(The following article is from the November 1-15, 2008, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $25/year, or $12 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $25 US per year; other overseas readers - $25 US or $35 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 133 Herkimer St., Unit 502, Hamilton, ON, L8P 2H3.)

The recent open split from the African National Congress has brought a sharp rebuke from the South African Communist Party, as the sidebar report on this page indicates. On October 14, SACP leader Blade Nzimande addressed the National Union of Mineworkers of South Africa, a major affiliate of the Congress of South African Trade Unions. Like the SACP, COSATU is part of the alliance with the African National Congress, which has governed through the post-apartheid era. We reprint parts of Nzimande's speech, dealing with the struggle to defend the unity of the ANC and the Alliance, and to advance a radical national democratic revolution in South Africa.

     Your Congress is taking place at very crucial domestic and international conjunctures which may seem distinct but are deeply interrelated developments: the global crisis of finance capital and the splinter group from the African National Congress. I say these are related because we are part of a global capitalist system, whose impact on our shores go beyond just the economic realm, but has had disproportionate influence on our politics as well.

     Although there were some systemic dips, generally in the post-1994 period the global capitalist economy appeared to be going through a relatively sustained expansion. This was certainly the orthodox belief here in South Africa and our fixation became how to link up, catch-up and generally benefit from what was supposedly a guaranteed path to growth and all things good. The SACP constantly warned against this illusion. But after 1994 the government pursued policies of rapid opening up and liberalisation through drastic tariff reductions (far ahead of what was even required by the GATT agreements) and the dropping of exchange controls. Impressing foreign investors became more important than developing a national industrial policy, or addressing our skills challenges.

     We warned against these neo-liberal measures, but we were scoffed at by many in government, not to mention the financial commentators. However, by 2007 even the always-cautious Bank for International Settlements, the club of rich country central bankers, said in its Annual Report that the world was "vulnerable to another 1930s slump".

     That warning now no longer looks alarmist as the wave of bankruptcies and forced mergers of banks, mortgage providers and insurance companies mainly in the US and the UK rolls on...

     Should we be celebrating that there is a global capitalist crisis? Yes, but not when this is not accompanied by sustained working class offensive against the system itself. We can only celebrate if progressive forces world-wide are able to seize the moment to force through a major change in the direction of global accumulation. Without such a change, the crisis will impact mainly upon workers and the poor, and especially those in the South.

     In South Africa we will certainly be affected negatively. Global recession will impact upon our export earnings. Our current account (the difference between what we earn from exports and what we spend on imports) is already in a fragile situation. The dip in oil prices is unlikely to be sustained and we are very vulnerable, due to our distance from major markets, to transport costs. As a country, until very recently, we were a net food exporter. In the recent period, thanks to GEAR-related policies and agricultural liberalisation, we have become a net food importer. Key sectors of our industrial economy have all but been wiped out as a result of tariff cuts without a clear industrial policy in place....

     What is to be done? If we remain stuck on our current trajectory there is a very serious danger that we will be forced to go to the IMF. This must be avoided at all cost. Once trapped in the IMF we will lose sovereign control over our economic policies and our new democracy will be become redundant...

     In this period one critical task of the trade union movement is to make sure that the second decade of freedom benefits the workers and the poor. Part of this struggle includes precisely the struggles that have been taken up by COSATU, struggles against poverty, against high food, fuel and electricity prices, against HIV/AIDS, against women's exploitation, against narrow BEE, and indeed against the capitalist system as a whole.

     ...It is also important for the trade union movement to properly understand the current moves by some to splinter from the ANC. Again no progressive trade union, aligned to the ANC, and part of the Congress tradition, can stand aside from the task of defending the unity of the ANC and our alliance on the grounds that trade unions must stand aside from political battles.

     In line with what is contained in the Communist Manifesto, what we are actually seeing happening with this splinter group must be properly understood from a class perspective and in its historical context.

     The SACP, since about 2006, had characterized the problems in the ANC as a manifestation of the simultaneous rise and subsequent crisis of a particular class project in the movement and the state, which we correctly referred to as the 1996 class project. This project we said is a class alliance between sections of global and domestic capital a certain cadre in the state, together with the emergent sections of the black sections of the bourgeoisie. This has been a project highly dependent, for its success, on the control of the ANC and the state in order to achieve its objectives.

     Polokwane [the ANC's December 2007 policy conference] marked the severe dislodging, albeit not total defeat, of this class project inside the ANC. Therefore this splinter group is nothing else other than the continuation of the objectives of the 1996 class project by other means, now that it has been severely weakened inside the ANC... 

     Therefore NUMSA and indeed the working class as a whole must defend the unity of the ANC and our alliance from this renewed offensive of the 1996 class project. An attack on the unity of the ANC and the alliance is an attack on the working class. These splinter forces must therefore feel the full might of the organized working class.... We are convinced that NUMSA will rise to the occasion and to the challenges of our time!