Forward to greater working-class unity, forward ever!
7 October 2020
Over 2 million jobs were lost in our country between April and June this year, 2020. The number of unemployed people is over 10 million. Inequality and poverty deepened because of the capitalist crisis of Covid-19 and the system’s interrelated crisis before the current crisis. This is among the many reasons, in the launch of our Red October Campaign 2020–2021, we reiterated our call for a minimum income guarantee, among other measures. A universal basic income grant should be part of the minimum income guarantee.
However, we also need grants in the form of productive interventions, aimed at building access to the right to work for all. If truth be told, many of our unemployed people can thrive if supported with incentives for productive activity, for example in agriculture/farming, with seeds, implements and technical capacity building, as the Freedom Charter calls for. There are many other sustainable livelihood activities in which many of our people can thrive if given adequate support. The development of a thriving co-operatives sector is a key solution as well.
Private wealth accumulation forces, global and national, oppose many of the working-class interests. Those forces stand in our way to address the systemic features of inequality, unemployment, poverty, and the corruption pandemic. They include those who cling to an increasingly discredited neo-liberal fundamentalism. Unfortunately, they have their ilk in the National Treasury and the South African Reserve Bank. In court papers, for instance, the National Treasury has even gone so far as to say that it would be “immoral” to honour the government’s public sector wage agreement.
Amid the Covid-19 pandemic and huge economic and social distress, the South African Reserve Bank has been prepared to inject significant liquidity into the private banking oligopoly. A developmental central bank can play a strategic role towards the much needed transformation of the financial sector. But the South African Reserve Bank is not and does not do so. It is fixated on neoliberal orthodoxy. Meanwhile, the publicly owned sections of our economy are under distress. There is just no permanent reason, in principle, why the South African Reserve Bank should not make direct state bond purchases to support our economy and broader social transformation and development.
A much wider agenda could be at play here. After the 2008 global economic crisis, private capital accumulation in many sectors came under distress. As part of capital’s efforts to restore profitability, the Paris-based OECD produced a series titled “Economic Policy Reforms: Going for Growth”. Through this series, the OECD advanced the neoliberal measures that the National Treasury of South Africa published without consultation in August 2019 – packaged in a document sub-titled “Towards an Economic Strategy for South Africa”.
Allow us to quote directly from what the OECD said about collective bargaining. In its “Economic Policy Reforms…” published in 2015 and 2017, the OECD said: “Weaken administrative extension of collective bargaining in sectors covered by bargaining councils” (page 285 in 2015, and page 289 in 2017). This is what the National Treasury actively started pushing through. In its statement released on 1 November 2019, the IMF added (under a section titled “Expediting reforms”), by alleging that South Africa had labour market rigidities. It went further to say those had to be tackled by: “decentralizing wages bargaining”. In its statement released in January 2020, the IMF revealed a commitment made to it by the National Treasury. The Washington-based global loan shark said the South African authority planned to reduce the public sector wage bill. These explain why there are attacks on collective bargaining and the National Treasury is refusing to honour the public sector collective bargaining agreement. The SACP firmly stands with the workers. We say the National Treasury must honour the agreement. Public servants deserve their wage increases in terms of the public sector's collective bargaining agreement.
There are other neoliberal measures driven by imperialist dominated foreign institutions, and monopoly-finance capital, and their domestic replicas, agents, aspirants and hangers-on. These include divesting State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in favour of conveying public network infrastructures or exposing them to private capital accumulation exploitation. What South Africa needs is to have our democratic transition placed on to a second radical phase. South Africa needs to advance determinedly towards the goals of the Freedom Charter.
However, a neoliberal agenda co-ordinated by imperialist dominated institutions, corporate-capturers of different sorts, and ratings agencies, could cause public participation through the state in the economy being liquidated, or could see several state assets being privatised and outsourcing deepened. The transmission of public assets, entity by entity, by means of policy instruments to private wealth accumulation interests is one way in which corporate-capture is facilitated. The crude, brazen smash-and-grab we saw in the previous years is therefore not the only form of state capture.
The SACP welcomes the support offered by Saftu, Fedusa and Nactu to this Cosatu-convened action of today. We wish to take this opportunity to reiterate our call for the labour movement to convene a joint conference and deepen consultation, in the common interests of workers, towards more joint programmes of action. The working-class struggle is indivisible. As Cosatu’s motto teaches us, “An injury to one is an Injury to All”.
The situation that workers found themselves in at the South African Airways (SAA) and SA Express, for instance, could be replicated at any other public entity. The same reasons could be advanced. That must be prevented. The best way to move forward is to express active solidarity with the affected workers. Also, the workers at Comair in the aviation sector; the workers in the retail sector, at companies such as Edcon, Hamleys (now closed) and others; the workers in the manufacturing sectors, such as at metal and steel companies that closed down operations, deserve active, maximum organised workers’ solidarity. The SACP takes this opportunity to call on unorganised workers to join unions and the struggle to fight against economic exploitation. Besides fighting the immediate battles for improvements, and against retrenchments, the real fruit of building workers’ unity lies in the struggle to end the exploitative system of capitalism, corruption, racism and sexism.
- The SACP resolutely supports the demands for, and is fully part of the struggle for gender transformation and equality. We are intransigently against gender-based violence and want to see the perpetrators hunted down and held to account. We want to see an end to patriarchy and gender-based violence. We want complete and universal social emancipation.
- The SACP unwaveringly identifies with the demands to end corruption. We need to rally behind state transformation to build a capable democratic developmental state. Such a state has internal capacity to serve the people and mobilise them in non-exploitative production and delivery of public goods and services. That means we must roll back the corruption-prone tender state model that crept into our system through privatisation, outsourcing and tenderisation of the state and its functions. We should press for the immediate implementation of the review of outsourced services, with a strong view of insourcing.
- The SACP is pushing for an end to class, racial and gender inequalities, and uneven spatial development. We have launched our Red October Campaign 2020–2021 on October the 4th, taking forward these and other proletarian demands, under the themes “Hunger eradication, Healthcare, Human settlements, and Water”.
- The Red October Campaign includes objectives to protect public property and infrastructure. It is an important platform to intensify the fight against corruption, criminality and gender-based violence. We want to see the perpetrators of these scourges hunted down and held to account. We want to see successful prosecution, and those found guilty sentenced to severe prison sentences. We want to see those who acquired assets or wealth through corrupt means face the might to the Asset Forfeiture Unit.
- The recent developments of arrests are a sign that we finally could be entering the dawn of the era of accountability. However, let us not lower our guards. This is the time to intensify the struggle against corporate-capture and corruption in general. The SACP therefore says thank you, comrades, for convening this important action.
- The SACP supports the demand for decent work. As we have said already, the struggle for decent work should go together with the struggle to end the exploitative capitalist system – the underlying cause of indecent work.
Down with corruption, down!
Down with racism and sexism down!
Forward to universal social emancipation, forward!
Issued by Alex Mohubetswane Mashilo, Central Committee Member for Media & Communications, 7 October 2020
