South+Africa+today+according+to+Dr+Dale+T+McKinley


 * Dominic,******

Normally I ignore the litany of (generally) self-serving and selective presentation of people’s struggles that characterises the SACP’s/Communist University listserv ‘reporting’ of what’s going on in South Africa – but on this occasion I feel the need to respond, even if very briefly to your latest distortion.

You are certainly entitled to your opinions etc – but please don’t pass off those opinions as facts when you clearly are out of touch with the reality on the ground in terms of the APF and social movements generally.

The APF and many other movements have not ‘dwindled to nothing’ (as you so clearly wish was the case) but continue to fight a range of struggles in poor communities. Indeed, over the last year, a host of struggles around housing/evictions, pre-paid water meters, education rights and services for schoolchildren and poor families, retrenched workers and labour rights, support for striking workers, adequate electricity services … and others … have, and continue to be fought for by poor communities affiliated to the APF (of which there are over 20 in Gauteng – with many more indicating their wish to join).

The APF’s struggles on the ground don’t usually make the stories/headlines (unless of course, the police descend on those communities and there is violence – and then it becomes ‘news’) and don’t rely on the internet to have currency amongst the so-called ‘left’ (both here and internationally) – they are ongoing and real where they are.

It is indeed salutary that not once, over the last few years have those poor and unemployed comrades in the communities organised by the APF ever witnessed any material, ideological or practical support from the ‘revolutionaries’ of the SACP – indeed, in all the communities I have worked in for the last several years in and around Gauteng, not once have I have ever even seen any meaningful practical activity or struggle from SACP cadres – with the exception of Khutsong.

The APF – along with movements such as the Anti-Eviction Campaign in the W. Cape, Abalhlali base Mjondolo and the flat-dwellers in Durban, and many others spread out across the country – will continue with their struggles.

And rather than try to denigrate them and wish them away it would seem to me that any self-respecting ‘communist’ would support those struggles and try to make practical linkages on the ground, where it counts (or is the battle against the installation of pre-paid water meters and forced removals of shack-dwellers not a ‘revolutionary’ enough struggle for the self-proclaimed saviours of the SA working class, the majority of whom would are seemingly much more comfortable attending study-groups, writing endless articles for the bourgeois press and spending time and energy ripping off other left activists than actually getting their hands dirty in the day-to-day struggles of the poor).

=Dale=

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