NUMSA: Which way forward?

The Marikana miners are the vanguard of the South African workers

NUMSA* broke with the ANC/SACP before the last election. It was then expelled from COSATU to prevent it from convincing the majority in COSATU to break from the ANC. This break however, is not complete. NUMSA President Irvin Jim calls for the return to the Freedom Charter which has been abandoned by the ANC/SACP. He presents the Freedom Charter as in the interests of workers when it was always the SACP inspired Stalinist program aimed at creating a Black bourgeoisie. Secretary General of COSATU Zwelinzima Vavi has thrown fuel on this fire in his recent Open Letter to the SACP slamming it for consistently opposing COSATU’s resistance to the neo-liberal policies of the ANC since 1994. While NUMSA calls for a ‘united front’, and a new ‘workers party’, at the same time as a ‘return’ to the Freedom Charter, this will lead to a new ‘popular front’ with bourgeois figures like Ronnie Kasrils, former Minister of Information in the ANC. We look at the stand taken by different currents on the left and put forward our position for a revolutionary workers party and program.


NUMSA Splits from the ANC/SACP*

On the left we note the positions of Socialist Project, the WASP and the WIVP. All welcome the NUMSA break with the ANC/SACP but disagree on how to make this break complete. The most immediate disagreement is whether NUMSA should fight to overturn its unconstitutional expulsion and continue with its fight to get COSATU as a whole to break with the ANC/SACP.

This is important because those like Socialist Project who think NUMSA should not challenge its expulsion abandon any fight for democracy in COSATU, leaving the rank and file of other unions at the mercy of the bureaucratic ANC/SACP dominated leadership. It leaves uncontested COSATU CEC’s unconstitutional action in blocking a special congress where NUMSA could advocate a COSATU split from the ANC. At the same time it writes off the role of COSATU and advocates a social movement perspective outside COSATU.

Second, those who want NUMSA to challenge its expulsion are divided over the use of the bourgeois courts. We say that since NUMSA is a workers organisation and has fought for decades to enshrine workers democratic rights in its Constitution, going to the courts to overthrow an illegal expulsion is not a matter of principle. The principle involved is: that defence of bourgeois rights is necessary when it advances the workers’ revolution. The tactics employed must serve this principle.

We are opposed to taking COSATU to Court over the expulsion under the current circumstances. We don't think it advances the workers revolution. It takes the struggle out of the hands of the rank and file of COSATU affiliates when it is strong enough to challenge the leadership, defend the constitution and overturn the expulsion. It seems that appealing to the Court is a tactic being used by the leadership to foster illusions in the Courts as independent of the ANC/SACP corrupt regime, rather than mobilising the ranks to throw out the corrupt COSATU leadership.

On the other hand, those who argue that NUMSA should abandon COSATU as corrupt and instead build a new union movement, are weakening the mobilisation of the rank and file within the unions to oppose the Irvin Jim leadership in going to the Courts, calling for a return to the Stalinist Freedom Charter, and inviting ‘progressive’ bourgeois factions who are proven enemies of the workers into the ‘united front’.

For example, the NUMSA ‘United Front’, at its small ‘preparatory assembly’ ahead of the launch next April, put the bourgeois politician Ronnie Kasrils, a former ANC Intelligence Minister responsible for collaborating with the CIA and Mossad, on its ‘interim leadership commission’! His ‘workers’ credentials are no more than opposing Zuma, and campaigning for a ‘no vote’ for the ANC. We agree with the WIVP that the NUMSA split is in danger of becoming ANC Mk2 by including corrupt bourgeois celebrities. Who is next: Julius Malema and his personality cult to revive the Freedom Charter?

Break from the Freedom Charter!

All of this points clearly to the main weakness of the NUMSA split from the ANC. It does not split with the Freedom Charter. It does not complete its break with the ANC/SACP program. If the bureaucratic expulsion from COSATU leads to a new bureaucratic labour movement, (despite the ‘united front’, workers’ party’, and ‘socialism’) then the democratic will of the mass of workers moving against the ANC/SACP/COSATU will face yet another bureaucratic barrier to their class independence and the socialist revolution.

The WASP approach to this problem is to ignore the question of program and talk only about organisation. It supports going to court to make COSATU hold a Special Congress. At the same time it calls for NUMSA to press ahead with its ‘united front’ to rally all COSATU and non COSATU unions around a ‘socialist’ program. Yet it neither critiques the COSATU leadership’s illusions in the Freedom Charter nor comes up with a ‘socialist program’ of its own.

It is not possible to build an independent trade union movement on socialist principles without a clear call to break from the Freedom Charter! Given the history of WASP in the Militant tendency, we expect that it to be silent about the ‘united front’ failing to challenge the Freedom Charter and making compromises with the bourgeois politicians like Kasrils which turns a workers ‘united front’ into a bourgeois ‘popular front’.

That is why the WIVP call to replace the Freedom Charter with a Workers Charter is correct.

“In opposition to the Freedom Charter, we propose the consideration of the development of a Workers’ Charter, based on working class demands, both democratic and Socialist, of a programme for working class power and a workers’ government. Let us cast off the old clothes and prepare the basis for a new revolutionary working class party.”

WIVP rejects the Freedom Charter as the ANC/SACP program for the national democratic stage in which the black bourgeoisie comes to power to prepare the road to socialism. The National Democratic Revolution (NDR) did not lead the nation to independence from imperialism and open the road to socialism. 20 years of black bourgeois rule has proven beyond doubt that the rule of imperialism has been entrenched and the working class has been subjected to imperialist super-exploitation.

The Workers Charter as summarised by the WIVP is the Trotskyist Transitional Program. The task of revolutionaries is to raise it in all the ‘united front’ actions along with the call for the formation of a mass workers party. It would become a rallying point inside and outside the unions for a genuinely independent workers movement.

Use the Transitional Method!

Underlying the Transitional Program is the Transitional Method. This is another word for dialectics, the method Marx developed as the basis of his revolutionary critique of capitalist political economy. Dialectics means that society is based on a contradictory unity between objective reality and subjective reality where the latter acts on the former to make a new objective reality. Marxism does not separate theory from practice.

Theory helps us understand how capitalism works objectively as class society and this subjective knowledge transforms our class consciousness to guide our struggle to overthrow class society. The highest expression of this subjective reality is the Marxist Party which uses the program as a scientific weapon to advance the consciousness of the proletariat in its struggle to transform capitalism into socialism!

Is South Africa right now, the objective reality is the ANC bourgeois capitalist regime that oversees the super-exploitation of the working masses in return for a cut in the profits for the new black bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie ‘trickles down’ some of its profits to buy the bureaucratic leadership of COSATU as part of the ‘popular front’ to strangle any independent workers movement from breaking with the regime.

However, for Trotsky, the main task of the unions as "schools for revolution" is: the "...complete and unconditional independence of the trade unions in relation to the capitalist state. This means a struggle to turn the trade unions into the organs of the broad exploited masses and not the organs of a labor aristocracy."  

In South Africa the unions have begun the struggle for independence from the bourgeois state. Marikana expressed the objective reality of poverty in radicalising the subjective consciousness of the miners. It was this radicalising of the base of the unions that has forced the NUMSA leadership to split with the ANC and its Stalinist SACP bedfellows to head off a break with the Freedom Charter. The result is the big fight inside COSATU where the mass membership is moving to break with the Freedom Charter against the resistance of the bureaucratic leadership that is still defending it as the program of the black bourgeoisie.

In the words of Nelson Mandela:

“The Charter is by no means a blueprint for a socialist state...The Charter does not contemplate such profound economic and political changes. Its declaration “The people shall govern!” visualizes the transfer of power not to any single social class but to all the people of the country be they workers, peasants, professional men or petty-bourgeoisie... For the first time in the history of the country the Non-European bourgeoisie will have the opportunity to own in their own name and right mills and factories, and trade and private enterprise will boom and flourish as never before.”

To activate this change in workers’ consciousness to the point of a complete break from both the bureaucracy and the bourgeois state revolutionaries must raise the Transitional Program in the unions. Replacing the corrupt union bureaucracy with a new leadership accountable to the ranks would prove wrong Socialist Project’s claim that trade unions cannot represent the majority of workers because they are irrevocably compromised by their links to the bourgeois state.

Like the Marikana strike it would prove that corrupted unions like NUM can be replaced by rank and file struggle unions such as the AMCU and that their isolation, as in the recent Platinum strike, can be overcome by a ‘united front’ of all unionised and non-unionised, domestic and unpaid workers preparing for a general strike.

Finally, it would coordinate all united front actions under the leadership of a mass workers party in which revolutionaries would fight for the adoption of a transitional ‘Workers Charter’, for “working class power and a Workers’ Government’, as part of an international struggle of the working masses of the whole of Southern Africa for a Federation of Socialist Republics.

20 December 2014

*Note ANC (African National Congress); NUMSA (National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa); SACP (South African Communist Party); COSATU (Congress of South African Trades Unions); WASP (Workers and Socialist Party); WIVP (Workers’ International Vanguard Party).

Class Struggle 108, January-March, 2014

   CS108 Jan-March 2014 by davebrownz

South Africa: NUMSA breaks with ANC

Striking platinum miners rally for R 12 500 a month wage

Finally m0re than a year after the massacre at Marikana, a major union is in the process of breaking politically from the Tripartite Alliance of the ANC, SACP and COSATU that has ruled over imperialism’s super-exploitation of South Africa since 1994. The National Union of Metalworkers (NUMSA) will not campaign for the ANC in the next elections and has called for an independent union- based socialist party. It seeks to force the leadership of COSATU to call a special conference to pass a resolution that all the COSATU unions break politically from the ANC. But NUMSA has not rejected the reformist “Freedom Charter” –the ANC charter that called for a peaceful, parliamentary transformation to socialism. Nor do the other political breakaways from the ANC, the Committee for a Workers International (CWI) -led Workers and Socialist Party (WASP) and the Malema-led Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) reject the Freedom Charter. It is necessary for  revolutionary communists to fight for independence of the unions from the ANC and for the formation of a new mass revolutionary party that breaks the ‘necklace’ of national capitalism and fights for international socialism.

Global Crisis and South Africa

The global crisis of falling profits since 2007 has been downloaded onto the semi-colonies by both the US-led and China-led imperialist blocs. In this way imperialism tries to cut the prices of raw materials and labour power so that global profits can be restored. In South Africa the ANC acts as the junior partner of the MNCs imposing deep cuts on workers living standards to restore both imperialists and the ANC share of rising super-profits.  The strategic relationship between the ANC and China does not allow South Africa to escape the fate of imperialist super-exploitation. South Africa may be a BRIC but it is definitely becoming a semi-colony of China. Traditional British and US MNCs are now joined by Chinese MNCs in intensify labour and forcing down wages. This has been felt in every sector of production from the mines to agriculture.

The response of the MNCs, and its junior partner the ANC, has been met with growing resistance in mass demonstrations and strikes. The ANC has declared itself national strike breaker by using the police and union thugs to shoot down miners and other workers in an attempt to intimidate the militant leadership. This has been met with angry resistance such as at Marikana where miners staged a wildcat strike against the corrupt NUM bureaucracy that acts as the paid agents of the mine owners. When two miners were shot by NUM officials, the wildcat spread. Attempts by NUM national leaders to quell the uprising failed and led to the planned police massacre at Marikana. As a result most of the platinum miners have left the NUM and joined AMCU, a breakaway union. More strikes have followed leading up to the current platinum workers’ strike for R 12 500. It is clear that the legitimacy of the COSATU unions is now being questioned by a widening layer of militant workers. Such was the lead up to the NUMSA vote to break with the ANC. Out of the capitalist crisis comes the opportunity for revolution.

Militancy is not enough

Working class militancy as a response to the demand for more super-profits does not automatically throw up revolutions. Militancy results from rising exploitation and austerity, but the causes of these attacks on workers are not immediately obvious. Capitalism exists as an exploitative social relation where Capital exploits Labour in the process of production. However, this appears as an exchange relation where exploitation is based on labour being paid below its value. This appearance presents the solution as labour organising and fighting for reforms to equalise exchange or ‘fair shares’ between Capital and Labour. This leads to ‘economism’ where the labour movement fights for wage increases rather than for the end of the ‘wage system’ i.e. reformism.  

Since economism blames the bosses’ for using their power to raise profits at the expense of wages, the bosses’ policy of attacking labour to raise profits is seen as the enemy, rather then the capitalist system itself. This anti-worker program may be labelled ‘neo-liberalism’, corruption, austerity etc., but for reformists it can be reversed by workers parties winning elections with a program for parliamentary socialism. Thus economism gives rise to opportunism as the bureaucratic leadership of the unions and left political parties attempt to negotiate ‘fair shares’. So despite the militancy of workers, economism prevents them from organising independently of the labour bureaucracy, building their own political organs and forging their own path to the socialist revolution.

The Freedom Charter

The ANC Freedom Charter was a reformist program drafted by the SACP, a Stalinist party, which put forward the two stage theory of a national democratic revolution preparatory to the socialist revolution. It was held that once the black majority came to power it would nationalise the means of production to develop the economy and create the basis for a second, socialist, stage. However, since 1994 reality has shown that the ANC in an alliance with the SACP and COSATU has failed to implement the Freedom Charter.  Land and industry largely remains in the hands of national and multinational capital, and that far from creating the conditions for socialism, the living standards of the masses have deteriorated.

Those who criticised the ANC did so in terms of its corrupt politics, adopting ‘neo-liberalism’, and enriching of a new black bourgeoisie at the expense of the masses. The critics alternative was and is still today to be for a new mass party to replace the ANC and implement the Freedom Charter as originally planned. For example the CWI opposition in the ANC, the Marxist Workers Tendency (MWT) was kicked out of the ANC but continued to behave like an internal opposition.  Today its successor, the Workers and Socialist Party (WASP), calls for a new socialist mass party that can be elected to power to legislate for ‘socialism’ by nationalising the land, industry and banks without smashing the state! Similarly, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) of the former ANC Youth leader Julius Malema expelled in 2013 for criticising the current leadership, calls for nationalisation of the mines and industry but only a 60% state share leaving 40% owned by the capitalists. Neither of these political currents, which are also discussing an alliance, wishes to break from the democratic national program of the South African revolution. 

What should revolutionary communists do in the upcoming elections? While the WASP Manifesto is left reformist despite its Trotskyist phrases about nationalisation under workers control, it will be a pole of attraction for militant workers who are breaking with the ANC.  For this reason revolutionary communists must give it critical support in the classic Leninist method. We raise our own program but where militant workers have illusions in parliament we offer to accompany them through the experience of voting WASP at the same time warning them that no socialist revolution can be won through parliamentary reforms.

 

Permanent Revolution

When Trotsky called for a Black Republic in South Africa in the 1930s he did not envisage this as a national democratic stage to prepare for a future socialist stage. Once the black majority was in power it would face a hostile intervention from British imperialism which would necessarily force it to follow the course of the 1917 revolution in Russia—to the seizure of power by the working class, and to defend itself in a revolutionary war against imperialist attacks. That is, the ‘permanent revolution’. The Leninist-Trotskyist position on the right of nations to self-determination was not a matter for isolated nations. The imperialist epoch was one in which oppressor nations oppressed the colonies directly and the semi-colonies via the national bourgeoisies. The struggle for national independence would require a struggle to defeat both the national bourgeoisie and its imperialist masters. Trotsky was assassinated by a Stalinist agent in 1940 and didn’t live to see it, the period of decolonisation that followed WW2 vindicated the Leninist-Trotskyist theory and practice of Permanent Revolution.

By contrast the Stalinist conception of ‘socialism in one country’ was translated into national roads to socialism where the national bourgeoisie would take power to prepare the conditions for socialism. This was an opportunist adaptation of the Stalinists to the ‘democratic bourgeoisie’ as allies of the Soviet Union but at the expense of the world revolution. The new bourgeoisies would prevent the workers from rising up and be rewarded as the junior partners of imperialism. In every case such political ‘independence’ was a sham that ensured continued economic slavery. So in South Africa the SACP dutifully wrote the Freedom Charter as the Stalinist road to socialism.

The ANC in power since 1994 has proved beyond question the validity of the Leninist-Trotskyist conception of national liberation via permanent revolution. In the colonies and semi-colonies where the national liberation movement went on to overthrow the national bourgeoisie and defeat imperialism this proved that it was possible to win a partial national liberation and independence from imperialism. But these were not ‘pure’ workers revolutions. These were petty bourgeois revolutions that expropriated the bourgeoisie and resulted in transitional deformed workers states such as China, Vietnam and Cuba, ruled by bureaucratic elites, living off the backs of the workers and peasants. Such transitional states would be overthrown by workers political revolutions and become healthy workers states, or they would revert to become restored capitalist states. Political revolutions could only arise out of an international working class movement led by an international party and program committed to permanent revolution. What does all this mean for South Africa today?

Revolutionary leadership

We can see that when NUMSA breaks with the ANC, the national bourgeois lackey of imperialism, but does not take the road of permanent revolution, it cannot succeed in creating the conditions for socialism. That is why revolutionaries in South Africa must be clear about their program. When NUMSA breaks from the ANC and SACP, and fights for COSATU to break also, to form a new mass political party, it must be supported, but very critically by raising the transitional program for permanent revolution. 

When NUMSA argues for implementing the Freedom Charter we must say: “The reformist politics of the Freedom Charter for completing the nationalisation the South African and imperialist corporations, is nothing more than the SACP Stalinism of the ANC, now dressed up as the ‘win-win’ partnership with China on the road to  ‘market socialism’.  The road to China, Vietnam or Cuba, of merely nationalising capitalist property and calling it ‘socialist’, leads inevitably to a new capitalist tyranny over the workers.”

Moreover when the road advocated by the EFF, the WASP and other left currents, to form a mass party with a program for South Africa to join the Bolivarian bloc of nations with China against US and EU imperialism, we must say: “China is not the model for South African socialism. It is a restored capitalist state that has become a new imperialist power that super-exploits workers and peasants in all of Africa and the world. Its rivalry with the US threatens to engulf us in a new world war.”  

When the left reformists call for a national socialist program for South Africa, revolutionaries must point out that South Africa is not a single country but a vital part of all Southern Africa and the whole of Africa. The working class and landless peasants know no borders. They form a surplus army of migrant workers super-exploited and super-oppressed who move across and between continents.

We must therefore call for the unions to recruit all workers, employed, unemployed, or whatever language, ethnicity and gender and build a mass party based on the workers councils and militias to unite all working people to overthrow the South African state and defeat its imperialist backers in their attempts to destroy 

the Southern African revolution. 

A revolutionary communist action program:

• Workers to take control of their unions as fighting democratic unions!
• Build a mass workers party based on the reclaimed unions!
• Form local workplace and community councils and self defence militias!
• Mobilise for a general strike to bring down the government and replace it with a Workers and Peasants Government!

This government will then impose a plan to create a socialist economy based on the expropriation of all capitalist property, national and MNC, the mines, the banks, the farms, etc., under workers democratic control.

Such as program will unite workers of all Africa and enable a Federation of Socialist Republics to be established on the continent!