COSATU+GS+Z+Vavi+to+85th+Anniversary+of+SACP,+Pietermaritzburg,+2006



=COSATU Message of Solidarity to the SACP=

=On the occasion of its 85th Anniversary Celebrations=

30 July 2006 in Pietermaritzburg
 * Delivered by the COSATU General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi**

Dear Comrade, General Secretary of the SACP, **Blade Nzimande** Members Central Committee and of the SACP Deputy President **Jacob Zuma** and the rest of the leadership and membership of the ANC Leaders of COSATU and COSATU members present


 * Dear comrades and friends,**

I bring you revolutionary greetings from the COSATU Central Executive Committee and the nearly two million members of our giant federation, with messages of solidarity and friendship. This is a friendly and joyful gathering of the three great allies that form our liberation movement in honour of 85 years of indispensable communist leadership in our country. It is a personal privilege for me to represent the organised working class at this gathering.

The South African working class in general and COSATU in particular have historically and consciously looked upon the South African Communist Party as its vanguard party. The respect we feel has grown over the years, not simply because of the name you bear, but because of the role played by communists in building the democratic and progressive trade union movement and in providing invaluable ideological clarity to our revolution and the organisation at its head - the ANC.

The SACP has still to be fully credited for its role in the liberation struggle. Without the SACP, COSATU and its predecessors might well have ended as narrow unions fighting narrow workplace struggles, without linking them to broader working-class battles for a better life. We would all too likely have been condemned to remain only as unions of gumboots, safety helmets and wages. The ANC too might have limited its ambitions to replacing the white government with a black one, leaving in place the pillars of social and economic oppression.

The SACP did not limit its role to theorising in boardrooms. It led from the front. It produced cadres of extraordinary calibre who played a still mostly untold role in building transformative trade unions and the ANC. Its cadres have always been the most politicised and most clear, the most committed and the most willing to making supreme sacrifices. I talk here of Chris Hani, Joe Slovo, Moses Kotane, Harry Gwala, Johannes Nkosi, Dora Tamana, Ray Alexander, Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba, Moses Mabhida. We talk about the giants whose names are written in diamond stones in the hearts of our people. They were communists that we claim as the finest unionists and the greatest heroes of our liberation struggle.

The SACP remains a reliable ally of COSATU. It is a vanguard, not because it declared itself as such, but because of the role it has played over eight decades. It is not simply because of abstract theories but because of this long history that our people recognise the SACP’s leading role.

COSATU appreciates the closeness and deep solidarity that exist between SACP and COSATU. We appreciate your unwavering support of our Jobs and Poverty Campaign. We hope you will say the same about our support for your campaigns in this transition.

This close solidarity is the most potent weapon in the hands of the working class. It has led to enormous synergy in the strategic discussions on a number of issues. That synergy emerges in the parallels between COSATU’s 2015 Plan and the SACP’s Medium Term Vision, which emerged even though we never discussed them in advance. It arises because we share the same struggle to keep the red flag flying in completely new conditions.

Again today we find ourselves identifying similar challenges in our recent discussion documents. We welcome the publication of these papers and call on all our members and supporters to engage with them.

We need to discuss the issues raised in these papers thoroughly, despite the pressure to take urgent decisions. Clearly the debate the SACP document has aroused will continue to stimulate us through COSATU’s Ninth National Congress in two months as well as the ANC’s upcoming conferences.

The SACP has declared today’s theme as “Building a People’s Economy.” That in itself demonstrates that our alliance of mass and vanguard is not an artificial one. We are naturally aligned towards the same goals.

A people’s economy would be one where there are jobs for all, and where there is no poverty.

As you know, COSATU has been leading, and is still escalating, its Jobs and Poverty Campaign. This campaign has involved unprecedented provincial action, sectoral action, and national stayaways or general strikes, of which we have had two since your Special Congress last year. Not even the bourgeois media have dared to suggest that these actions are anything less than successful, popular, and representing the national interest even beyond the working class.

We do not need to thank you for your support in the Jobs and Poverty Campaign. The campaign belongs as much to the SACP as to COSATU. It represents //de facto// working class leadership of our revolutionary process. By this means we are taking the question of working-class leadership of the National Democratic Revolution out of the realm of debate and into the realm of practice and unity in action.

COSATU is preparing for its Ninth National Congress from 18 to 21 September, guided by the theme “C//onsolidating working class power - for intensification of the Jobs and Poverty Campaign”////.// We hope to meet many of you again on that occasion, in your capacities as leaders of the mass formations of the working class.


 * Comrades and friends,**

The major meetings of the Alliance partners like this one, like our Congress and the ANC’s conferences, as well as the Constitutional structures of the Alliance like the SACP Central Committee, COSATU’s CEC and the ANC’s NEC - these structures give content to our democracy.

In reality we are the democracy of South Africa. This alliance is the backbone of the country, and its working class component - the SACP and COSATU – form the backbone of the alliance.

In this context, the organised working class notes with excitement the strong growth of the YCL since its three years ago, to the point where you are anticipating 1500 hundred delegates to its Congress in December this year. We expect to see increasing numbers of these young cadres taking their place among the massed ranks of the working class as leadership.


 * Comrades and friends,**

You know that we have published a discussion document of our own in the run up to our Ninth Congress, called “Possibilities for Fundamental Social Change.” What is this fundamental change that we seek?

Our document notes:

“The //**post-apartheid socio-economic order**// can be characterised as one in which there is positive economic growth and opportunities for amassing wealth for a few. This growth is not equitably shared and does not trickle down much to the many that are desperately poor. While there is a formal break with the apartheid racial ordering of society, the dualistic development path continues, albeit with new features. Fundamentally the accumulation regime has not changed, so that development and under-development continues to coexist.”

This by no means describes the People’s Economy that we want. But it is unfortunately the truth.

We have seen the abuse of the idea of Black Economic Empowerment to the point where it has become process of class formation and enrichment for a few members of the bourgeoisie.

COSATU wants a fundamental reversal of this situation. Empowerment must mean the inclusion of all in the productive economy, and not an increase in the unproductive parasitic section of the economy.

The intolerable degree of unemployment continues. All members of the Alliance, including the ANC, officially accept the figure of 40% unemployment in this country. This must be fundamentally changed, as we demand in the Jobs and Poverty Campaign.

We have seen the situation where a worker, Themba Manyathi, falls from a ladder, dies before the emergency services arrive more than an hour later, and then his body is left in the street for a further ten and a half hours. Such situations have to be fundamentally eliminated.

We know that here in KwaZulu Natal factory pollution damages workers’ health, and the same in Gauteng by the steelworks. We know that life is cheap to the managers and owners of Sasol’s plants in Gauteng and Mpumalanga. We want a fundamental reversal of this trend. We know that in the farms workers continue to face massive oppression and abuse.

We know that children have been missing their schooling because of absence of transport. This is not tolerable. It must be changed.

It is the labour movement that refuses to step backwards on these and other issues. But fundamental change means more than just holding the line. Fundamental change requires revolutionary change.


 * Comrades and friends,**

A Peoples’ Economy can only really exist in a People’s World. You as the SACP have wholeheartedly supported our efforts as COSATU to pursue the interests of the working class in the trade negotiations at the WTO.

In the past we as COSATU have pointed out the general defects of the WTO. We have said that the trouble is that the alternative is worse. Unfortunately now that the Doha Round has collapsed we are sitting with that worse alternative.

The collapse of the Doha Round was not the fault of the working-class organisations nor of South Africa nor any other developing, oppressed and exploited country. The collapse took place because of quarrels between and among the exploiters, the main imperialist powers – the USA and the European Union. All their previous pious rhetoric was thrown aside.

It is necessary to reflect on this situation in the light of the history of capitalist imperialism since its full emergence at the end of the 19th Century.

Imperialism enforces its self-declared right to own any assets (and all the most profitable ones), anywhere, by force of arms. Since the Spanish-American War in Cuba and the Anglo-Boer War here there has never been a time when such wars were not going on in some part of the globe. These are competitive wars among the monopolising finance-capital bourgeoisie, but it is mostly the ordinary people, including workers, who suffer.

The wars that are going on today, in Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon, are as terrible as any in history. To a large extent they represent the continuation of the struggle of the WTO by other means. Instead of the proposed “rules-based” environment, the world is returning to the settling of disputes by force of arms, and it is the working class and the poor who are the primary victims just like they would be if the US and EU get their way in the WTO negotiations.

We salute the brave working class state of Cuba in this connection, and applaud their stand against the terrorism of the United States against their country and generally. We salute the people of Palestine in their struggle of a special type that is similar to our own liberation struggle.

We rely upon the SACP for support against all kinds of neo-liberalism, and in particular the so-called “dual labour market” idea that is dead but does not want to lie down. We need you to join us on the watch against this danger.


 * In conclusion, Comrades**, we look forward with excitement to the further stages of your SACP discussion process. COSATU and its affiliates will play their part in the debates and the political initiatives that will have to follow.

The Party is the creative element of the Alliance. It pushes the frontier. We, the mass formations of the revolutionary class, the working class, are behind you.


 * Solidarity Forever!**

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