*Victory To The South African Public Workers- Break With The ANC- For A Workers Government

Click on the headline to link to a site thta has information about the South Africa public workers strike, August 18, 2010.

Markin comment:

As the news indicates the very trade union conscious South African workers are at it again. Victory to the South African Public Workers! That said, South Africa over the past couple of decades is prima facie evidence, if only in the negative, of Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. The gist of that theory noted that in the age of modern imperialism, and we are certainly deep, knee-deep, in that era, the working class would have to lead the bourgeois democratic struggle in the less advanced countries (in the original specific case, Tsarist Russia) in the process of creating workers states, and then on to our communist future.

Of course the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917 confirmed the wisdom of that theory as the Russian bourgeoisie proved to be just barely to the left of the benighted Czar and the working class took power. Equally true, however, is the fact that in now countless other situations in less advanced countries, including South Africa, the counter-posed Stalinist (or some other reformist variety) theory of two-stage revolution has been the norm. That “theory” has posited, in one form or another, that first the democratic stage has to be completed, organized around the demands of all those who can be gathered around democratic demands (bloc of four classes, popular front, etc.) and led by, in effect, and in the end to the benefit of the local bourgeoisie.

Well, in South Africa the bourgeois “gravy-train” African National Congress (ANC) has over the past couple of decades gotten just what they wanted, or most of the what they wanted, a black- run government that truly benefits the white, mainly, capitalist class and a little something for themselves. And the masses. Oh, I forgot to tell you that other part of that two-stage theory of revolution. What about the second part, when does that happen? Ya, you guessed it, never. And that, my friends, is why today’s headline reads as it does. It is time, way beyond time, for the working class, the rural poor, and the various ethnic and racial groups that make up South Africa, along with whatever whites are really to fight, to break with the ANC and fight for a workers government. And from the look of things, pronto. Break with the ANC! Fight for a workers government!