Statement on SACP-COSATU bilateral meeting held on 27-28 March 29-03-07

 

Statement on the SACP-COSATU bilateral meeting held on 27-28 March 2007

Our two working class formations, the SACP and COSATU, met in a two-day bilateral summit in Johannesburg on 27-28 March 2007 to discuss matters of common interest. The primary aim of the bilateral was to take forward and elaborate a joint programme of action based on the joint commitment we made some two years ago, to intensify working class struggles in order to make the second decade of our democracy a decade for the workers and the poor.

We made this commitment arising out of our observations that despite the many achievements we have made as a country since 1994, but in economic terms, the single biggest beneficiary during the first decade of our freedom was the white capitalist class, together with a tiny black section, and the middle classes. Instead the working class, despite many government resource transfers to the poor and a new labour dispensation, experienced a massive job loss bloodbath taking our unemployment to unacceptably high levels. We had also noted the continued casualisation and super-exploitation of the more vulnerable workers.

In order to develop a joint programme of action to achieve our above stated objective, the bilateral summit had intense and very fruitful discussion on the following issues:

a.. Harmonising the SACP's Medium Term Vision (MTV) and COSATU's 2015 programme
b.. Building the Alliance
c.. Building the SACP as a workers' vanguard party
d.. Building a strong COSATU
e.. The ANC Draft Strategy and Tactics
The MTV and 2015

The summit noted some recent positive developments during the second decade of our democracy, including:

a.. The ANC January 8 statement of 2007, which placed the struggle against poverty at the centre of the tasks facing our country, as well as some positive announcements in the President's state of the nation address, and the 2007 budget speech by the Minister of Finance.
b.. Some positive shifts and new emphasis on increased investment into infrastructure, and acknowledgement of a need for an industrial policy
c.. Acknowledgement by government for the need to cater for those currently not covered by our social security system
d.. After years of debate about the scale and nature of unemployment, including denialism by government on the scale of unemployment, government has changed its stance in this regard, setting clearer targets to reduce unemployment
e.. Again after years of confrontation between government and sections of civil society, and earlier denialism at senior government levels, there is now a new programme to combat the HIV/AIDS scourge
f.. After years of bashing public servants and telling South Africans that government is no employment agency, there is now recognition of the important role of public servants
Indeed many of these shifts are as a direct result of intensified working class struggles, especially since 1996 on many of these and other fronts, thus underlining the central importance of intensified working class struggles.

Despite the above positive shifts, the summit recognized that there are still growing poverty levels and un-employment is still at an unacceptably high level at around 40%. This is further perpetuated by the increasing and worsening state of income inequalities. Our economy still remains firmly in the hands of the white minority with only about 5% of companies listed at the JSE owned by blacks; and workers' wages remaining stagnant with the Labour Survey reporting that 17% of all officially employed people in the country are earning less than R500 a month, 34% under R1000 a month and 60% of all workers earn less than R2500 a month. The reality is that the in-equalities are deepening in this country as demonstrated by the UNDP Human Development Report of 2003 for which the Gini coefficient measure was at 0.596 in 1995 and rose to 0.635 in 2001. Current BEE continues to benefit a narrow layer within the black population and is nothing more than a process of an enrichment of a few.

The bilateral summit reaffirmed our commitment to a struggle for a socialist South Africa. We also reaffirmed that our route to socialism is through consolidation and deepening of a working-class-led, socialist-oriented national democratic revolution. To this end we will intensify the struggle to implement the emancipatory and radical vision of the Freedom Charter, a programme that is basis of our Alliance and its programme.

The Summit developed a comprehensive joint programme of action to attain these goals. At the centre of our struggle will be to transform the current economic growth path so that it benefits the overwhelming majority of our people. To this end we will embark on, rolling mass action to take forward our campaigns including the jobs and poverty eradication campaign, confronting the scourge of HIV/AIDS, transformation of the financial sector, mobilisation of the working class to be at the forefront of the struggle against crime, and accelerated land and agrarian transformation.

The summit also committed itself to intensify efforts to organize the more vulnerable workers, especially farm workers, domestic workers and the growing casualised working class.

The summit also committed itself to rolling mass action on specific areas that require urgent attention, especially the demand for the renationalisation of SASOL and Mittal Steel, the demand for a once-off amnesty for the 5,5 million of our people listed by the faceless credit bureaux, a more productive investment of workers' retirement funds, including fighting corruption around these funds, as illustrated by the current unfolding Fidentia theft scandal.

The bilateral summit also committed itself to convene within a year a conference on socialism, as part of an effort to build and lead mass movement for socialism in our country.

On the Alliance

The summit recommitted our formations to the building of a strong Alliance. The summit noted that apart from national alliance secretariat meetings, the Alliance hardly exists on the ground. The building of a strong alliance requires principally strong working class organisation and mobilisation.

The summit also agreed that, given our 13 years of experience of governance, the alliance needs to be significantly reconfigured. The days of collective alliance campaigning for elections, but decisions being left exclusively at the hands of the ANC are now over. The summit agreed that we need to radically change the manner of operation of the alliance, its protocols, method of deployment, and the question of accountability of government to the alliance, and the effective role of alliance partners in governance, and the possibility of an electoral pact and quotas for Alliance partners in ANC lists. We will campaign for these changes whilst at the same time engaging the ANC on these matters.

The summit instructed the SACP and COSATU to engage the ANC on all these matters, so that all these are effectively addressed in the run-up to the 2009 elections. The SACP 12th Congress, as well as COSATU's Central Committee later this year, will further discuss these matters. To this end the summit instructed the secretariat of the two organisations to develop concrete details and proposals on the reconfiguration of the Alliance, for tabling at these gatherings, guided by the resolutions of the COSATU 9th Congress and resolutions of the Central Committee of the SACP.

The summit also agreed that we need to actively prepare and participate in the forthcoming ANC Policy Conference. We regard this conference as absolutely important in that it will point the way on, amongst other things, the seriousness with which we want to change the colonial character of our economy or if we want more of the same. The SACP and COSATU are strongly of the view that more of the same, especially on the economic front, is not going to change the lives of the workers and the poor for the better.

Building the SACP and COSATU

The summit agreed that the SACP needs to be strengthened as the vanguard party of South Africa's working class. To this end COSATU committed itself to throw its weight in assisting the SACP to build workplace units and strengthen its capacity to provide Marxist-Leninist education to South Africa's working class.

The SACP also committed itself to the task of building a stronger COSATU, and using many of its campaigns as a platform towards the organisation of the more vulnerable workers in agriculture and the informal sector.

The summit was of the view that strengthening our formations is a critical factor in building working class hegemony in all key sites of power in society, as the only way to safeguard the national democratic revolution and that it serves the interests of the workers and the poor.

On international

The summit committed to better harmonization of its international work through more activism and solidarity, including the need to intensify the struggle against conservative trends in the international trade union movement. In the immediate period we are going to intensify joint solidarity work on Zimbabwe and Swaziland, including the demonstrations and support for the ZCTU and generally to express our solidarity with the workers and the poor in that country. We are organisation solidarity action with the ZCTU's national stayaway on 3 and 4 April 2007 and demonstrating at the Swaziland/South Africa border posts on 12 April 2007.

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The summit concluded its business by agreeing that these bilateral summits will be held annually, and in the next few days we shall publicly release a more detailed declaration that was adopted by this summit.