Dear Reader,
Lenin famously said “[t]here are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen”. Such is the period the world has entered, with increased uprisings of the global working class accompanied by an escalation of state repression.
We have seen rising arrogance of the bosses’ class, exemplified by failed attempts to silence our party’s support for the victorious Nature’s Garden strike through a defamation lawsuit by the company. Police use of rubber bullets on striking workers, and the hiring of private militias to break strikes have become normalised.
Against the backdrop of the worst economic recession of the century, we see divisions deepening in the ruling party. On one hand a state funded recovery plan is proposed, promising 800 000 public sector jobs, on the other the preachers of “structural reform” (handing an even larger share of wealth and power to private business) think their “Hallelujah moment” has arrived. To be sure neither of them truly hold a solution to the escalating series of crises the capitalist system forces upon us.
Capitalism’s contradictions are all too clear – while espousing the virtues of education and forcing the reopening of schools at all cost, the same government has slashed the education budget by R2.1 Billion; a further R4.4 Billion in the infrastructure grant has been reallocated to Covid19 expenses and 1,938 school construction projects have been stopped or delayed. Poverty-wage “teacher assistants” jobs are being rolled out en masse paying R3500/month, while unemployed teachers face the freezing of permanent positions indefinitely. Meanwhile, employed school staff, as the rest of the public sector, face wage freezes for the next five years.
Every cent cut from social spending will have consequences. Even the austerity-enforcing, restructuring-preaching IMF has recommended that the rich should be taxed more, but clearly the ANC government is committed to forcing the working class to carry the burdens of crises created by the ruling class, as they have been since the end of Apartheid.
The ANC internal crisis has spiraled to new depths as highlighted by the arrest of GS Magashule on charges relating to the R255-million asbestos roof audit of township houses. 97% of those funds were looted by tenderpreneurs. Health Minister Mkhize, who has enjoyed much praise for his handling of the pandemic by the bourgeois press, is embroiled in a scandal relating to his time as ANC treasurer and the PRASA tall trains scandal. The question must be asked: is there any ANC top brass left who is not implicated in corruption?
Reneging on the public sector wage increases has thrown the Tripartite Alliance onto centre stage. Trade union federations struck together in a historic show of working class solidarity on 7 October, as the labour movement awakes from immense paralysis. Cosatu members and officials are calling to break with the alliance!
But we must not only come out to defend our rights when they are threatened, we need a forward-looking programme of action to win new gains for the working class. As workers, communities and youth draw conclusions that this system is rotten, the time for SAFTU and all fighting trade unions and federations to openly build towards a mass workers party on a socialist programme is critical.
Our job as revolutionaries in this moment is to unite the struggles rising up in every sector of society; to stand in solidarity with all oppressed people in the fighting for a better world post-Covid; and, ultimately, to build the forces that will ensure a socialist world is on the horizon – one that ensures human needs are met, our planet is healthy, and profits are a thing of the past. WASP is out there doing this, the International Socialist Alternative (our world party) is fighting in over 30 countries, you should join us too.
