By Irvin Jim
Comrade Blade Nzimande’s article on the African National Congress’ (ANC) so-called u-turn on socio-economic policies, Alec Erwin’s budget speech and Jane Barrett’s piece on privatisation are a test of our understanding of the balance of forces in the country and within our liberation alliance. They challenge our assessment of today’s global political chemistry.
No discussion of today’s balance of forces can be accurate without factoring the forms of apartheid capitalist colonisation that we inherited.
Capital’s dominance over the majority continues to be the direct source of our misery. Capital’s brutality is the direct cause of poverty, unemployment, homelessness, crime and incurable diseases. All miseries that affect the African majority in our country point to one direction that the ANC cannot have a choice but to deal with these issues through the vigorous deployment of all the resources available to it, including the national budgeting process.
While the logic of our government’s decision to increase spending to address problems that confront people is appreciated, let us not forget that the capitalist mode of production continues to maintain profits with no intention to promote human dignity.
As Lenin said in 1907, “ours is not one single battle on a single front but an all-sided war against capitalist domination”. The reality of our situation is that ownership of the economy continues to be in the hands of the few white males who are very conservative. The recent Employment Equity Commission report bears testimony to this fact.
A very serious challenge for the working class in South Africa and in all post-colonial countries is that spending is still locked into colonial frameworks. This means our government spending cannot go beyond the limits of capitalism to smash and reconstruct townships which is an apartheid accumulation path of development. If we could do this, we would be in a position to deliver quality education to our township schools, engage ideological knowledge and knowledge production at tertiary level so that the ruling class is not allowed to reproduce itself and reproduce conditions to further exploit the working class.
Also important to note is that the extended public works programme cannot deal with the issues of joblessness that led to the Growth and Development Summit (GDS). The extended public works programme (EPWP) raises issues of:
Codes of good practice which will regulate how workers who will not have permanent jobs will be treated
How jobs that are created through EPWP will lead to downward variation of wages and conditions for permanent employment.
Labour should be extremely worried about the special rates and special conditions for workers in the extended public works programme. Capital has been looking to secure a two-tier labour market system.
What will stop capital, in the spirit of GDS agreements, from ensuring that every job that gets created, is thrown into the extended public works programme? Where does this leave our demand for permanent quality jobs?
The challenge then is for organisations of the working class led by the South African Communist Party (SACP) to see how they occupy from a class perspective, the space opened up by the ANC on many fronts. If the working class is ideologically careless, the ANC is likely to be the movement whose role is to alleviate poverty not to eradicate it.
Alternative strategy
What we need is a well-thought out alternative strategy.
The biggest frustration with this debate on whether there have been shifts in government policy is that we are evading real issues around the current macro-economic policy, Growth, Employment and Redistribution (Gear).
Despite Gear’s failure to meet its own targets, the strategy is still not fundamentally tampered with. South Africa still does not have an industrial strategy that spells out how we are intending to drive the economy and industrialisation in the country.
The country is at the mercy of the multi-national corporations (MNCs). Except black economic empowerment (BEE), which only caters for the black elite not the African majority, we do not have a plan to transform the economy from the minority to majority ownership and control in a way that changes real power relations in society.
Yes, the SACP must defend our ANC from neo-liberal fake organisations led by the Democratic Alliance (DA) as they are spokespersons of capital whose mouthpiece is Tony Leon.
But ours as the working class is to ensure that we do not allow false ideologies to permeate into our movement by lifting up fundamental class issues and then refusing to deal with them as such. Whether in the eyes of others there is a shift or u-turn, dealing with issues raised in this article will constitute the creation of moments of power in the interests of the working class.
Irvin Jim is Numsa Eastern Cape regional secretary