COSATU-SACP joint statement on bilateral meeting
The Congress of South African Trade Unions and the South African Communist Party held a bilateral meeting on Monday 2 April 2012 in Johannesburg. It discussed the very many issues on which the two allies are in full agreement and agreed to hold more regular bilateral meetings to continue discussions on other matters.
The meeting agreed that we are living through a major crisis in the global capitalist system, not just an episodic, but systemic capitalist crisis, which confronts the world with the prospect of either deepening human misery and conflict in a capitalist world, or of unprecedented progress and hope in a socialist world.
In South Africa the global capitalist crisis in super-imposing itself on the persisting systemic crisis on the neo-colonial (of a special type) crisis manifested in the chronic levels of unemployment, poverty and racialised inequality, where an estimated 81% of Africans earns less than R6 000 whilst 56% of whites earns more than R6 000.
The current rates of unemployment, poverty and inequality, in particular as they affect women and youth constitute a ticking time bomb, and require the mobilisation of all progressive forces, with the working class as the leading motive force, with a combined use of state power and resources to address this challenge. We need to build on the many advances made by our revolution in order to address these challenges.
The two allies were in total support for COSATU's campaign against the rapid casualisation of labour, the burgeoning of labour brokering and the intensified exploitation of workers and noted the bold, militant worker resistance.
The two partners agreed to jointly take up the campaigns of a living and social wage, including support for an NHI, transforming the apartheid human settlements, affordable public transport and access to education. In addition the parties agreed to take forward the struggle for the transformation of the financial sector campaign, so that resources in this sector are used to provide for a social wage for the working class and investment into infrastructure to create jobs and sustainable livelihoods.
The bilateral identified a key challenge of the ‘new tendency' in our movement and formations, the next generation of the ‘1996 class project', the neoliberal/neo-colonial faction that achieved a level of unstable hegemony within our movement and the state until 2007. The new tendency is a new wave of tenderpreneurs and rent-seekers, more desperate and more reckless than the more established BEE beneficiaries, and constitutes a serious threat to the consolidation of the national democratic revolution.
The meeting supported the campaign against the commodification of public services. They agreed that GFIP and e-tolling were a serious misallocation of resources on a project which is not pro poor and working class and which now leaves Gauteng commuters with a huge toll burden for this inappropriate project. The outcry against the e-tolls needs to be broadened into a wider campaign for public transport infrastructure, better allocated houses for the poor and the general deracialisation of our towns and cities. Both parties condemned the massive extent of corruption, in both the private and public sectors, and the theft and waste of public funds, which is bleeding the country dry.
The bilateral reaffirmed the commitment of both organisations to support the implementation of the progressive policies adopted by the ANC 2007 Polokwane Conference and contained in the 2009 ANC elections manifesto, and support for the leadership collective elected at Polokwane.
The two allies resolved to stand shoulder-to-shoulder, together with the ANC, in the struggle to deepen our national democratic revolution, to end the national oppression of the majority, the super-exploitation of workers by white monopoly capitalism and the triple oppression faced by women, in order to create a new non-racial, non-sexist, democratic and prosperous South Africa.
The meeting agreed that we must at all times remember that we are the socialist axis of our alliance and that the national democratic revolution is both necessary in itself and the shortest route to the socialist world which we all strive for.
Statement issued by Malesela Maleka, SACP Spokesperson, and Patrick Craven, COSATU National Spokesperson, April 3 2012
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