*VICTORY TO THE SOUTH AFRICAN PUBLIC WORKERS

Click on title to link to "Workers Vanguard" article on the aftermath of the South Africa Public Service Workers Strike.

COMMENTARY

BREAK WITH THE AFRICAN NATIONAL CONGRESS-FOR A WORKERS PARTY THAT FIGHTS FOR SOCIALISM

In the 1990’s if there was any country in the world where the fight for socialism was placed on the immediate agenda, and had a fair chance of success, it was in South Africa. This at a time when virtually everyone in the West was gloating over the “death of communism”. The white-dominated apartheid regime was ripe for overthrow. It had been in important areas internationally isolated. The fight to free Nelson Mandela, the central figure in the black liberation struggle, had intensified. The black-centered opposition of the African National Congress (ANC), the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the well-organized and militant trade unions united in the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) had the capacity to make changes. The masses of black militants were subjectively in favor a socialist society, as they understood it. What happened? As has been the case more than a few times in history the revolutionary developments were derailed not in the least by the bourgeois program of the ANC, the class collaborationist, two stage theory of the Stalinist SACP and the capitulation of the trade union leadership. In any case, that long ago promise remains in the future. South Africa exhibited, and exhibits today, a classic case of what the Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky outlined as the theory of permanent revolution and the crisis of revolutionary leadership.

As is well known, the case of South African black (and mixed population) liberation was an international cause at least as far back as the 1960’s when the civil rights movement in the United States acted as a catalyst for extending the fight for equality on an international level. As is also well known this fight in South Africa was taken off the front burner once the democratic issues, not the class issues, were resolved in the 1990's. All of this brings us to the obvious situation today where the disappointed masses are fighting the so-called “progressive” ANC that has become in essence a ‘black front’ for the white capitalist regime that still dominates the economy. So much for past socialist rhetoric. Today the masses of South African public workers are in a struggle against that ANC government over what is seemingly a simple matter. They are looking for a 12 percent increase in their already inadequate wage package. The government is hedging at 6 percent. The masses of public workers in South Africa are grossly underpaid (as elsewhere). What this struggle means, in this the largest walkout against the government since apartheid was abolished, is that some class contradictions are now coming to the fore more clearly than in the past. More on this as the situation develops. BREAK WITH THE ANC! Victory to the South African Public Workers!