Executive Committee statement
The Workers and Socialist Party calls upon all workers – organised and unorganised, youth, democrats, social movement activists, socialists and all people committed to equality and prosperity for all — to support #OutsourcingMustFall and #FeesMustFall and unite in protest against the corrupt Zuma-led cabal that has effectively established a dictatorship over the ANC and society as a whole. We must use this protest as the first step in the mobilization to enable the working class to have its own voice, its own programme and its own party – a mass workers party on a socialist programme.
Zuma proceeded with this power grab knowing in advance that it would not be his family, his clique or the rich capitalist minority as a whole that would pay the price for the inevitable downgrade by the economic police of global capitalism – the rating agencies. The victims would the working and middle classes, for whom what lies ahead are higher prices for food and basic commodities, school fees, and transport; greater indebtedness, higher home, car and furniture loan repayments and repossessions and retrenchments.
Nothing reveals the shameless hypocrisy of Zuma’s cabal than the assurances that both him and Malusi Gigaba have since given the rating agencies to continue the very policies of “fiscal consolidation” Pravin Gordhan had been implementing and which they had denounced so viciously. What they mean by “radical economic transformation” is the right to unrestrained looting in collusion with the very same “white monopoly capital” they claim to want to wrest economic power from. There is no more shameless example that that of the incompetent Bathabile Dlamini’s deliberately allowing the corruptly awarded white US-owned Cash Paymaster Services to continue and to open the social grant beneficiaries’ payments to be raided by the vultures of CPS’s partners even before they are paid out.
The working class has every interest in fighting against corruption. Zuma may be in the eye of the storm of our rage. But he is but one figurehead of an exploitative economic system that has made SA the most unequal society in the world over the entire post-apartheid period before and since Zuma with the ANC continuing where the apartheid regime had left off.
We are not protesting to enable the butcher of Marikana, Cyril Ramaphosa, to take over the presidency of the ANC or the country. His craven cowardice has once again been reaffirmed by his apology for speaking out against Zuma. After a weekend off his knees, he is now back on his belly licking Zuma’s boots.
These developments prove once again that the ANC has forfeited the right to rule society and along with them the capitalist class as a whole. As the 2016 local government elections have shown once again, the ANC – with the active electoral support of less than 35% of the eligible voting population — has lost the confidence of the majority. There is now a strong possibility that they may fall below 50% in 2019.
The capitalist class’ second eleven, the DA, is led in Johannesburg by a mayor who is an unapologetic xenophobe and free marketeer committed to dismantling trade union and collective bargaining rights but kept in power by the EFF. In the Western Cape it is led by a premier who says we should be grateful for colonialism.
The ever deepening mass unemployment, poverty and inequality lie within the capitalist system and the political system under which it is managed. The power Zuma has used to reshuffle his cabinet is provided for in the constitution in the form of the presidential prerogative. It shields him from accountability from his own party as well as society as a whole.
WASP calls for an Assembly for Working Class Unity of democratically elected delegates from communities, education institutions, trade unions and workplaces to develop a road map towards the launch of such a party. The party must commit itself to the nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy under democratic working class control and management; free education and health, the election of all official subject to the right of immediate recall and on an income no higher than that of the average skilled worker.