THE ENEMY IS ON THE RUN - THE ENENEMY IS NAKED - A SALUTE TO THE WORKERS FOR DEFENDING COSATU!

15 May 2012

The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), South African Catering, Commercial and Allied Workers Union (SACCAWU), Communication Workers Union (CWU) and the Progressive Youth Alliance (PYA) as constituted by the African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL), Young Communist League (YCL) and South African Students' Congress (SASCO) salutes the workers and the working class youth for occupying and swamping the streets in defense of our reliable, class conscious, revolutionary and fighting COSATU against the provocative and deceitful failed march by agents of imperialism and chief spokespersons of white monopoly capital as represented by fascist and racist Democratic Alliance (DA).

The leadership of all these formations salutes you for defending what we perceive as a direct attack on COSATU, ANC and SACP by agent-provocateurs. What the DA was trying to do is unprecedented in the history of our new dispensation and our collective resolve to address the triple crisis of poverty, unemployment and deepening inequalities. The challenges faced by our people, especially young people cannot be resolve by the DA and other like-minded organisations or disgruntled apartheid leaders as personified by FW de Klerk, the forefather to the DA.

We should not forget that the name Democratic Alliance arose because the racist bedfellows, the Nationalist Party and the Democratic Party, decided to form an anti-ANC alliance, which they misnomerly called the Democratic Alliance.

The aborted and failed march by the DA to COSATU Head Quarters should serve as a call to democratically elected government as led by the ANC to move with speed in addressing the persisting challenges faced by our people. The failure by the ANC to heed this call we might be plunging ourselves into a deep crisis or inviting the Tunisian style of protests led by young people of our country.

It is within this context that we are calling on the ANC -led government to heed the resolve of the Strategy & Tactics as adopted in Morogoro, 1969, which aptly said; ".. it is inconceivable for the liberation to have meaning without a return of the wealth of the land to the people as a whole. It is therefore a fundamental feature of our strategy that victory must embrace more than formal political democracy.

To allow the existing economic forces to retain their interests intact is to feed the root of racial supremacy and does not represent even the shadow of liberation.....Our drive towards national emancipation is therefore in a very real way bound up with economic emancipation. We have suffered more than just national humiliation. Our people are deprived of their due in the country's wealth; their skills have been suppressed and poverty and starvation has been their life experience.

The correction of these centuries-old economic injustices lies at the very core of our national aspirations. We do not understand the complexities which will face a people's government during the transformation period nor the enormity of the problems of meeting economic needs of the mass of the oppressed people. But one thing is certain - in our land this cannot be effectively tackled unless the basic wealth and the basic resources are at the disposal of the people as a whole and are not manipulated by sections or individuals be they white or black".

This mass occupation of the streets by workers and the youth feed correctly to the analyses made by COSATU and the SACP that our democratic breakthrough of 1994, white monopoly capital as presented by the DA became the main beneficiary of the first decade of freedom, and that this economic tirade or triple crisis of unemployment, poverty and deepening inequalities must be reversed so that the workers and the poor can benefit.

Therefore the neoliberal or reactionary posture of the National Treasury must be undermined and be in line with the pro-working class policies adopted during the watershed ANC National Conference held in Polokwane in 2007.

The current spectre of popular youth militancy haunting both the developed and underdeveloped world, the Bosses and their lackeys given the crisis of neoliberal reforms and its failure to respond to the youth interests and aspirations. These popular revolts or actions have confirmed that neoliberal reforms are not the solution as there is being rejected by the working class and the youth. This confirms the scientific analysis by the greatest thinker of the working class struggles Karl Marx that capitalism is its own grave-digger.

Statement issued by Castro Ngobese, NUMSA National Spokesperson, Magdalene Moonsamy, ANCYL National Spokesperson, Themba Masondo, SASCO Secretary General and Aubrey Tshabalala, CWU Provincial Secretary, May 15 2012

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