South African Communist Party General Secretary Blade Nzimande. He recently delivered a major address at a conference of NUMSA on October 14, 2008.
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos
SACP Message to the YCL National Council, University of Johannesburg
12 December 2008
Blade Nzimande, General Secretary
Introduction
On behalf of the SACP Central Committee and all its membership, I bring revolutionary greetings to your National Council and on the 5th birthday of your relaunch in 2003. Indeed, given the amount of work you have done in rebuilding this glorious organ for the working class youth in our country, it feels like the YCL has been around for double the time of its existence since its relaunch.
As we celebrate this 5th anniversary it is important to remember and honour the memory of some of the pioneers of the communist youth movement in our country, especially Cde Esther Barsel who passed away this year. Cde Esther shall ever be a shining light for communist youth in our country, as well as all youth who cherish the ideals of a free, democratic and socialist South Africa.
Since your last Congress, two other stalwarts of the South African Communist Party have since passed away, Cdes Brian Bunting and Billy Nair. We need to honour and treasure the memory of these comrades as they were true revolutionaries, who understood that the socialist revolution in South Africa cannot be advanced without addressing the national question, and that the national question can never be fully addressed without a decisive advance to socialism.
The relevance of the YCL today into the future
When the Central Committee of the SACP decided to relaunch the YCL, we relaunched this organization under the slogan of `Youth for Socialism and Socialism for the Youth`. It was a relaunch followed by the absence of the YCL for 53 years in our country, after it dissolved together with the SACP in 1950, just prior to the passage of the Suppression of Communism Act, 1950 hardly two years after the victory of the National Party in 1948. The SACP, together with the YCL, was the first organization to be banned by the apartheid regime after its ascendancy into power.
One of the main reasons for the banning of the then CPSA by the apartheid regime, was the fact that in the 1940s the SACP had emerged as the foremost weapon of mass struggle, with the working class at the head, against capitalist exploitation and colonial oppression of the black majority. The SACP had, since the 1920s, led the building of progressive black trade unions, and the YCL had played a leading role during the Second World War, in opposing and exposing the in collusion of elements within the National Party and the Nazis in Germany and Italy. The YCL had also played an important role in mobilizing youth against Nazi aggression and in solidarity with the Soviet Union.
The slogan `Socialism for the Youth and Youth for Socialism` remains even more relevant today for a number of reasons:
The current capitalist global financial and economic meltdown
Socialism remains relevant today, as is currently shown by the current global capitalist crisis. It is a reflection of the fact that capitalism is incapable of addressing problems confronting humanity today, and that in fact it is the persistent source of global human misery today. Recently we have learnt that 40 million more people have been added to the starving and poor peoples of the world, who face starvation in the midst of the riches accumulated only by the capitalist classes mainly located in the North.
The current global capitalist crisis is the worst since the late 1920s. Whilst it started as a crisis of the global financial sector, especially in the United States, it is now seriously beginning to affect the productive economy, and threatens to get worse. The source of this crisis is the increasing financialisation of the capitalist system, with increasing more speculative activity by the capitalist class, away from investing in the productive economy. Cde Fidel Castro has correctly characterized contemporary capitalism as more of a casino rather than a productive economy.
The impact of the current global crisis is already beginning to have enormous negative effects on our economy. We are beginning to see job losses mainly through retrenchments, and loss of income for the working class through long shut downs by sections of the manufacturing and mining industries. This also goes to show that it is a myth to say that our economic fundamentals are in place and have helped us to weather this global capitalist storm. Instead, the pursuance of neo-liberal economic policies by our government since 1996 has made us to be even more vulnerable.
Some of the reasons for this vulnerability is the fact that we have pursued macro-economic stability at the expense of pursuing an industrial policy that will develop domestic productive capacity in our economy, thus making us to be very vulnerable to financial speculative activity. As a country we have also squandered the opportunities brought about by the increasing demand for commodities by not directing the profits from this into domestic productive activity. Instead we have embarked on narrow BEE and wasted billions of rands into wasteful mega projects like the Gautrain, the Arms Deal, Coega, the Dube Trade Port and the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor.
The bourgeois media has also fostered a myth that since 1996 our country has embarked on fiscal discipline thus creating better conditions for growth. But this `fiscal discipline` is a lie given the wasteful expenditure on the projects mentioned above. In so far as there has been fiscal discipline it has been in relation to lack of productive investment into the economy, lack of an aggressive approach towards skills development and not adequate resources thrown into education and health. Instead of dealing with some of the pressing social problems we have been consumed by aids denialism peddled from the highest office in the land, and ameliorative, albeit necessary, welfarist measures that have not been accompanied by a developmental industrial strategy.
Instead of approaching our state owned enterprises as a resource for driving a developmental agenda, we have sold and/or run down some of them, notably Telkom, notably sold to some of those who proudly tell us that `they did not join the struggle to be poor`. The latest of this saga is the scandalous sale of Vodacom, the cash cow of Telkom, to British Vodafone, without any due regard to the implications of this for the totality of our IT strategy to serve the workers and the poor of our country.
Within the context of the neo-liberal economic strategy, we have mindlessly pursued an inflation targeting strategy that is a blunt instrument and completely oblivious to the developmental and job-creating imperatives for our country. Yesterday`s reduction of the interest rate by half a percentage, welcome as it is, but is yet another missed opportunity for higher interest rate cuts in order to create better conditions to protect workers` jobs and incentivize more investment into our economy.
All the above realities are a proof that capitalism is not in the interests of the youth of our country, and instead the struggle for socialism is as relevant as ever. Our own homegrown neo-liberal economic strategy has been pursued under the rubric of what we have referred to as the `1996 class project` – an alliance between sections of our cadre within the state and movement, elements of domestic and global capital, and sections of an emergent BEE elite which has also captured sections of state-owned enterprises like the Public Investment Corporation and the Industrial Development Corporation, to mention but a few.
We are however heartened by the realization of the ANC`s Polokwane Conference of some of the serious shortcomings of the policies pursued by the 1996 class project. The Polokwane Conference has re-affirmed the centrality of the state in economic development and the need for a state-led industrial strategy, under which our macro-economic policies must be subjected. In addition the Polokwane Conference has re-affirmed the centrality of the ANC-led alliance in driving a radical national democratic revolution. The YCL has an important role to play in ensuring that indeed these Polokwane resolutions become a reality.
The Polokwane Conference also marked a serious blow to the 1996 class project, and one of the key challenges facing us is how to ensure that we completely rout the 1996 class project in both the state and our movement in order to re-position ourselves to drive a developmental agenda beneficial to the overwhelming majority of our people, especially black working class youth. The YCL remains central in achieving these objectives.
An activist and campaigning YCL
The relevance of the slogan `Youth for Socialism and Socialism for the Youth`, is further re-affirmed by the track record of the YCL over the past five years. The re-establishment of the YCL has added new and much needed dynamism and revolutionary activism into youth politics of our country. You have rebuilt an activist and campaigning YCL that has grasped the challenges facing working class and poor youth of our country.
Let me take this opportunity to congratulate the YCL for the many campaigns it has launched over the last five years. Not only have you become an important component in driving the SACP campaigns on the transformation of the financial sector, the land and agrarian reform campaign, the health campaign, etc, but you have also launched your own campaigns within the broader rubric of the programmatic objectives of the SACP.
One of the major campaigns that have made a huge impact in our country is the `Kabelo Thibedi campaign to ensure that our youth is not deprived of their identity documents. The task of the YCL is to deepen this campaign by also ensuring that the Home Affairs department is completely transformed such that it is able to deliver services that it is supposed to deliver.
We also appreciate the fact that the YCL has managed to establish branches in many campuses of higher education institutions of our country. As part of the Progressive Youth Alliance it has consistently waged yearly struggles to ensure that progressive SRCs are established in all the campuses of our country. The higher education youth sector is an important component in building a communist youth league that is able to impact on the transformation of these higher education institutions, including the transformation of curricula away from the dominant neo-liberal model, but a curriculum that serves the overall developmental agenda of the national democratic revolution.
We also appreciate the advances that the YCL has made in building a closer relationship with the ANC Youth League, despite the initially cold relationship between these two formations at the re-establishment of the YCL. It is important for communist youth to realize that building a strong ANC YL is an important struggle to mobilize the youth from the families of the workers and the poor, much as the existence of a radical YCL is important in the overall objectives of the ANC YL. Your task is that of ensuring a stronger, radical and left-leaning ANC YL as part of the ANC`s own commitment to a bias towards the working class.
Indeed we must also salute you that in the middle of the preparations and the start of your National Council, you embarked on demonstrations against the factionalist SABC, which has clearly positioned itself in support of the opposition parties, just like it supported a faction in the run up to the ANC`s Polokwane Conference. We also salute you for further action in support of the 16 Days of Activism against Violence directed at women and children. You are indeed UFasimba, a leading detachment against all the scourges facing our country, especially the youth, including the struggle against the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
It has been through these activist struggles that the YCL has seen tens of thousands of our youth joining the YCL. It is through these struggles that you will realize one of the key objectives of your 2010 vision, that of building a strong YCL, capable of organizing working class youth into a formidable force in this country.
It is on the terrain of all these struggles that the slogan `Youth for Socialism and Socialism for the Youth` will be practically realized.
The immediate tasks of the YCL
Over and above the struggles you have been leading and waging it is also important for the YCL to be part of giving practical effect to the immediate struggles of the ANC-led alliance, from within the standpoint of the overall objectives of the SACP.
The South African Road to Socialism and our Medium Term Vision
It is indeed important that the struggles of the YCL are firmly located within the programme of the SACP as contained in SARS and the MTV. Our SARS and MTV enjoins the SACP to lead in building working class power in six key sites of power: the state, the economy, the workplace, in the community, ideologically and in the international sphere. We are convinced that the Polokwane outcomes provide a fertile environment in which to advance and deepen these struggles. And it is only the working class, pursuing these objectives, that is best placed to lead the national democratic revolution. In fact, it is on the terrain on deepening the struggles in these sites of power that a radical national democratic revolution will be advanced.
The tasks of the YCL is to ensure that your membership, and indeed the broader working class youth, understand the objectives of our SARS and Medium Term Vision, and seek to play a key role in the achievement of this. SARS and the MTV are clear pointers to the terrains of class struggle at this point in time, and you must continue to be guided by what Marx and Engels said in the Communist Manifesto, `The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles`.
The vision as contained in SARS and the MTV are an important basis on which to advance a radical national democratic revolution. A radical national democratic revolution is an essential condition for ensuring a transition to socialism. It is therefore important for our YCL to properly grasp the relationship between a radical national democratic revolution and a transition to socialism as contained the in the SACP`s programme. It is our hope that the YCL will ensure political and ideological education for all your members to understand SARS and the MTV.
It is only from the perspective of SARS that the YCL must also be at the forefront of implementing the five key priorities as agreed to by the ANC-led Alliance, and appropriately define the tasks of the youth in this programme. And it is very important that we approach all these priorities from a consistently Marxist-Leninist perspective, including the class, racial and gender dimensions of these challenges:
Creating decent work and sustainable livelihoods
As part of the ANC-led alliance we have agreed to energetically pursue economic transformation in order to create more jobs and opportunities for sustainable livelihoods for the overwhelming majority of our people. This requires the development and implementation of an industrial strategy that will primarily focus on investment into infrastructure and our productive economy. Our macro-economic policies (whether it be budget deficit, budget surpluses, inflationg targeting, etc) must be informed and guided by such industrial strategy rather than the other way round.
In addition, as the SACP we have identified the building of a large, progressive co-operative sector, including co-operative banks, as an essential component of building sustainable livelihoods for the majority of the people of our country. Indeed we are proud that as the SACP, through our financial sector campaign, we have ensured that there is indeed now progressive legislation on co-operatives and co-operative banks. Our YCL has a huge responsibility to bring youth energy into these endeavours.
For the SACP it is going to be very important that as part of transforming the current economic trajectory and driving an industrial strategy, we particularly focus on the transformation of the financial sector, both the public developmental financial institutions and the private financial sector.
In so far as the developmental financial institutions (DFIs – eg. IDC, DBSA, MAFISA, etc) are concerned we have two critical tasks. The first is that of ensuring that the financial resources in the hands of these institutions are invested in our developmental priorities, infrastructure and job creation. The second one is that of ensuring that the boards of these DFI`s are substantially representative of the working class and poor communities, rather than be populated by narrow BEE types, who often use them to support their own narrow and selfish accumulation interests, outside of the broader developmental mandate, as we have seen with the IDC lately.
In fact as the SACP, in order to reposition these DFIs, we will ask the incoming government after the 2009 elections, must undertake a comprehensive review of the role of these institutions, as well as all state owned enterprises, including a comprehensive forensic audit in order to identify all instances where these have been used for corrupt and narrow accumulation interests.
It is also very clear that the banking and insurance capitalists are hell-bent in reversing the very many advances we have made, through our financial sector campaign, towards the transformation of these institutions. We need to resuscitate our financial sector campaign in a big way in order to deepen the struggles for creating a private financial sector that serves our overall developmental agenda.
Let me also take this opportunity to congratulate the YCL, together with the ANC Youth League and the rest of the components of the Progressive Youth Alliance, on your victory for the establishment of a National Youth Development Agency (NYDA). This indeed has the potential of focusing the energies of our country, our government and the youth towards a comprehensive strategy to create jobs and sustainable livelihoods for our youth. The YCL has a particular responsibility to ensure that the NYDA is subjected to the logic of our overarching industrial strategy to change the current economic trajectory, defeat the economic objectives of the 1996 class project, roll back the capitalist market and build a developmental state.
Elevating Education into a societal priority
The ANC-led Alliance has committed itself to elevating education into a national priority, around which we have to mobilize the whole of society to achieve such goals. Contained in this vision is the need to raise the quality of our education system, building upon the very high levels of enrolment that we have achieved, especially in our schooling system.
One of the most significant Polokwane resolutions is that of ensuring free education for the poor until the first higher education qualification. This is one of the most important and radical commitments towards transforming education and making it a societal priority. Amongst other things this means re-looking at the National Student Financial Aid Scheme and its role in this regard.
Most importantly, the challenge to achieve these educational objectives is that of the mobilization of our communities, through building local education committees – made up of teachers, learners, parents and communities – to ensure that indeed our schools our functional, that learning and teaching does take place, and that our schools are safe. The YCL in particular, and our youth in general, has a very important role in this regard in order to ensure that indeed these progressive resolutions are realized and that vibrant local education committees are built. Just like the 1976 generation opened the bridge-head to the struggle for educational transformation, today`s youth have a responsibility to take forward this struggle within the context of these very progressive commitments.
Access to health for all
The ANC-led alliance has also agreed to establish a National Health Insurance Scheme that will ensure that health care is accessible to all, and that no one will be expected to pay upfront for health services.
However, the capitalist class in the private health sector and the medical aid schemes, is going to vehemently fight against such a scheme, as it potentially poses a threat to their selfish accumulation interests in the private health care sector. It is going to be very important for the YCL to be at the head of the struggle to defend the establishment of such a health scheme in order to ensure that we once and for all provide health care for all.
This also means that we need to intensify our struggle for adequately resourcing our public health system, the revitalization of public hospitals and community health centres. The SACP also calls for a comprehensive review and possible reversal of all services that have been outsourced from the public health system. Outsourcing has led to casualisation, increased exploitation of workers, and the deterioration of our health services.
The SACP also wishes to pledge its full support to the YCLs campaign for the provision of free sanitary pads to poor girls and women, just in the same way as we are committed to providing free condomns, as part of combating HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.
Prioritisation of rural development, including accelerated land and agrarian transformation
We have also agreed that we need to prioritise rural development, including the acceleration of land and agrarian transformation. This must include firm regulation around disposal of government land, with priority given to land for food production and curtailing the selling of municipal land for building luxurious golf courses and game reserves that do not address the agricultural needs of the workers and the poor.
Part of the role of the National Youth Development Agency must be the release of productive land for youth agricultural activities, including for young women. It is therefore important for the YCL to clearly define its role and take up mass struggles for rural development, including the building of rural infrastructure, public transport facilities and the training and employment of agricultural extension officers. The YCL has to prioritise the needs of rural youth, as these constitute a very large section of our youth.
Intensifying the struggle against crime
The ANC has called for the building of street, village and block committees as an important component of fighting against crime in society. The youth must play a leading role in this regard, and should seek to build such committees as important support pillars to the police, the criminal justice system as a whole, and to strengthen Community Policing Forums. The SACP`s 2008 Red October Campaign is, amongst other things, focusing on the mobilization of our communities to build such committees. The YCL needs to develop its own programmes in support of these, including intensification of the struggle against violence directed at women and children. It is after all, working class and poor women and children who experience the worst forms of domestic violence and abuse, and whose needs are not adequately served by our criminal justice system.
As communists we also have a responsibility to challenge and expose elitist and bourgeois notions of the rule of law, that one-sidedly emphasise rights to vote, free speech, assembly – important as these are – to the exclusion of the fundamental rights of people to eat, have clean drinking water, right to life, etc.
Towards an overwhelming ANC electoral victory in 2009!
It is on the basis of the above commonly agreed to priorities that the SACP will work for an overwhelming ANC electoral victory in the 2009 national and provincial elections
The SACP has called for a re-configured Alliance as part of its support for the ANC in the forthcoming elections. We must however welcome the fact that most of the things we have called for to reconfigure the Alliance, have already been realized, at least at a national Alliance level. These include the establishment of the Alliance Political Council at national level, made up of the nationa alliance office-bearers, representation of Alliance partners in ANC deployment and list committees, including list conferences, the holding of a national Alliance Summit and Alliance Economic Summit with far reaching areas of agreement, participation in the formulation of the ANC manifesto for the 2009 elections, and effective participation in ANC policy formulation processes, including in the ANC NEC policy subcommittees.
The biggest and urgent challenge is that of replicating all the above processes at provincial and district levels. There are uneven developments at these sub-national levels and it is going to be important that we urgently devote more energy into building these relationships at this level.
It is however important to bear in mind that the creation of a reconfigured alliance will not be a once-off event, but is something that has to be built through the ongoing mobilization of the working class on the ground. The YCL has an important role to play in this regard.
The most important challenge now is for the YCL to ensure that each and every one of its members become an activist, a volunteer and a campaigner for an overwhelming ANC electoral victory in 2009.
It is also important that you continue to grow and build a very strong YCL. Our national democratic revolution need a strong, organized detachment of young communists! It is also important that you be in the forefront to defend and build an even stronger SACP.
Defeat the Gang of Three and Co: Fugitives from the Polokwane democratic outcomes
I do not wish to waste my energies on analyzing the latest breakaway from the ANC. But it is important that you understand these `ladies and gentlemen` for what they really are. If Lenin had said that `War is the pursuance of politics by other means`, the Gang of 3 and their company are nothing but the pursuance of the agenda of the 1996 Class Project by other means. They are trying to achieve what they failed to achieve inside and through the ANC.
The Gang of 3 and company tried to turn the ANC in government into an instrument of white monopoly capital, tried to turn the ANC into a demobilized organization, and in short, to steal the ANC from the workers and the poor by turning it into an instrument of a highly dependent and compradorial elite pre-occupied with enriching itself.
The Gang of 3 and company claims to be the best defenders of our constitution and democracy, yet they break away from the ANC because they cannot accept the democratic outcomes of the Polokwane Conference. In fact they are fugitives from democracy! How can they claim to be the champions of South Africa`s democracy as a whole, when they cannot even accept democracy within their own political organisation!
In fact the Gang of 3 and company are the modern face of counter-revolution, whose aim is to achieve what the successive colonial and apartheid regimes failed to achieve, to divide and defeat the ANC and its alliance as part of preventing the democratization of South Africa.
Like the apartheid regime, they promote tribalism, anti-communism and anti-worker sentiment and seek to thrive on campaigning based on smear tactics and political attacks directed solely at the ANC and its allies. They have openly declared that they are prepared to go the grave with Helen Zille, and form coalitions with the Mangopes and whoever is willing to prostitute the national democratic revolution. They claim to be a new party, yet they want to steal the ANC`s history and traditions! There is indeed no honour amongst thieves!
Interestingly, some leaders, in whose names the Gang of Three is pursuing its agenda, are curiously silent. No leader of our movement should ever allow his or her name to be used as justification for activities aimed at defeating the ANC and the alliance.
The task of the YCL, and indeed the whole youth of our country, is to ensure that we teach the Gang of 3 and their company a lesson of their life – let us wipe them out in the 2009 elections and send the clearest message that counter-revolution (even if dressed in black skins) can never defeat the ANC and the national democratic revolution it leads. Just like the apartheid regime, they will also fail.
Socialism for the Youth and Youth for Socialism!
Amandla!
Contact:
Malesela Maleka
SACP Spokesperson - 082 226 1802
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