South Africa - April 22, 2023
Faced with record unemployment, layoffs, low wages and now no electricity…
THE SOUTH AFRICAN WORKERS AND EXPLOITED ARE ONCE AGAIN ENTERING THE FIGHT AGAINST THE ANC-CP GOVERNMENT AND THE RECONCILIATION REGIME
RAMAPHOSA MUST FALL!
For a National congress of the workers' and popular organizations to unify all the sectors in struggle and impose the revolutionary general strike until Ramaphosa and the regime fall
For a Provisional Workers' and Peasants' Revolutionary Government
On March 20, the South African working class and exploited once again took to the streets all over the country in a one-day national strike demanding the right to basic electricity services and the resignation of South African president Cyril Ramaphosa. Since January there have been successive mobilizations for this demand, which have become more and more intense.
South Africa has been suffering from blackouts for more than a decade, but in the last three years they have worsened, causing the worst energy crisis of the last three years.
South Africa's electricity provider is Eskom, a state-owned company in which the African National Congress (ANC) and Communist Party (CP) government has failed to invest in maintenance or even refurbishment. Almost all the electricity it generates comes from burning coal, of which South Africa is the seventh largest producer in the world, and the equipment is not only obsolete but has already lost the capacity to supply to the whole of South Africa.
The government's plan is to say that "investment is needed" and issue bonds to finance it. With South Africa's debt burden (over 80%), the bonds will be unpayable, i.e. they will be worthless on the market, although the South African state will be forced to take them at face value and hand over Eskom itself as part of the payment. In other words, there is a plan to privatize Eskom for a dime.
But this plan is already being paid for by the workers, along with all the imperialist plunder of natural resources, the suffocation by the foreign debt, and the government's fund-monetarist adjustment attacks. The situation is so delicate that the government has declared a "national state of disaster", the fourth it has decreed. The other two have been due to floods, and a third because of the Covid-19 pandemic. This situation aggravates the hardships of the masses in the poorest neighborhoods, as health and education centers are out of order for most of the day, and the little people can buy to eat ends up rotting for lack of electricity.
Therefore, in this struggle for electricity, the demands for health, education, against hunger, the right to a job and a living wage come together... because the fundamental drive is hunger.
The masses identify the ANC-PC government as responsible for their hardship. Therefore, they argue that to achieve their minimum demands Ramaphosa must fall. But the struggle to improve their miserable living conditions is an anti-imperialist struggle against the transnationals, the IMF and their local managers, the government, who are responsible for the theft and plunder of all our wealth.
The situation is already unbearable! The working class has made a thousand and one attempts to impose a workers' way out of the crisis!
Their leaderships have betrayed them once and again
The working class of South Africa has been fighting in successive waves against the starvation regime, already since the huge strike of the Marikana miners in 2012 with the demand "12,500 rands for all". Then they confronted the Stalinist trade union bureaucracy and the repression of the ANC police with 34 martyrs and they were taken to pressure the bourgeois courts, leading them away from the path to win real justice. Julius Malema, a CP youth leader who split from the CP and formed a new party called the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), played a key role in this diversion. This is a bourgeois party that raises the slogan of "black power" as a policy to deceive the masses and bring them to the feet of the regime.
Since 2017 the workers broke with the COSATU trade union center (Confederation of South African Trade Unions) and its Stalinist leadership that was supporting and sustaining the ANC government, and went on general strike to bring down the government of the then president Zuma.
In the face of this struggle, a new mediation emerged, a new trade union center called SAFTU, headed by the Stalinist trade union bureaucracy of the metalworkers' union NUMSA. This leadership led such a working class struggle to put pressure on parliament, which voted Zuma out of office, to be replaced by his deputy president, the murderer of Marikana and current president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, a wing of the ANC representing the imperialist mining companies that plunder the nation, who since taking office has been unloading an IMF-type offensive plan of austerity cuts and tariff increases to pay off every last rand of foreign debt.
The Stalinist bureaucracy of the NUMSA played no small role in allowing Ramphosa to assume power and continue to be the South African president to this day. They called for the SRWP - the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party - a "party of the working class" to be set up from within the metalworkers' union itself. But the leaders of NUMSA imposed that this party was to support Lula, Fidel Castro, dressing up as "socialist" and embracing that swindle of the "Bolivarian Revolution" which was the abortion of the socialist revolution in Latin America. The SRWP, after deviating to the left and separating the workers from the NUMSA as a class alternative of the whole workers' movement, disappeared without much glory. It proved to be another variant of Stalinism to sustain from the left the regime of reconciliation with Apartheid that is in crisis.
In the meantime, unemployment has reached around 35% and last year, the masses, especially the unemployed, staged hunger uprisings by going to fetch bread where it is, taking it from the supermarkets.
As inflation is increasing, the unionized sectors of the workers, led by NUMSA, went on a national strike. The demand for a decent wage increase and work for all is the demand of the whole labor movement.
Today it is the township workers who are leading the huge marches and strikes against Ramaphosa for the power cuts because he has not invested a single rand in the maintenance and modernization needed to supply South Africa with electricity.
The electoral detour: A trap for the workers
While the masses have already identified the government as the cause of their plight, the COSATU bureaucracy, unsurprisingly, insists on supporting the ANC for the next elections in 2024. The other trade union center, SAFTU, claims to support the demands of the masses for electricity, but has lined up behind Julius Malema's bourgeois party, the EFF. Malema wants to ride ahead of the mass actions by calling for "strikes", making "electricity court filings" and raising the slogan "Ramaphosa must resign".
Thus we see that the aim of the leaderships is to channel the revolutionary anger of the masses to peaceful means, while different bourgeois variants want to ride on the mass anger in view of the elections in 2024. But even so, the working class, winning the streets, showed that it was a great day of struggle where all sectors came out to fight, including the support of the middle classes of the city and the countryside, resulting in a blow against Ramaphosa.
Ramaphosa and the whole regime must fall. Imperialism out, IMF out!
This new day of national strike on March 20 means a big step forward, that is why it is necessary to call on all the workers' and popular organizations, especially the NUMSA union, to break with the bourgeoisie, whether "officialist" or "oppositionist", and to call a National congress of the workers' and popular organizations to unify all the sectors in struggle behind a single list of demands, to impose a general strike until Ramaphosa, the murderer of Marikana, agent of Anglo-American and other imperialist gangs, falls, and to expel imperialism.
That Congress must unify the demands and struggles of all the workers of Southern Africa who stand up in struggle for the same demands starting with the migrant workers who do the worst jobs and today are at the mercy of the fascist gangs. It must call to set up committees of employed and unemployed workers, militant students, immigrants, and all those who fight for the minimum demands of the poor people. It is necessary to set up self-defense committees to defend themselves against the fascist gangs that attack our class brothers and sisters in Zimbabwe and South Africa because first they come for the immigrant and unemployed workers and tomorrow they will turn against all the workers in struggle.
Out with the collaborationist Stalinist bureaucracy of COSATU that sustains this infamous regime!
For a dignified minimum living and mobile wage according to the family basket indexed to inflation. Reduction of the working day without wage reduction and one more shift per factory and establishment so that all the unemployed go to work.
The trade unions and workers' organizations must incorporate the immigrant brothers and sisters as full members. No more first and second class workers, papers and full rights for all!!!!!
Out with Ramaphosa and the starvation regime! Workers' and Peasants' Revolutionary Provisional Government!
So that the crisis is paid for by the capitalists and we can live in dignity...
Out with imperialism, out with the IMF!
Not a single rand more to the IMF! Expropriate the transnationals without compensation and under workers' control, as the Anglo-American, the mining, the land, the banks and the properties of these rich black lackeys of imperialism! A single state bank under workers' control and monopoly of foreign trade! There is the money for credit, electricity, quality health and education and all the demands of the poor people!
For self-defense committees to smash the fascist gangs armed by the white bourgeoisie and the ANC who attack our immigrant siblings.
The rank-and-file soldiers must disobey the officer caste of the murderous army in Pretoria and take the side of the people with their weapons. For soldiers' committees to stop the repression and crush the fascists!
In this world economic crisis, imperialism is coming for everything in the semi-colonies. The African continent is no exception. The foreign debts of the African countries have become unpayable. A plundered Africa, with millions of migrant workers losing their lives in the Mediterranean in search of a country where they can get to work...
The working class is not only waging battles in South Africa, but has won the streets in countries like Nigeria, Senegal, Kenya or Swaziland where in 2021-2022 the workers rose up. The struggle of the South African working class is one in the whole region.
The struggle of the South African workers must be united again with the workers and exploited of the whole African continent!
For a Federation of Black Worker and Peasant Republics of Central and Southern Africa!
Let's reunite the internationalist ties traced by the slave route with our class brothers and sisters in the US and imperialist Europe because black lives matter!
In unity and internationalist struggle lies the strength to defeat our oppressive governments and liberate our nations from the imperialist yoke.
Slaves in Africa, in America, in Europe, one same working class, one same struggle!
WIL - Zimbabwe
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