Inside this Issue:
Namibia:
WRP(N) fights for its constitutional rights
Namibian miners demand “end evictions!”
Programme of the Fourth International:
The Theses of Pulacayo (1946)
Europe:
What next for Greece – and Europe?
Bosnia solidarity appeal
UK elections
Out now! Issue Number 2 of Namibia‟s proletarian newsletter The Worker.
This issue includes material relating to the attacks on the WRP’s position in the Parliament.
Inside this issue:
Namibia:
‘This house will have to hear the independent voice of the working class’ Maiden speech of WRP parliamentarian Benson Kaapal
‘We will put forward the seizure of our natural resources to enable us to fund the upliftment of the working class and poor peasantry’ Salmon Fleermuys addresses Parliament
WRP Namibia’s response to Sam Nujoma
‘You are not welcome at our commemoration’ A letter to the President of Namibia from the Baster Community in Rehoboth
Hewat and Erica Beukes on behalf of the Beukes and Thiro families: Do not attend!
South Africa
Statements and postings by the United Front
Irvin Jim’s input to the conference for socialism
Report of a Workers International delegation to Johannesburg
Bosnia:
Suicide bid of two workers, former combatants
An appeal to the international labour community
Inside this issue:
Workers Revolutionary Party of Namibia:
Report on November 2014 National Assembly elections
South Africa:
Numsa National Treasurer Mphumzi Maqungo speaks to the Australian Workers Union
Marxism:
Historical Materialism: A timely reminder. An extract from a forthcoming book by BALAZS NAGY examines and defends a fundamental aspect of Marxist thought
In this special supplement of The Journal we publish the full text of the “True State of the Nation Address” issued by the United Front in South Africa on 11 February 2015, the 25th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison.
THE UNITED FRONT was initiated by the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa(NUMSA). We believe that this statement is of special interest to the People’s Assembly in Britain and people standing up for socialism all over the world.
NUMSA explained that for them the massacre of the Marikana miners “marked a turning point in the social and political life of South Africa”. It could not be “business as usual”. They put the question: “How do we explain the killing of striking miners in a democracy?” They had to conduct “a sustained and thorough analysis of the political meaning of Marikana”.
The leadership concluded that the decisions of the union’s ninth Congress “were no longer enough to guide [them]. The situation had changed to a point where [they] needed a new mandate from the membership”, and their Special Congress in December 2013 decided to break with the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP) and call upon the Confederation of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) to re-establish its independent campaigning role, for “there is no priority more important than safeguarding the capacity of the working class to act in its own interests”.
In so doing NUMSA raised matters of vital importance for workers everywhere “engulfed by the crisis of capitalism which manifests itself in mass unemployment, deepening poverty and widening inequalities”. To end the rule of capital, workers are faced with the task of breaking with fake “socialist” and “communist” parties acting on behalf of the capitalist class and “failing to act as the vanguard of the working class”.
The Special Congress therefore decided on a new united front to coordinate the struggles in the workplace and in communities, to explore the establishment of a Movement for Socialism and to conduct a “thoroughgoing discussion on previous attempts to build socialism as well as current experiments to build socialism” and “an international study on the historical formation of working class parties”.
Letter:
to Mr. Charles Lobodell, Political Officer, American Embassy, Windhoek, re: Meeting 10 December 2014
Dear Sir,
You have requested a meeting with me to discuss:
We have delegated Mrs Erica Beukes, Jacobus Josob and our two parliamentarians to meet with you on Thursday, 14:00, 11 December 2014. As indicated I will not be able to attend.
Our delegation is to discuss the following concerns.
In 1976 Dr Henry Kissinger on behalf of the American Government requested Sam Nujoma to get rid of the “radicals” in SWAPO. The “radicals” were SWAPO Youth League and PLAN fighters who were demanding a stop to the corruption of the SWAPO leadership and a Congress to call the leadership to order and chart out a political programme centred on self-determination. This leadership were using warehouses of weapons, food, clothing, medicine and general provisions as their wholesalers while PLAN fighters were dying of hunger in the camps.
They were also opposing the Sole and Authentic Representative status of SWAPO bestowed on it by the United Nations Organisation. The SWAPO leadership was tribal and did not represent the Namibian Nation.
Dr Kissinger also had talks with President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia.
Shortly thereafter the Zambian Army rounded up the Plan and Youth League members and started killing them. The survivors were kept at Mbaroma Camp in Zambia.
As a result of the Kissinger initiative, SWAPO in 1978 started building 3 metre deep dungeons in which it threw hundreds of SWAPO members culling them regularly by firing squad and hurling some of them from a mountain cliff in Southern Angola. Thousands died in this manner until 1989.
Three days before the Cassinga massacre the SWAPO leadership ordered the Mbaroma Camp inmates to be dressed in army fatigues and brought to Cassinga in southern Angola to be massacred on 4 May 1978.
Sam Nujoma during this reign of terror caused the 11-year old son of Martha Ford (néé Beukes) to be killed as reprisal for her criticism of their treacherous politics and sexual abuse of young girls. Mrs Ford was a member of the Politbureau.
The ultimate consequence of this was that the issues of self-determination and civilization was deferred to today. We now sit with a cleptocracy which ravages the country and its people like a swarm of locusts.
Our delegation will also inform you of the electoral fraud which has become endemic in this country. The very sovereignty of the country has been shown to be void with the Indian voting machines. This has been declared “free and fair” by the European Union while the German Supreme Court has declared voting machines to be intransparent and open to fraud. Even Universal Franchise has been assailed and nullified.
Our concern is that the Kissinger Initiative put an indelible question mark on your invitation. We cannot be blamed for suspecting that this may be the beginning of American intervention in Namibian affairs which bodes ill for Namibia, ourselves and our party.
If that is the case, we demand that you desist from continuing the Kissinger initiative.
We write this letter for the historical record, the laws of which are stronger than any power.
Hewat Beukes, Authorised Representative.
[threecolumns]Workers Revolutionary Party to Rebuild the Fourth International is a member of the Workers International for the Rebuilding of the Fourth International.
Its leadership emanated from the liberation struggle of Namibia and were part of the socialists in the SWAPO Youth League, which in 1976 unsuccessfully challenged the SWAPO Leadership for all-encompassing corruption and imperialist collaboration due to imperialist intervention.
In 1984 we started building our party clandestinely and stood in the forefront of the struggle against the terror campaign and mass killings of SWAPO members by the SWAPO leadership in exile in Angola and Zambia.
In 1988 our party called out the mass protests of 4 May 1988 against South Africa just prior to independence obtained in 1989.
Since 1990 we have fought on all fronts on issues wracking the working class and the colonial status quo maintained by the colonial ruling classes through a caretaker boss-boy SWAPO regime.
We dealt with trade union issues, the homeless, the landless and workers who were in struggle over the past 24 years.
We participated in elections to articulate a workers programme and self-determination for national groups.
We did not stand in the 2009 elections due to our work with mass workers groups such as the TCL miners whose pensions were stolen, teachers who were being pauperized, fuel workers who were being brutalized, the Truth and Justice Committee seeking historical restitution of history and the landless whom the regime sought to bulldoze after they had taken their land by themselves.
We took part in the 28 November 2014 general elections, incorporating former soldiers of South Africa who were forcefully conscripted during the colonial era and whose pensions were stolen by the SWAPO regime, and won two seats in the National Assembly to the consternation of the bourgeoisie.
The media speculate on how a party which has not made one rally or campaigned could obtain such a high number of votes and for that matter a communist party.
Our votes varied between 1.5 and 2% over this vast country (1,600 km north to south, from central Namibia to north west 1,600 km, east to west 800 km.)
Our votes came mostly from organized groups and from supporters of our work over 24 years.
(We plan to produce a fuller report on the Namibian election campaign and results in the next issue of Workers’ International Press – Editor)[/threecolumns]
The posts below are on political developments in South Africa including a report on steps by the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) towards establishing a United Front, a warning of a growing witch-hunt against NUMSA and her United Front allies, with particular reference to a recent speech by the South Africa Communist Party General Secretary “Blade” Nzimande, and responses to recent written and oral statements by Cosatu General Secretary Zwelinzime Vavi and NUMSA General Secretary Irvin Jim.
[threecolumns]10 December 2014
http://unitedfrontsa.wordpress.com/
It has been realized that the Government is failing to meet the needs of most if not all poor communities. This is evidently shown by a significant number of community struggles such as road blockade, burning of tyres, etc. While on the other hand the government is using the state through police brutality to smash those communities that are aggrieved.
This led NUMSA in its Special National Congress (SNC) that took place in December 2013 to take resolution of being a catalyst or a facilitator in forming the United Front (UF), since most NUMSA members are the victims of the policies promulgated by the government.
For instance E-Tolling, affects the poorest of the poor directly. If the bread cost R10 including delivery cost, the owner of the bakery will add E-Toll amount into the price of bread, of which the poorest of the poor may end-up paying R12.
Likewise the National Development Plan looks like a good plan, but most people hardly look at how it is going to be funded. It talks about infrastructures like roads to be built, funding coming from users, of which it will be through the e-tolling system.
It is evident that in most countries outside Europe where Western countries have intervened; the situation gets worse than before. That means in South Africa we need to coordinate these protests in order not to be hijacked by agencies of the West. And everything should and must be from below (Bottom Up Approach).
On 15 November 2014, the KwaZulu Natal (KNZ) had a UF provincial workshop to address the Numsa idea of a United Front. The people who attended the workshop adopted the Numsa idea of the UF which is independent from Numsa. A steering committee was elected of 15 people around KZN.
The steering committee had it first meeting on the 7th of December 2014. On that meeting, 5 interim office bearers were elected, who areThemba Mchunu: Chairperson, Bonginkosi Khanyile: Deputy Chairperson, Bandile Mdlalose: Secretary, Philani Nduli: Deputy Secretary, Gcina Makhoba: Coordinator.
The role of the KZN UF is to form UF local structures and encourage communities to form their own community organizations that can affiliate to UF; to dismantle the silo system that communities and organizations are working within, to address the issues faced in KZN emanating from the government policies.
The UF is not a political party, not affiliated to any political party, not a trade union nor a structure formed to attack or being against the governing party, but it is formed to unite the Civil Society to speak in one voice as the united body.
Having observed many community protests, such as blocking roads, burning tyres, etc. demonstrates that these protests are genuine but not coordinated. And it is the fact that the real struggle is not about short term reforms, but it is all about struggling for economic equality, which will assist on closing the inequality gap in the society.
Some of the activities that we are going to start with, to deal with these challenges till the end of March 2015 are as follows:-
Water and man-made diseases: Mtubatuba
Transit Camps: Shaka’s Head
“Grey Water”: Inanda
Within the three campaigns we will also be engaging with researchers and academics to be assisting communities in the fact-finding and scientific evidence.
There will also be political education workshops that will be taking place from time to time in various community areas.
On 13 and 14 December 2014 the KZN UF office bearers will be joining the United Front National Assembly to be held in Johannesburg this coming weekend.
As we go, we shall be doing the formative assessment, and then do the summative assessment by the end of March 2015.[/threecolumns]
[threecolumns]Zwelinzima Vavi, the General Secretary of COSATU and himself an SACP member, got into a public argument with SACP Deputy General Secretary Jeremy Cronin last November over contentious issues in the Alliance that rules South Africa.
This bare fact alone shows how utterly fundamental the political crisis in South Africa is.
A lengthy reply by Vavi to Cronin dated December 17, 2014 is available online at:
The basic division in the political crisis is between the working class and wider layers of working people on the one hand and the bourgeoisie and its representatives in the Alliance on the other. That was made very clear when armed police opened fire on striking rock-drillers at Marikana on 16 August 2012 and in the way political forces have lined up subsequently. It is therefore very hard to understand why in his reply Vavi makes no reference of any kind at all to the events at Marikana. The silence on this issue robs his remarks of meaning in a certain sense. It belies the very reality he attempts to portray at considerable length in the letter.
The crisis in South Africa involves the unravelling of the National Democratic Revolution’s meretricious promises. It is a crisis which involves workers driven to mobilise against the Alliance government in order to defend their class interests, but also one which works right through every element in the alliance, COSATU, SACP and ANC.
It is a crisis in which the developing leadership of the working class lies in the hands of the NUMSA officeholders, who correctly take the fight through all parts of the Alliance, while at the same time building their movement in a very open way in the United Front and among their international contacts. Their insistence upon their right to belong to COSATU and fight within the federation testifies to their understanding of their responsibilities towards their class and the masses in general. Big, indeed historical, political issues are at stake. They cannot be resolved by walking away from this fight or displacing it elsewhere.
Vavi comes across from this letter as a man of a somewhat different kidney from the NUMSA leaders. He describes very tellingly the abusive nature of the working class’s relationship (through the COSATU federation) with the SACP and the government, but also he is looking to restore a relationship that is damaged, appealing to common sense and goodwill to overcome a rocky patch in a fundamentally sound, if occasionally violent, marriage.
For all its diplomatic language, however, this long letter makes it absolutely clear that it is the government which is smashing up the ANC-SACP alliance along class lines on behalf of bourgeois interests, and that many leading figures in the SACP are up to their necks in collaboration with this government. It stands out that, to say the very least, the SACP fails to provide leadership for the working class, deceives and betrays the interests of that class, uses prevarication and double-talk while class interests are attacked and that, having stood back while neo-liberal “reforms” are inflicted, belatedly adapts to pressure from workers’ organisations via bombastic rhetoric not backed by actions. The leaders of the SACP are the splitters. Vavi is not just any member of the SACP: he is the elected secretary of the trade union confederation Cosatu.
Vavi is aware that the stakes are high: ““Labelling, rumour-mongering and character assassination become the order of the day”, he warns, bringing the threat of “the unthinkable – physical conflict between the members and leaders of the working class”.
He calls for: “necessary debates about the state of the National Democratic Revolution and whether the current trajectory can even herald a seamless movement towards socialism.”
Vavi goes through a long list of issues which have been contentious. His treatment of the Growth, Employment and Redistribution plan (GEAR) provides a good example of the problems he is describing. Vavi recalls that the SACP statement of 14 June 1996 welcomed and “fully backed” GEAR, insisted it “situates itself as a framework for the National Democratic Revolution”, asserted that it “resists” “free market dogmatism” and “envisages a key economic role for the public sector” and “reaffirms and reinforces the bilateral (between government and unions) National Framework Agreement process.” The SACP statement went on that it “envisages the extension of a regulated market and it introduces an innovative approach to flexibility. It rejects laisser-faire market-driven flexibility and instead calls for negotiated regional and sectoral flexibility.”
“The opposite of the truth …”
Vavi’s comment now should be written in letters of fire:
“History will record that, on this crit-ical issue of GEAR, which was to divide the movement for many years to come, virtually every line of this statement proved to be incorrect and problematic, and the SACP itself subsequently came to realise this fact. This is important because its raises the question as to how such a fundamental error of judgement could be made on such a vital question for the working class”. How indeed!
Recalling that the SACP rushed this statement out without consulting its members, Vavi continues: “The SACP statement on every key topic makes assertions which would later be exposed as the opposite of the truth”.
“It is now history that GEAR sought to replace and overturn the RDP (Reconstruction and Development Programme)”, Vavi continues. “GEAR espoused market fundamentalism, and sought to slash the public sector …” He adds: “It aimed to remove key rights of workers in the labour market”. Vavi describes GEAR as “a comprehensive neo-liberal macroeconomic strategy, which the Party was later to denounce as the 1996 Class Project”.
“This is still relevant”, he continues, “because it was seen by the working class as a major betrayal of trust in the SACP’s responsibility as a leadership rooted in its attempt to retain its proximity to power. Others on the left of the SACP argue that this was not a misjudgement but a political choice and have from that time written off the SACP. It didn’t help that a leader of the SACP, Cde Alec Erwin, was a prominent driver of the GEAR strategy.”
On this, as on other matters, Vavi recalls that the SACP made purely “rhetorical” adjustments. It had been the same previously with the 1995 “6-pack” and privatisation plans. The SACP claimed: (Umsebenzi February 1996): “Contrary to many press reports, the GNU (government) position actually calls for the basic retention of Telkom, Transnet, SAA etc. in public hands, while allowing some minority strategic partnerships with private companies … We see in it a rejection of mindless privatisation”. The Party also welcomed “comrade Mbeki’s very clear statement that the positions were a point of departure for negotiations, in particular with labour”, as an implied promise that the privatisation measures would not be pushed through roughshod (Mbeki was at the time President of the country).
Although COSATU was able “to exercise power by the Federation’s membership, which, in the end partially halted the privatisation drive in its tracks”, Vavi comments: “Today workers at Telkom and other SOEs (State Owned Enterprises) are still paying a heavy price of private equity partnerships and commercialisation and therefore neoliberalism”.
Vavi praises the SACP’s policies on the banks and the land, but points out: “But deeper analysis suggests that it has studiously avoided anything which could be construed as taking on the state … where it has raised criticisms they have tended to be muted, or so ‘nuanced’ as to be ineffective or simply sending out confusing messages”.
With the “launch of the NDP (National Development Plan) in August 2012 “there was silence from the Party about the ideological and class problems within it”, says Vavi (himself no stranger to “muted” language and “nuances”), pointing out that top Party leaders were members of the cabinet which had endorsed it. While SACP Deputy General Secretary Jeremy Cronin engaged in double-talk about fighting “for our macro-economic policies to be better aligned to those important micro-economic interventions”, Vavi notes: “The NDP … proposes both macro- and micro-economic policies which are at odds with the progressive elements of the NGP (New Growth Path) and IPAP (industrial Policy Action Plan)”.
In other words, while the unions solemnly negotiate socially progressive measures through the NGP and IPAP processes, the government is pressing ahead with neoliberal reforms and deregulation measures which, along with the general pressures of imperialism on wages and working conditions, completely undermine such agreements.
Vavi’s explanation is that the Party is “seemingly blinded by not just its close relationship with government but the presence of top leaders in government … If the Party was the vanguard, why was it constantly taking up a position at the rear?” This remark arises in relation to the 2013 Alliance summit (held at the end of August, immediately after the Marikana Massacre which Vavi fails to mention). Discussing how the NDP was simply imposed, Vavi says:
“The price paid by the working class in this process is immeasurable. A pro-business economic strategy will now run till 2030 unless a major pro-left political rupture takes place within the ANC and the Alliance. Frankly I see no possibility of this happening inside the government or even the ANC in the near future. COSATU has found itself completely isolated, as many government leaders, in particular the President, have repeatedly told the world that there is sufficient consensus to implement the NDP. But this ‘national consensus’ excludes the working class.”
According to Vavi, the SACP neglects macro-economic policy and believes “we must rather focus on micro-economic policy, industrial policy, etc. In this respect the Party has shared common ground with many conservatives inside and outside the state…” But he explains that this is a problem because “macro-economic policy is the state’s major lever to drive development”. He goes on: “Our progressive IPAP policy has failed to stem deindustrialisation … because the incorrect macro-economic policies are in place”.
In his own “muted” and “nuanced” way, Vavi is depicting how the National Democratic Revolution has crashed into the buffers.
He again (politely) accuses the SACP leaders of lying to the masses over budgets. For example, this is how the SACP responded to the 2013 “austerity” budget: “ … the budget’s stance has rejected the path of austerity disastrously followed by many countries in Europe”. The Party claims that “many of the major pillars of expenditure including infrastructure, education and health-care are maintained”. The trade union federation COSATU was forced to reply: “We are following European/IMF austerity policies, which have only plunged Europe deeper into crisis”.
Vavi points out the key role of “certain economic ministries and state institutions (including the Reserve Bank, strategic SOEs etc.) … with the Presidency as the coordinating centre. But the institutional engine for monopoly capital in the state is the National Treasury”, which “uses its control of the purse strings … to attempt to shape, drive and often frustrate the policy agenda in the state”.
When COSATU called for the scrapping of motorway e-tolls and a boycott of ebills, the SACP accused them of allying itself with the Democratic Alliance.
Vavi deals directly with the crisis in relations between the Alliance government and the metal-worker’s union NUMSA:
“The question we must ask is: why, in its Special National Congress, did NUMSA move from being the defender of the ANC to its biggest critic? … The intensity of NUMSA’s critique, particularly since 2013, and the NUMSA Special National Congress resolutions of December 2013, reflect the crisis in COSATU, in the Alliance and in the working class as a whole.
“This is what the Party should have been responding to, not their irritation with NUMSA positions which they regard as extreme. Rather they should be responding to the extremity of the moment, in which the working class find itself in deepening crisis.
“Secondly, we need to ask, why is the SACP so threatened by NUMSA’s critique of ‘neoliberalism’ in South Africa?
“It may be that NUMSA’s critique has sometimes been overly crude in not recognising areas of progress, contradiction and contestation in the state. But equally the SACP has been in denial about the reality that neo-liberalism is a significant feature of strategic aspects of government economic policy, and that this needs to be contested. If the economic proposals of the NDP are clearly neoliberal, what else should we call them?”
Vavi points out that the SACP is: “… very cautious – many would say too cautious and hyper-diplomatic” in its approach to “managing its differences with the ANC, even in the face of attacks from the movement”.
“However it has chosen to adopt the opposite standpoint in handling its differences with NUMSA. The Party seems to have decided on a course of total confrontation, engaging in running battles with NUMSA, hyping up the war talk, and pushing for the purging of NUMSA from the movement.”
Complaining about a “confrontational posture … reflected in the extreme language continuously used by the Party”, Vavi adds:
“Party statements thinly disguise the fact that it was celebrating the expulsion of NUMSA. This creates the clear impression amongst workers that the Party was indeed behind this, despite its denials.
“The SACP can’t say that we want worker controlled unions and a democratic federation, but we also want to purge particular unions we disagree with, or change the democratically determined mandate of their federation.”
These are words which must be weighed seriously by trade unionists and political activists around the world who are accustomed, without reflecting too much, to respecting the Alliance as the leadership of the South African people’s struggle for liberation.
More broadly, Vavi raises the general question:
“Many workers will be astonished, and also perplexed, at how a party calling itself Communist and with a long history of revolutionary struggle, could have ended up supporting right-wing, pro-capitalist economic policies and becoming the main defenders of a democratic yet capitalist government, while waging a campaign to emasculate, weaken and ultimately destroy the independent mass workers’ union movement, COSATU.”
This is of course the central question. Vavi thinks: “The best answer to this question is to be found in a famous pamphlet by … Comrade Joe Slovo: Has Socialism failed, written in 1989”.
Discussing the source of the degeneration and collapse of the USSR and the international Communist movement, Slovo said: “ … the party leadership was transformed into a command post with overbearing centralism and very little democracy … the gap between socialism and democracy widened … the commandist and bureaucratic approaches which took root during Stalin’s time affected communist parties throughout the world”.
Now Vavi takes this matter somewhat further. He comments that the Party members should have addressed the problems of bureaucracy and personality cult much earlier, and points to some of the consequences:
“The fear of any democratic opposition from within each country spread to other parts of the world. In Spain in the mid-1930s the Communist Party uncritically supported the Republican government which, although a left-wing coalition, was still essentially a capitalist government, and it declared war on workers who were then struggling for a socialist Spain. The anarchists, Trotskyists and independent workers, not the capitalists and fascists, became the CP’s main enemy.
“They were attacked with exactly the same sort of insults and absurd conspiracy theories we hear today in South Africa, in which NUMSA and COSATU leaders, NGOs and progressive civil society groups are charged with ‘anti-majoritarianism’ and conspiring with international counter-revolutionaries to destabilise ‘our’ ANC government.”
Yes, this is an SACP member and the elected General Secretary of one of the world’s most respected trade union confederations speaking!
We Trotskyists in the Workers International have more – much more! – to say about the origins and character of the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union and the Communist International. We have a scientific analysis of these things which places “personal” failings and “commandist and bureaucratic approaches” in a proper context.
A useful introduction to our analysis, and the issues raised, is contained in the articles Stalinism and Bolshevism which Trotsky wrote in 1937. It is easily available online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1937/08/stalinism.htm.
Vavi concludes his long letter with an expression of hope that:
“It is not too late for the Party to change direction, and recapture its historical role, so that together we can transform our skewed internal development and place society onto a new growth and development path”.
Whether or not this is too optimistic, the issues he raises must be fought out to the very end at all political levels in the movement. They are clearly under discussion in every nook and cranny of the movement in South Africa. We at Workers International stand shoulder to shoulder with all those who wish to take the theory and practice of the masses forward.
Bob Archer, January 2015 [/threecolumns]