NUMSA - KZN RESPONSE TO YCLSA NATIONAL COMMITTEE STATEMENT

01 June 2011

The KwaZulu-Natal National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) is taken aback by the unwarranted and ill-conceived attacks directed towards NUMSA and its leadership by the Young Communist League of South Africa (YCLSA).

The attacks by YCLSA are a striking reminder of a terrible and painful period during Thabo Mbeki's Presidency whereby other formations bona fides and loyalty to an individual leader were questioned in full-glare of TV cameras. The YCLSA leadership wants to create a wedge and rift between the leading formations of the working class, by applying the rejected tactics of the 1996 class project, to unleash organisational machinery to destroy other formations and leaders for their principled stance and consistency on the current political conditions or struggles faced by the working class in the post apartheid South Africa.

In fact we are not surprised by the attacks unleashed by the YCL leadership. Since its chaotic National Congress last December 2010 in Mahikeng, the YCLSA continues to suffer from serious ideological incoherence as evidenced by mass expulsions of its members for holding divergent views or being critical on the wholesale absence of the Party leadership from its Head Quarters.

The charge which we plead not guilty as informed by paranoia bedevilling the YCLSA national leadership of late - that NUMSA and its leadership are throwing "unwarranted attacks on the leadership of the SACP, in particular the General Secretary, by certain individuals within COSATU and two of its major affiliates, NUMSA and SADTU. We are aware that the attack on the SACP General Secretary and the leadership and character of the Party is intended to prepare for a leadership contest at its 13th Congress planned for July 2012" - are a figment of their own paranoid imaginations.

This accusation by the YCLSA is the worse form of recklessness couched in Bolshevik defence of the Party and further continues the trend of projecting the Party leadership as a paragon of wisdom and solutions on the many ongoing contemporary challenges facing the working class in South Africa.

We therefore seek to clarify the following;

We will never be part of any agenda to destroy the SACP. The Party is our vanguard and we do indeed want socialism to be our future.

We will never be co-opted to any agenda that seeks to change the leadership of the SACP in its 13th National Congress, but we have strong views on some of the tactical errors taken by the Party, which have liquidated its visibility on the ongoing struggles waged by workers to reverse the tyranny of the markets.

The YCLSA further charges that "these individuals have constituted themselves as a faction, posing as revolutionary mouth-piece of the poor, with the intention to take over the SACP and weaken it for their malicious intents...As the YCL we are determined to challenge this faction and expose it for what it is, a faction hell-bent on discrediting the party programme, to capture the party and ensure that its independence, power and influence are affected".

We urge the YCL to name these individuals and assist NUMSA and its leadership to isolate such individuals from its ranks. Because as NUMSA we subscribe to Marxist-Leninist dictum as propagated by Vladimir Lenin ‘that a Party becomes strong by purging itself'. We want to be in the front-line with the YCLSA ‘to challenge this faction and expose it for what it is' in the interest of the revolution and safeguarding the Party from ideological scavengers. NUMSA will never be the home of ideological fraudsters' masquedering as an advanced detachment of the working class secretly working in a clandestine fashion to launch a serious offensive and attack on the Party and its leadership.

The YCL should make a serious introspection and ask itself tough questions on the SACP's relationship to state power and the inappropriate and erroneous deployment of the Party's General Secretary to the executive of the state (cabinet). Clearly, the Party, is absent in leading popular class struggles waged by the working class on the ground and its voice is being muzzled in the interest of the perks of serving in the Executive by its most leading and senior Cadres. This has crippled the independence and influence of the Party as the vanguard of the working class. The working class communities are burning on their own in the absence of the Party.

The decision by Chris Hani as General Secretary of the SACP to relinquish his position as NWC member of the ANC and stall any ambitions to be a Cabinet minister when everybody was positioning themselves as such was remarkable leadership and an example of what communists leaders should do.

The position taken by both NUMSA and COSATU for the SACP to have a full-time General Secretary was well conceived and is not an attack on any individual leader of the Party, including Cde Blade Nzimande. The YCLSA should resist any attempts to be used as private army of individual leaders that want to use the SACP for their upward class mobility or retaining the current status quo for their self-centred privileges.

The YCL should do justice to working class youth in this country and start serious and genuine mobilization on youth unemployment, working class landlessness and advocate for the return of the wealth to the workers who produce it.

We want to remind the YCL that the duty of communist organisations is to wrestle state power and ensure that the working class ultimately rules this country. The YCL cannot continue to wear its red colours and proudly brandish the hammer and the sickle, whilst its actions amount to delivering the working class and the poor on a silver platter to the capitalists in this country. This recent statement will go down in the annals of history as an unfortunate act aimed at disintegrating the left forces in the interests of parasites who seek nothing from the movement but the advancement of their own careers.

Statement issued by Mbuso Ngubane, NUMSA KZN Regional Secretary, June 1 2011

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