SACP helped push Numsa’s expulsion from Cosatu

Steven Friedman, Business Day

THERE was a time when the South African Communist Party (SACP) terrified supporters of a market economy. Today, it is more likely to frighten the left.

By expelling the National Union of Metalworkers of SA (Numsa), the Congress of South African Trade Unions’s (Cosatu’s) central executive committee seems to have slapped the African National Congress (ANC) in the face: it ignored the appeal by its task team, led by Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa, for unity.

Making a Sow’s Ear from Palestinian Protest

Camalita Naicker, The Con

The recent decision by the Congress of South African Students (COSAS) to place a pig’s head in what was assumed to be the kosher section of Woolworths, and then, in fact, turned out to be the halal section, could be written off as a mere “fail of the week.”

But it is indicative of a far more serious and insidious politics being cultivated by Boycott. Divestment. Sanctions-South Africa (BDS-SA) who have proved unable and unwilling to run a disciplined and ethical campaign in solidarity with Palestinians.

Conflict of Interest, Inc: Mining unions' leaders were representing their members while in corporations' pay

A Daily Maverick investigation has revealed a furtive conflict of interest, with mining houses footing the bill for top National Union of Mineworkers office bearers’ salaries. The hard-to-believe arrangement started in the late eighties as the means of protecting union leaders from the corporations, but it was retained over the years, creating a severe of conflict of interest. Unionists are being paid high salaries by the very people from whom they are supposed to protect their members. The 'arrangement' is just about to end, in spite of union leaders' unhappiness and an unpredictable labour and political backlash. By GREG MARINOVICH. The Daily Maverick

COSATU: a house divided

By Benjamin Fogel, Amandla!

COSATU is in the midst of the biggest crisis in its 27-year history. This crisis has arisen from an SACP-driven attempt to oust democratically elected COSATU General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi, under the guise of corruption charges. The conflict's roots are in longstanding political contradictions and ideological tensions between COSATU and its Alliance partners – the ANC and the SACP. At stake is not only the leadership of COSATU, but its political and moral direction.

COSATU's history: coming full circle

Interview with Dirk Hartford, the first head of COSATU media and editor of COSATU News in the 1980's, about the implications of the current tensions in COSATU. Amandla!

Amandla!: What do you make of what is happening in COSATU now with the allegations against its General Secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi ?

DH: I think what we are seeing is a direct result of the decisive victory of the Zuma-SACP faction at the December ANC Congress in Mangaung. The SACP essentially triumphed at Mangaung, and now has more people in the ANC's NEC, government and Cabinet than ever before. They are on the offensive to take out any significant opposing voices in the Alliance. Julius Malema, the ANCYL NEC, and the Limpopo NEC are already history. Now they are coming for the biggest thorn in their sides, which has always been Vavi and the independent trade union or worker views that he reflects.

The Enduring Horror of South Africa

by Richard Pithouse, SACSIS

In her recently republished autobiography Emma Mashinini, the grand old lady of the trade union movement, ascribes the deep roots of her steadfast political commitment to a desire to assert that: “I am human. I exist. I am a complete person.”

This may strike some people as naïve in a country where many of the discourses contending for influence in the elite public sphere are frequently weighed down with the dead hand of stolid jargon, mediated through everything from Stalinism, to the language of the World Bank or human rights. But the constant mobilisation of all this jargon - 'deepening and advancing the national democratic revolution',  'achieving labour market flexibility', 'building social cohesion', 'extending participatory developmental instruments', 'gender mainstreaming' -  is not just about establishing and sustaining a distance between contending experts and the people with a view to legitimating the power of experts over the people. And it’s not just about the dark art of saying nothing of consequence while trying to sound informed and intelligent. In some cases, like the recent claim by the SACP and COSATU in KwaZulu-Natal that 'renewed imperialist aggression' aims, with the support of various local allies, to have Zuma removed from the Presidency in order to 'recolonise this country', we are dealing with language that is paranoid, fantastical, grossly authoritarian and plainly Orwellian.

The Marikana Massacre: a Premeditated Killing?

by Benjamin Fogel, CounterPunch

“Two hundred thousand subterranean heroes who, by day and by night, for a mere pittance lay down their lives to the familiar `fall of rock` and who, at deep levels, ranging from 1,000 to 3,000 feet in the bowels of the earth, sacrifice their lungs to the rock dust which develops miners` phthisis’ and pneumonia.”

- Sol Plaatjie, first Secretary of the African National Congress, describing the lives of black miners in 1914

Crisis of Conscience in the SACP: A Critical Review of Slovo’s “Has Socialism Failed?”

Pallo Jordan. Lusaka, February 1990.

“Has Socialism Failed?” is the intriguing title Comrade Joe Slovo has given to a discussion pamphlet published under the imprint of ‘Umsebenzi’, the quarterly newspaper of the SACP. The reader is advised at the outset that these are Slovo’s individual views, and not those of the SACP. While this is helpful it introduces a note of uncertainty regarding the pamphlet’s authority. The pamphlet itself is divided into six parts, the first five being an examination of the experience of the ‘socialist countries’, and the last, a look at the SACP itself.

Is the SACP still relevant?

by Mazikbuko K. Jara, The Sunday Times

The South African Communist Party can be faulted on many fronts, but its sterling contribution to defeating apartheid and challenging capitalist exploitation was personified in the principled socialist morality and selflessness of Chris Hani, Joe Slovo and others.

Re-reading Rick Turner in the New South Africa

Tony Fluxman and Peter Vale, 2004

Using the writings of the assassinated South African political philosopher Rick Turner, this article provides a critique of South Africa ten years after the end of apartheid. Influenced by both Western Marxism and utopian thinking, Turner developed a model of democratic socialism which offered a vision of a ‘new South Africa’. This was countered by the ideology of the market and, later, by the force of the ‘end of history’ thesis. The article argues that inequalities continue in South Africa because the promise of Western Marxism was squeezed out by the convergence of communist political ideology and capitalist modernization.

Housing battles in post-Apartheid South Africa: The Case of Mandela Park, Khayelitsha

by Martin Legassick, Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign, 2003

Mandela Park is situated in Khayelitsha, Cape Town’s largest township, some 26 kms from the city center. It was established by the Botha government from 1983 with the initial intention of housing all Africans in the area. This of course proved impossible: Crossroads, KTC etc as well as the established townships of Gugulethu, Nyanga, Langa remained. Instead the repeal of the pass laws in 1986 resulted in the mushrooming of Khayelitsha, partly from other parts of Cape Town, but mainly from new immigrants from the Eastern Cape. The township grew to perhaps 300,000 by 1990 and to 500,000 and more during the 1990s – and is possibly the second (after Soweto) or third (after Mdantsane) largest in the country. Mandela Park was established within Khayelitsha in the late 1980s, by the banks, who bought the land and started building housing on it in 1986 – one of the few areas in the country where Africans bought housing through bank bonds.

What colour is our flag? Red or JZ? - A critique of the SACP approach on the JZ matter

by Mazibuko K. Jara, Deputy National Secretary, Young Communist League, November 2005

1. Introduction

A famous social activist changes the words of The Red Flag to provide a jocular and yet effective critique of the strategy, tactics and programme of our South African Communist Party: he sings “The people’s flag is palest pink, it is not as red as some would think. The working class can kiss my ass. To show we are still sincere, we will criticise GEAR once a year”. If this jocular criticism has some truthful import, what could be the objective basis for it? The criticism calls for some fresh introspection in light of our positioning and role as the Communist Party in the Jacob Zuma (JZ) saga.