Cheche+Selepe+v+Oupa+Lehulere

=**From Cheche Selepe, received by the Communist University on September 25, 2005**=

Hi Comrade, and thank you for that input by Oupa Lehulere on Social Movements, Cosatu and the 'new UDF'.

Of interest are the three or so dry paragraphs on Cosatu’s campaign for comrade Jacob Zuma in his thirty-something page document, but later about it. Most interesting is that it is the party’s 84th birthday yet still relevant like in 1924, July 30 when we celebrated. It is just seven years before we celebrate 100 years of the movement’s existence in 2012 comrade, the oldest in national liberation struggles. Changing times indeed. We just fresh from the centenary celebration of the first Black Republic, Comrade Thabo was there to celebrate and Aristide here to hibernate. The story of Haiti has been a great inspiration to many around the world.

Comrade Thabo reminded the 2005 party congress that in 1927, the Communist International raised an issue about the Black Republic. It said that the Communist Party of SA must combine the fight against all anti-native laws with the fight against British colonialism, and as a stage towards a worker and peasants’ republic with full equal rights for all, black, coloured and white.

He said that perhaps part of the reason he wants to join the SACP is that he wants to be part of the formation of the workers’ and peasants’ republic! And he asked if this is the strategic task that faces the congress now? And if it is not, then what is it?

Great reminder from the comrade. And again this year we celebrate fifty years of the unbroken congress alliance that we championed in the first place. June 26, 1955. Comrade Blade saw another fifty years of blood, sweat and tears coming. Indeed it is half a century since we met and made comrades and friends here in Kliptown. Remember the nationalisation proposal that eventually became a clause in the Freedom Charter. Our comrade Nelson, on his release, sighted the clause in dealing with monopolies in the mines, banks, the land and so on. He has celebrated his birthday, he is 87 now, happy birthday Dibas. He is just three years older than our birthday-Party, and wrangled in legal bat-tles over money, religion and property (intellectual), pillars de kapitalisme. Just because of intellectual property and the rewards it has in this money world, our comrade dumped a lawyer from one religious fraternity for another. Without causing any religious uproar, he successfully campaigned, ostracising another within his own religious circles for intellectual property and its rewards. Maybe he is becoming tired since the spear fell on comrade Walter, who recruited him to struggle. Cde Walter was born the same year as the movement in 1912, amandla. A year later in 1913, we witnessed the unforgivable 1913 Land Act that gave thirteen percent of land to the 87 percent of the population. The state plans to redistribute at least thirty percent land to the 87 percent population by 2014. They still pondering whether the market will ultimately assist in this noble mission. Well, thanks to comrade Marx and the Bolshevik revolution, we knew in 1924 that the NDR and the historic formation of the movement in 1912 were not enough to abolish capitalism.

So we born just 12 years after the birth of the movement in 1912, fabulous. Remember that historic moment in that winter of 1924, at the peak of comrade Lenin’s New Economic Plan and just two years after the 1922 strikes in the Reef, despite some dismissing it as too white, while others painting it red. And today, some have just labelled the railway strike as being too white again. Nonetheless, 12 years after the centenary celebration of the movement, we will have that of the party, fireworks. In fact, twelve years after the movement was born, we came to birth. Of course, 12 years after the national democratic revolution why not the socialist. The 1927 Communist International that cde Thabo reminds congress about says so, with no time frames of course. Next year is 12 years of the NDRevolution, the first and final stage towards the socialist revolution. It took 12 years of the movement’s existence to consider forming the party for socialism and next year will be 12 years of the NDRevolution comrade, you know that. And the movement has achieved its mission, and is ageing not only on matters of presidency but also with ideas. The party spoke non-racialism, and they took it as a principle. It spoke of South Africa as a colonialism of a special type, they accepted the definition. It shall and must chant socialism and they shall follow.

Hear what cde Thabo says about this fact: ‘The Party programme of 1962 which spoke about the Colonialism of a Special Type (CST) marked the conclusion of an ideological debate that had been going on for about 35 years. This programme characterised our country, and therefore a determination of the nature of the struggle we have to fight, given that we have CST which determination came from the Party. It became the property of the movement as a whole.’.In other words, within liberation circles, the party ended an ideological debate that existed even before the movement was born. A remarkable thing is that in one of his “letters” cde Thabo characterised the situation in the USA as a CST. He lamented that – with capitalism – it will take 500 more years for the standard of living of black America to equal that of its white counterpart.

Having stated his intention to join the party and be part of the procession from a national to a socialist republic, cde Thabo posed these questions: ‘What is the relationship, if any, between the national revolution and the socialist revolution? That is a question you only can ask and answer. Was the Comintern wrong? It is a question that faces the Party, not the ANC, but the ANC will be interested to hear how you answer this question.’

These questions are posed to a party banned years before the movement, in 1950. The party that taught the comrades underground, international and guerrilla work. The questions are posed by a comrade president of the movement that is getting divided, not purely on class basis but somehow on them. The movement cadres are getting exhausted with the unending NDRevolution; they want a way-forward. Our Bolshevik friends, thanks for their support for many years and in many ways under-ground; it took them only eight months to deal a severest blow to national bourgeoisie democracy. But many years of civil war ensued before comrade Mao drove the national bourgeoisie out of the mainland.

Nonetheless, the movement has eleven presidents in total, and it might not have the 12th president because comrade Thabo does not want to step down ‘if requested to do so by the branches,’ good. Hey this has sparked yet another short-lived debate within the presidency of the young lions, they are future lions of the movement. One president says there is no such a thing as the two-centres of power, and the other says there is. But are there two centres of power, say that of the workers and of the bourgeoisie. The movement might degenerate into two centres of power. There could probably be no more 12th president of the movement in the forseable future and possibly no president of SA being the president of the movement. In fact the country’s presidency could be privatised. Is this not the right time to nationalise? And so what happens to the movement presidency outside parliament and its bourgeoisie institutions. Are we heeding for the next 50 years of alliance and struggle side-by-side with the movement, as cde Blade cuts it.

The message on the eleven presidents of the movement is from an artwork lying defiantly in one of the floors at Luthuli House. It is not mounted on the walls of the corridors of power, but lies flat on the ground. It is made of mosaic, and depicts all the previous, and the current, presidents of the oldest national liberation movements in a continent so thirsty for socialism.

The framing around the mosaic sends an impression that the movement does not have the next president; there is no space for reframing the artwork comrade. Maybe one could impose another president on top of that movement flag, and the movement seizes to be the movement, the national dem-ocratic revolution is finished comrade. Or else the artist should make another mosaic, another revolution. The presidents are eleven, like a full soccer team, com. To add player number 12 will be breaking the rules of the game, the soccer game.

But this is no soccer game, the question is who is next, and that question still stands. This next comrade must be the number 12 president of umbutho. Mind you, we 12 years younger than the movement seeking a 12th president. In search of the 12th president the movement is getting divided, not purely on class basis but somehow on them.

The story of JZ is like that of Jesus. He had 12 members in his team. Then Judas number 12 sold Jesus for cash and he was crucified. But the number game has lots of mythology and superstition around it. The story of Jesus and Judas is one example. After number 12 is number thirteen and before is number eleven; where the movement stands. And in some cities and suburbs, buildings do not have floor or flat number thirteen; from twelve it jumps up to fourteen.

But this is not the purpose of this note, as Karl Marx puts it: ‘History has long been merged into superstition, and now is the time we merge superstition into history.’

In a rather bemoaning fashion, Lehulere says: ‘COSATU has not displayed a fraction of the energy it has displayed in defending former Deputy-President Zuma.’

Well, he could be correct on the nature of the energy displayed by Cosatu on the Zuma campaign. However, this he says in a rather derogatory manner and he simply does not appreciate such worker militancy and the bravery displayed by Cosatu leadership.

He goes on and says: ‘For the struggling masses in dusty townships no songs and praise, no sms campaigns, no trust funds to bailout those accused of public violence, no funeral funds for those killed in combat, no T-shirts in honour of the water that no longer runs, of energy cuts in the heart of win-ter.’

No so on and so on, but what does Lehulere expects or suggests Cosatu should do? Fold arms, keep quiet and Zuma must be jailed.

He could still be correct, Cosatu has never taken the struggle against the state repression apparatus (the justice system) in a manner that it does with the comrade Jacob Zuma case. However, that does not mean Cosatu should be castigated for taking up such a legitimate struggle against the state repression apparatus.

And he is wrong to suggest that Cosatu must do this for those accused of public violence, water cuts etcetera. The entire working class and not only Cosatu should also campaign for those arrested for the economic crimes committed under the evil capitalistic system. The working class currently swelling the overpopulated SA prisons are sentenced by the very racist judges that Cosatu wants to uproot.

There is a problem in the misguided angle of Lehulere’s utterances. He is lambasting the campaign yet not offering any way forward, somehow suggesting that die poppe must dansfor JZ and all the “criminals” under the evil capitalism.

And a reasonable comrade of the communication workers union lamented thus: ‘If our resolve is that the system is evil, why then do we refer to those who cannot cope with it as criminals?’

In essence, the comrade says evil capitalism is bound to produce criminality. There is evidence of the dialectical relationship between capitalism and crime and the prison system, no wonder our first prison in SA was built in Kimberley by the global diamond monopoly.

The system builds prisons to deal with dissent; political or otherwise.

It could be added that criminal activity is economically motivated and directly relates to the conditions of desperation and poverty facing the majority of the people in capitalist societies. It is a known fact that people at risk of getting involved in crime/corruption need access to food, housing, jobs, education, health care, clean and safe environments and above all they need dignity and respect. The unemployment crisis, and the lack of adequate education, among other problems, creates an environent in which options for survival outside of illegal activity are difficult to pursue, or even hard to find.

A good example on the direct relationship between capitalism and criminalism is reflected in the newly capitalist Russian federation. Prior to its blanket adoption of capitalism, Russia boasted a zero crime rate in the world. But all is history as they say, Moscow its capital, is one of the most unsafest cities in the world.

This is what Lehulere further says about the campaign: ‘... a federation that is more concerned about a most disgraceful issue of supporting former deputy president Zuma.’

He says the campaign against the class and racially biased judiciary is disgraceful. In who’s eyes is he saying this campaign is disgraceful; that of the workers or the bourgeoisie? Does Lehulere knows that South Africa is a capitalist society? Does he knows that in capitalist societies the ruling class wields the means of production as well as those of represssion, the courts, the police etcetera? Does he also know that the ruling class uses these means of repression for the suppression of its class enemies, the working class?

He goes on and says: ‘COSATU's alliance with Zuma around the corruption charges is bringing shame, embarrassment and disrepute to a proud tradition of working class struggle. The leading group in COSATU is using COSATU and its proud name in internal squabbles within the ruling class.’

He uses harsh words such as “disgraceful”, “embarrassment” and “disrepute” in Cosatu’s involvement in the “internal squabbles within the ruling class.”

And since when has the ANC become the ruling class? And what is a class by the way? A ruling class is a class that owns the means of production in a given society. Where on earth has a member and a leading member of the ruling class (the ANC) being threatened with imprisonment for ‘generally having a corrupt relationship with a businessman. In fact, the ruling class is looting billions out of the countries they rule everyday at will without any legal recourse.

Through its ownership of these means, the ruling class has automatic control over the means of mental production as well as those of repression. What does the ANC owns in South Africa? The productive land in SA is privately owned. The media is private and the judiciary “independent”, so what.does the ANC own to qualify as a ruling class and for its squabbles to be internal-ruling-class squabbles.

Well it is true that at the heat of the class war against starvation wages, and in the middle of the rolling labour action against poverty, the working class is mingled in the story of comrade JZ.

One perspective generally questions the logic of indulging in the dividing internal politics of the movement. The view warns of its dividing impact within labour and the working class in general. This line hides behind the importance of working class unity in the light of globalisation and imperialism.

The view is propagated by a myriad of groups some of whom do not even believe in the peasants and workers republic thesis. Some are the privatisation lobby. They do not want to “interfere with the independence of the judiciary” and the market forces. The private independent judiciary is what they do not want to interfere with.

But another perspective says the working class had to give a response in the light of public and media pressure. You know the so-called public and the bourgeoisie media pressure. This perspective is rooted in the premise that labour is in alliance with the movement and the Party. As a leading component of the alliance, the movement’s leading role and leadership is of utmost importance to labour.

In the mist of these opposing views, is an argument that attempts to give a class perspective to the comrade JZ saga.

‘He is sympathetic to the workers than comrade Thabo and so must be supported,’ so it goes.

Well, what are the class basis for supporting JZ against the “independent” judiciary?

One cannot assume that there is no class connotation to the Zuma saga, surely there could be. The connotation becomes louder particularly when made against the judiciary that some comrades including Lehulere do not want to “interfere with its independence”. Independence from what, one may ask.

And the movement’s national executive instruction to comrade JZ is that it (movement) does not control the judiciary and its instruments of repression is scaring. And most scaring, it says comrade JZ might be jailed. That is true, the movement des not control the means of production as well as those of repression. Remember comrade Allan Boesak was jailed for some Swiss donor money of capitalist networks. And the movement did nothing. So now it will do the same nothing with comrade JZ.

However Cosatu knows that the judiciary includes the courts, police, and prisons that ‘function to enforce the laws of a society,’ as echoed by one comrade from the US, ‘but when the laws are enforced to protect a narrow set of elite interests, the whole justice system becomes a muzzle on the masses of poor and working people; keeping them from the wealth their labour has created.’

She went on asserting that under capitalism, the judiciary includes repressive laws, obscenely long sentences, state executions, judges who hand down discriminatory sentences along racial and political lines.

The last statement tallies with a comment by the deputy justice minister (the Star 7/12/04) that thirty-nine child molesters have been sent to prison for life this year alone. And comrade JZ must go join them.

But the US comrade adds: ‘It (the judiciary) includes the anti-democratic activities of the secret police, civil surveillance, infiltration of grassroots movements and assassinations. It includes an expanding prison culture: cop shows, court TV, films which glamourise or trivialise prison life.’

The above facts are true. Consider the former notorious “No: 4” prison in Johannesburg which has become a museum and a cool entertainment-cum-tourist site. The glamourous extravaganza on the “4666” prison number of comrade Nelson on ireland is also worth noting.

Another interesting point to note is the racialised nature of the judiciary and other state apparatuses, ideological or otherwise, under capitalism. For example, a Johannesburg newspaper published a letter by a certain Hannes Engelbrecht of Bloemfontein in August 12 2005 headlined, "The Visagies are in our thoughts". Nonsense.

This Visagie was shooting to kill a car thief only to kill his daughter. He was regarded as no murderer at all but something else according to the stereotypical Engelbrechtic, South African journalistic and its court definitions of a murderer.

Maybe they think that the life of a car thief is worthless and thieves have no loved ones. What if the slaughtered young-woman was really 'stealing' her daddy's car to go party, it happens. The English Oxford dictionary defines a thief as: "someone who steals secretly and without violence.” So this man applied the worst violence to a non-violent situation but was freed. Comrade JZ killed no one, but.“might be jailed” according to the movement leadership and capitalistic reality.

The kind of violence Visagie applied is logical and enjoys sympathy in the SA media, courts and the Engelbrechts of whatever race, colour or creed.

Surely Visagie could have been awarded hero-status by the Engelbrechts of whatever race should the thief being black and male. In other words, should the thief being like comrade JZ, Visagie could have been a hero. But the thief happened to be white, female and worst Visagie’s own offspring hence the noise.

Condolences to all, but what could one do when the South African racial journalism, judiciary and Engelbrechts rear their ugly heads again. What could one do where the most brutal killers find sympathetic voices in the media, courts and Engelbrechts if they are white. These sympathetic voices get much louder if the killers, irrespective of their race, deal with "criminals".

As if blacks and "criminals" are no human, let us not forget that SA journalism used to sound like this: "Two people were killed and a Black injured when a car-bomb blast..."

Let us not also forget that we have hanged many blacks and "criminals" than any other people in South Africa, maybe that is why we abolished the death-penalty.

Now look at the case of Visagie, a white former rugby player pumping a bullet/s on his daughter mistaking her for a car thief, hopefully not a black car thief. From the shooting incident, right through the funeral and the court case we were overdosed with his story, not as a murderer but a victim. More disturbing is the amount of sympathy he enjoys for taking the life of another human just for property, a car. And comrade JZ allegedly stole money, state property, and must be vilified. Why didn't Visagie shoot the tyres of a car to stall down the car? What if the car thief was a white neighbour's son? He knows that white youth do not steal cars, but blacks do, and so he wanted to skiet dood n kaffir.

This man, the media, courts and the Engelbrechts of whatever race are telling us that he wanted to shoot-to-kill what he believed was a car thief. Yes, say we agree that he wanted to kill, not just to scare the car thief away. And now that it was his daughter killed, we supposed to accept this as a mistake and sympathise with him. Nonsense.

Remember the white farmer throwing a black labourer in a lion's den. The last article I read about this in the Star newspaper was buried in the inside pages and it was not about the deceased or the ruthless white killer, but the slogan echoed at the court case. The Star newspaper forced the ANC/SACP/COSATU spokespersons to account on the "kill the farmer" slogan echoed by their supporters.

They cared less about the biblical-times kinder barbarism of feeding human to lions. That barbaric white killer-farmer still enjoys salient sympathy among some in the South African “independent” press, judiciary and the Engelbrechts. He is still no murderer at all, but the guilty murderers or prospective ones are those echoing the "kill the boer" slogan. These ones must be dealt with.

This is the continuing stereotypical reporting on crime and the bad portrayal of the image of a blacks in South Africa today, continuously criminalised. They are corrupt, rapists of children and women. They looked at with suspicious eyes at supermarkets, including the comrade Thabo himself, he could be degraded where he is not known simply because of his race and gender.

It is true that prisons are meant for blacks, working class and the poor. And comrade JZ “might be jailed” because he fits some of the characteristics of a “criminal”.

The prisons are built by the ruling class for the general repression – class, racial or otherwise.

Recently a judge talking from Cape Town calls for the re-screening of all the old-order judges in the country. According to him, the purpose is to ‘transform’ the SA judiciary.

He is not alone confirming that control institutions have lost control. A report from Amnesty International says there’s an upsurge of deaths inside South Africa’s institutions of detention and at the hands of the state security forces.

Ironically, we hear the world’s largest jailer, the United States of America accusing South Africa for human rights violations.

Singing the same tune on the turmoil striking the microcosm of society as well as its instruments of repression, a Pretoria High Court judge says: ‘If the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) were to cram as many animals into a cage as the Correctional Services were forced to cram prisoners into a single cell, the society would be prosecuted for cruelty to animals.’ (Judge Eberhard Bertelsmann,The Citizen 2005, 11 February)..Well, Judge Bertelsmann goes on and says of the SA judicial mess: ‘The crisis in our prisons has huge constitutional implications for the whole justice system.’

Quite interesting point from the judge about the system – the capitalist system. But the he is generalising, a more specific statement on the deepening crisis within the state repression apparatus was highlighted by another judge five years ago when saying: ‘Conditions in prison, more particularly for un-sentenced prisoners, are ghastly and cannot wait for long-term solutions.

‘For example, there is one toilet shared by more than 60 prisoners; there is a stench of blocked and overflowing sewage pipes; shortage of beds resulting in prisoners sleeping two on a bed whilst others sleep on the concrete floor, sometimes with a blanket only; inadequate hot water; no facilities for washing clothes; broken windows and lights; insufficient medical treatment for the contagious diseases that are rife. The list of infringements of prisoner's basic human rights caused by overcrowding is endless.’ (Judge Fagan, 2000).

To save humanity, the South African negotiators had set-up the Human Rights Commission to deal with recurring injustices perpetrated through the instruments of the “independent” judiciary. And in his Pretoria Prison visit five years ago, Human Rights Commissioner Jodi Kollapan discovered that, in instances when there is an outbreak of diarrhoea or other intestinal illnesses, some of these inmates become so desperate for the occupied toilet that they are forced to find other ways to relieve them-selves.

The turmoil in the state’s judicial apparatus was shown in its attempts to address the human rights concerns raised by a bunch of white right-wingers detained at Pretoria Prison for plotting to overthrow the SA government. The Pretoria judge presiding over the case of these white supremacists responded promptly to the human rights concerns they raise. A spokesperson of the prisons department explained in the media how they refurbished the prison cell for the humane treatment of white supremacists who hope to return SA to white rule.

The judge even sent state representatives to address the group’s plight. And overcrowding and the inhumane treatment of other human beings is not confined to the prisons, instead it is the common feature of the broader capitalist system. Slaves were shipped on overcrowded vessels and the weak ones thrown into the oceans to die-drown. All shack settlements and hostels are overcrowded, taxi ranks are overcrowded with hawkers, taxis and passengers, the trains are overcrowded with workers and the poor, public schools and hospitals, the same.

At the workplace, a colleague from the national Union of Mineworkers writes: ‘They lived in over-crowded single-sex hostels and could only go home in-between contracts.

‘They were, until the formation of the union in 1982, identified through their badge numbers and not their names. Even to their death, the industry used to bury them on the ground with their badge numbers marking their graves.

‘The thinking of the industry was that mining is an occupational hazard, therefore blacks have to die, be crippled and confined to wheelchairs in pursuance of making the captains of industry richer.’

But much earlier, Amanda Diesel of the centre for the study of violence at Wits University wrote that the first prison was built in Kimberley by the world’s diamond monopoly.

‘In fact it is in Kimberley where the first mining took place in SA,’ adds a NUM comrade.

While incarcerated for “defrauding” the newly-privatised parking meters in Johannesburg, an inmate from a shack settlement said of another from a hostel:

‘You much content with the situation in prison because the cells resemble hostels in many ways.’

Amanda’s lament and that of an inmate at Johannesburg prison were long crystallised by late SA communist party chief Chris Hani before his violent assassination by fascists, and just at the peak of the hostel violence in the early nineties.

‘Who built the hostels, townships and the mining compounds?’ Chris answered when asked whether is it apartheid or capitalism the source of strife in South Africa.

Be that as it may, ‘the crisis in our prisons has huge constitutional implications for the whole justice system,’ says the judge.

He is correct but should be pardoned for confusing the justice sub-system for a whole system. The whole system is capitalism. Justice is not a system but a sub-system that functions inter-dependently with other sub-systems making the whole money system crippling societies.

To sort out the mess in its ‘whole justice system’, the SA government co-ordinated its means of repression through what it called the Integrated Justice System composed of the ministries of police, justice (courts) and corrections (prisons).

Ex-Minister of Correctional Services, Ben Skhosana, four years back at a briefing session and media conference said the Ministers of the Integrated Justice System "want to transform the present criminal justice system into a modern, efficient and effective system that will stand the test of time."

He is also confused in that he is not aware that the system cannot be transformed or reformed but needs a total overhaul. The Integrated Justice System he spoke of, or sub-system to be correct, is the courts, the police, spies, corrections and all other means of state repression.

Some outcomes of Skhosana’s ‘modern-system’ approach were incapsulated in NUM secretary general Gwede Mantashe’s observation that:‘Today there are more private armed firms than the combined armed forces of the state police (local and national), the army and corrections.’ Gwede’s concern was long lobbied with the ex-police minister Steve Tshwete and raised by the ANC working committee on security in parliament but ruthlessly crushed by the elite within and without parliament.

The concern was crushed because the global elite disallow governments, on national, state, and local levels, from passing laws which constitute "illegal barriers to free trade." Any efforts to contain private security in South Africa would have been overruled. They earnestly trying to extend the liberalisation or privatisation of trade in services, including public services such as water provision or public education. Prisons and private securities are in this category, and have become one of the services opened to international competitive markets.

The General Agreement on Trade in Services, one of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) 28 free trade agreements, is used to further open up the SA criminal justice services to market forces.

South Africa’s failure to contain the global elite has also resulted in the country boasting the world's largest privately financed, designed, built and operated prisons. One activist says of the WTO hazards: ‘As globalisation knits the fortunes of an international financial elite ever more tightly together, additional repression becomes necessary to control the dissent of struggling populations.

‘Without social control provided by the private prisons, the economic colonialism of the WTO would not be possible.’

The activist adds to say: ‘Disenfranchised, unemployed, and displaced communities are met by sharply reduced social services. The polarisation of wealth reaches obscene proportions, both within and between nations.

‘The ensuing social unrest and upheaval are met by the repressive state violence of an increasingly international Prison Industrial Complex (PIC).

‘The PIC may be thought of as the entire apparatus of internal state repression, which includes increasingly militarised police forces, the National Guard, private security forces, and the traditional military branches when they are used to put down civil unrest.

A British researcher says of the private prisons: ‘In their short history, they have mirrored and even, on occasions, gone beyond the systemic human rights abuses found in the worst of the public sector.’

In essence the subjection of justice to the market forces of supply and demand lies at the heart of the pro-Zuma lobby within labour. It is what Gwede, the ANC working committee on security, as well as US and British activists bemoan. Just like water and women nowadays, justice is bought and sold in the open market-place.

There is no remedy for the mess except a total systems overhaul and the removal of money as its lubricant and sole determinant.It is absurd though that the judge talks of the SPCA as a logic for not sending a politician to that inhuman institution called prison.

However, judge Bertelsmann statement gets much closer to pointing to the solution for the crisis that currently engulf the whole system. And if anyone needs to be prosecuted for the judicial mess and the continuing cruelty to prisoners, then it is none other than the system.

And the question of human rights in prisons is not confined to South Africa alone. A lawyer representing the Basque youth currently languishing in Spanish jails says the detention condition of his clients is indifferent to the ex-Talibans rotting at Guatanamo bay. Guatanamo is a notorious prison on Cuban soil under US military command. The Basque youth face sentences of more than 600 years and some have been on detention without trial for four years now.

Thanks it is the lawyer representing the young comrades facing treason making such a comparison.

But one might stretch the comparison much further given the interconnectedness of capitalism.and imperialism.

Consider the situation and conditions of the five Cuban comrades currently languishing in the US dungeons.

The imperial activities of capitalist Spain in the occupied Basque land is not a special case, but a general nature of capitalist development and the miseries it creates.

Faced with a combined class and national resistance effort against its imperial objectives, Spain like the US is resorting to the hated detention without trial.

Lenin wrote that imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism. And that is why most liberation movements have failed – they sought to replace the highest stage of capitalism (imperialism) with its lowest and often backward stages in varieties. Others failed to connect the internal national and class struggles on the one hand with the external class struggles globally.

Since imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, it is natural for the people of the Basque not to see their oppression as a special case but as part of a general case of oppression globally.

Given that imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, it could be argued therefore that the struggle against capitalism is the struggle against an infant imperialism. Why not? The struggle against capitalist accumulation inside Spain is part of the struggle against Spanish expansion in the Basque and elsewhere. On these grounds, there is a link between the class struggle in Spain and the national and class struggles inside the Basque. And this answers cde Thabo’s question to the party congress.

Having stated his intention to join the party and be part of the procession from a national to a socialist republic, cde Thabo posed these questions: ‘What is the relationship, if any, between the national revolution and the socialist revolution?’

Fighting capitalism is fighting imperialism in its infant phase and fighting imperialism is fighting capitalism in its matured form, highly developed. The Basque struggle for national independence from Spanish occupation is connected to the struggle against capitalism in Spain and France, its conquedores.

The converse also holds, the struggle against foreign imperialists is a struggle against local capitalism.

One could add flavour to this and maintain that the drivers of imperial expansion abroad are in actual fact capital’s captains back home.

Looked at from yet another perspective, the argument is that the struggle for national democracy is a struggle against (imperialism) capitalism in its developed form, and therefore the outcome cannot be imperialism in its backward form. A revolution that seeks to replace the foreign capitalist with the local one is not a revolution since it moves from a situation of the highest stages of capitalism to its lowest and often backward form.

In fact it boils down to what Marx referred to as the unity of opposites; as in the replacement of feudal monopoly with modern bourgeoisie monopoly, foreign with local.

Today the unity of opposites prevails with much freshness and vigour, foreign settler-colonial bourgeoisie are replaced with national ones. The thesis of a national democracy becomes obsolete and counter revolutionary because of its outcomes.

The correct thesis of national democracy should be as follows:


 * thesis: imperialism

antithesis: national democracy,

synthesis: socialism**

In other words, national democracy must be the rallying point and not the ultimate outcome. The interlinkages between capitalism and imperialism that Lenin spoke of becomes evident and making it difficult, if not impossible, to build an artificial “Chinese-wall” between the unfolding national and class struggles.

The Spanish elite, drunken by the power it usurps against the working and poor Spaniards, is faced with the collapse of its tin-pot colonisation of the Basque. It has therefore become incumbent upon the working masses – Spaniard and Basque – to remove the Spanish elite from power once and for all.

It is due to the capitalist nature of Spain that the Basque land has been taken, and not because the Spaniard in general feel racially superior over the Basque people.

The same could be said of the CSTs in the conquered land of the Palestinians, and the situation of.the working class and other racial minorities in the US.

It is not because the Jews feel racially superior that they oppress the Palestinians, or the racially superiority complexes felt by white over black US or SA.

The root cause of the racial subjugation of black US, for instance, is in the capitalist system of that country rooted in the slavery of blacks.

The near-slavery situation of the majority SA blacks is the root-cause of the miseries they face today.

And one common feature of the racially oppressed classes is their cycle of contact with imprisonment for various “crimes”; political or economic. Whenever capitalism, and its twin evil of imperialism is in a state of crisis it resorts to brutal methods such as imprisonment.

The ongoing imprisonment of the Basque comrades cannot be seen in isolation from the continuing imprisonment of the poor struggling people of the whole world.

The Basque comrades are but one component of the whole complex cycle of the impoverished people languishing in capitalist-build jails for various ‘crimes’ under the capitalist status quo.

More and more struggling people of the world are imprisonment by the crisis-stricken capitalists states for various reasons, the Basque comrades are but some of the victims of the highest stages of capitalist imprisonment.

Here in South Africa as in America and elsewhere in the capitalist world, more and more people are imprisoned for various reasons ranging from economic to socio-psychological and even political.

Incapable to cope with its growing prison populations, capitalists states have resorted to the delegating of the management of justice to the market forces. In South Africa, two private prisons have been built by global private-prison firms, in order to cope with the cycle of imprisonment facing the workingmasses.


 * cheche selepe**