S. Africa’s Democratic Left Front comments on NUMSA initiatives T here is a spectre haunting the ruling

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10 SOCIALIST ACTION JANUARY 2014 class and government in South Africa: it is the radical anti-capitalist movement that the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) has given birth to at its historic Special National Congress held last week. The Democratic Left Front (DLF) congratulates NUMSA for this, Con­ gress that united metalworkers in spite of the sustained attempts to divide NUMSA.

As the most highly organised section of the working class, NUMSA has taken a decisive step. It has responded in an un­ equivocal manner to the role of the ANC and its government in sustaining capitalist exploitation in South Africa. NUMSA has decisively rejected the cold-bloodied mur­ der of workers in Marikana. As the DLF, we were inspired by the moving and concrete solidarity expressed by NUMSA Congress delegates as each of them donated R100 to the Marikana solidarity fund and as they collectively embraced the Marikana rep­ ... Mandela (continued from page 12: “The fractured legacy of Nelson Mandela”)

leadership. It was being organized primarily, he said, as a source of pressure “to break the deadlock” in CODE­ SA negotiations.

But Newsweek described the purpose even more blunt­ ly in its July 27, 1992, issue: “In an effort to catch up with rising militancy in the ranks, [the ANC’s] leaders have escalated their rhetoric—while at the same time sending the government conciliatory messages.”

In any case, the Mass Action campaign did not last long; soon ANC and union leaders sought to cool things down by offering even more concessions. A year later, when the former ANC guerrilla leader and current head of the Communist Party Chris Hani was murdered, Nel­ son Mandela intervened to stem angry protests; in his address to the nation on the issue, he said that the cur­ rent crisis demanded that national elections not be put off any further.

In 1994, the African National Congress received a majority vote in the new National Assembly. Nelson Mandela formed a “national unity government,” giving former apartheid head of state de Klerk the post of sec­ ond deputy vice president. From that time, a series of neoliberal reform programs ensued that bowed deeper and deeper to the demands of big corporate interests.

In a guarantee to the international banks, for example, Mandela and his government agreed to continue pay­ ing the “apartheid debt,” which was owed for items that included military supplies and prisons that the previous white government had used to repress the Black masses.

Andrew Ross Sorkin, business columnist for The New York Times, provided details (Dec. 9, 2013) of how Mandela was persuaded to forsake the vague calls of the ANC’s founding document, the Freedom Charter, to na­ tionalize the mines, banks, and monopoly industries— and to instead choose the path of unfettered capitalism.

“The story of Mr. Mandela’s evolving economic view is eye-opening: It happened in January 1992 during a trip to Davos, Switzerland, for the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. Mr. Mandela was persuaded to support an economic framework for South Africa based on capitalism and globalization after a series of conver­ resentatives who addressed the Congress. NUMSA is picking up the baton from the strike wave that followed in the mining, farming and other sectors. By insisting on the need for political and organisational in­ dependence, it has shown its commitment to the continued struggle of the working class to chart its own destiny.

South Africa can never be the same again. The historic decisions made by the NUMSA Special Congress reverberate through the length and breadth of South Africa’s organ­ ised and unorganised working class. These decisions inspire hope and confidence in the imminent possibility of a transformed South Africa, where people come before profits and where democracy becomes a daily-lived experience.

This NUMSA Congress marks a decisive end to the era of national liberation politics. NUMSA has broken new ground and has thereby opened space for a genuine massbased political alternative to emerge, led Delegates at the NUMSA congress have rejected the claims of the South Afri­ can Communist Party (SACP) that it is the vanguard of the working class. It has right­ ly argued that such titles are only earned through the process of struggle. The first and most important duty of anyone who claims to be a socialist is to work towards the maximum unity of the working class.

The SACP leadership has failed dismally in this regard and has made a conscious deci­ sion to side with the state, government and the ruling party against our class at every turn over the past few years.

We call on genuine socialists still inside the SACP to leave the party and embrace the NUMSA-led initiative. We appeal to others that seek to present themselves as the political vanguard of the working class to put aside such misplaced arrogance and join the United Front of workers and communi­ ties and work towards building the Move­ ment for Socialism.

sations with other world leaders. “‘They changed my views altogether,’ Mr. Mandela told Anthony Sampson, his friend and the author of Mandela: The Authorized Biography. ‘I came home to say: “Chaps, we have to choose. We either keep nation­ alization and get no investment, or we modify our own attitude and get investment.’” … “[A]s the five-day conference of high-level speed-dat­ ing wore on, Mr. Mandela soon decided he needed to reconsider his long-held views: ‘Madiba then had some very interesting meetings with the leaders of the Commu­ nist Parties of China and Vietnam,’ Mr. [Tito] Mboweni wrote, using Mr. Mandela’s clan name. ‘They told him frankly as follows: “We are currently striving to priva­ tize state enterprises and invite private enterprise into our economies. We are Communist Party governments, and you are a leader of a national liberation movement. Why are you talking about nationalization?”’”

Ronnie Kasrils, former intelligence minister in the ANC government, and a long-time member of the Com­ munist Party, told “Democracy Now!” that once Mande­ la had made up his mind on the rapprochement with big business, he remained firm with it, and was instrumental in convincing the “left wing” of the ANC—which Kas­ rils identified with the Communist Party—to go along. “There was no real debate or argument about this,” said Kasrils. But that should be no surprise. The South African Communist Party, trained by the representatives of Joseph Stalin, had long been urging the liberation movement to restrain its activity and limit its demands, under the misapprehension that working-class rule and socialism would not be “on the table” for many decades. Kasrils justified Mandela’s pro-capitalist policies to Democracy Now! listeners by expressing the view that he had no other alternative under the extreme conditions of the day, with attacks from what was called the “third force” (undercover police, Afrikaner white nationalists, Inkatha, etc.): “We could have had a civil war at the time. There could have been enormous bloodshed!” Kasrils, like Mandela and the ANC, had no confidence that mass mobilizations could effectively counter the “third force” death squads. But lasting success in such a campaign would have required leadership and a pro­ gram that could rally the oppressed masses in an unstop­ pable movement for social liberation and working-class political power.

the Democratic Left Front, we will engage in this process humbly, genuinely and with modesty, conscious that sustained, united, non-sectarian and principled political ac­ tion from below is the only solid rock upon which to find mutual, shared and collec­ tive socialist alternatives to the complex challenges facing South Africa and indeed wider humanity. We will contribute to this process a perspective for the socialist trans­ formation of South Africa on the basis of deep participatory democracy.

All this requires the maximum unity of the working class and those who are open and willing to side with it. The Democratic Left Front calls on mass movements, work­ ers, the unemployed, women, youth, shack dwellers, backyarders, the landless, other ru­ ral dwellers, independent trade unions, trade unions affiliated to COSATU, NACTU and FEDUSA, the broad left, progressive civil society and individuals committed to a peo­ ple-driven transformation of South Africa to all embrace the NUMSA moment through democratic political debate, sustained mass action, solidarity and the building of a so­ cialist working class alternative. n Nevertheless, Kasrils conceded, “This is where I say our Faustian pact or bargain stems from. … we push the economic issues onto that back burner, and they suc­ cessively become distant, so that nationalization, com­ mand of the hearts of the economy, this becomes a nono. And once that sets in, and you get the gates open for a nouveau comprador bourgeoisie to come to the fore, junior partners of big capital and the corporates and the international connections, then we embrace the neolib­ eral economy of the world today, with all its corruption, with its cronyism, as its patronage.”

Today, the ANC reeks with cronyism and corruption. The selfish mentality of many in the organization’s top leadership is symbolized by Cyril Ramaphosa, deputy president of the ANC and former leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, who has become a multi-bil­ lionaire capitalist, with investments in platinum min­ ing. To their shame, Ramaphosa and the current ANC leadership abetted and then tried to cover up the hor­ rible police massacre of protesting platinum miners at Marikana in 2012.

At the Dec. 10 memorial rally for Nelson Mandela in Johannesburg, the crowd booed each time that the im­ age of South African President Jacob Zuma appeared on the big screen. It was left to his deputy, billionaire Ramaphosa, to attempt to hush them, exclaiming, “We should show the same level of discipline as Madiba [Mandela] exuded!” It is an ugly fact, however, that part of Mandela’s legacy is Zuma, Ramaphosa, and their like—former radical activists who have now grown fat and cynical.

Disaffection with the ANC is growing. Significantly, the metalworkers’ union, NACTU, the largest compo­ nent of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), has cut its ties with the ANC, and has been urging a thorough shift in policy for COSATU. If the ANC continues to sabotage the liberation move­ ment and to line up with its class enemies, we can ex­ pect that the South African masses will elect to follow one road that Nelson Mandela laid out for them long ago, in one of his true statements of political wisdom. In his speech to the COSATU national trade-union confer­ ence of 1993, Mandela told the assembly, “If the ANC does to you what the apartheid government did to you, then you must do to the ANC what you did to the apart­ heid government.” n

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(continued from page 6: “Who won and who lost?”) budget deal’s continuing “austerity” focus. But that’s not all. Other “off-track” discretionary spending cuts about to occur involve cuts to food stamps for millions of recipients, scheduled to occur by February 2014.

Today one in eight households receive food stamps, the result of the deep decline in jobs since 2008, the failure to create jobs at a normal rate since then, and the fact that jobs that have been created since 2008 are predominantly low paid. The cost of the food stamp program, SNAP, has doubled to $80 billion during the so-called Obama economic recovery and the abysmal record of job creation the past five years. Both wings of the POCA are concurrently proposing cuts to SNAP, ranging from $24 billion for the Demo wing and $52 billion for the Teapublican (traditional republicans + Tea Party faction) wing.

An increase in food stamps that was scheduled for Nov. 1, 2013, has already been put aside. Further re­ ductions are being negotiated to conclude by Febru­ ary 2014 that will likely reduce food stamp spending by $8-$10 billion over the two-year period, 20142015, of the recent budget deal period. As in the case of the $25 billion in cuts to unemployment benefits, the $8 billion more in food stamps spending cuts are conveniently ignored in the budget deal calculations.

The real budget deal thus amounts to $31 billion in domestic spending cuts restored from the seques­ ter—offset by $26 billion paid for by government workers, retirees and vets, by another $25 billion paid for by the unemployed, and still another $8 billion by the poor and working poor in food stamp cuts. What the budget deal gives (+$31 billion) with one hand, it takes away double (-$59 billion) with the other. The net result is a -$28 billion reduction for workers, re­ tirees, vets, and the unemployed, while the Pentagon and defense corporations get off free.

Strategic significance of the 2013 budget deal The budget deal just concluded fundamentally rep­ resents a continuation of deficit cutting for the rest of us, while letting defense corporations and spend­ ing off the sequester hook. … Contrary to the media spin, there is a grand bargain in progress. It’s just dis­ persed, implemented over the course of several years since 2011 and in stages.

And the game of smoke and mirrors is not over. … Doug Brown / Cleveland Scene (Left) Protest in Cleveland against plans in Congress to cut food stamps.

What remains is passage of a new tax code, which will include hundreds of billions more in corporate tax cuts. The fiscal cliff addressed tax cuts for wealthy individuals, not their corpo­ rations. Now the latter want their tax cuts as well. That potentially is on the agenda in 2014.

Then there’s the matter of “entitle­ ments” spending—i.e. Social Security and Medicare. Obama’s 2014 budget calls for no less than $620 billion in Social security and Medicare cuts over the coming decade. Apparently, Re­ publicans and Tea Partyers considered that sufficient for a “first bite of the apple.” But they’ll be back for more in the final stage of the grand bar­ gain by increments.

But entitlement cuts will not be addressed during the election year of 2014. That comes later, and after corporate tax cuts in 2014—which for some time both Obama and the Republicans have been on record for proposing. n Jack Rasmus is chairman of the Federal Reserve Sys­ tem in the Economy Branch of the Green Shadow Cabi­ net of the United States. He hosts the weekly radio show, Alternative Visions, on the Progressive Radio Network, online at PRN.FM every Wednesday from New York.

His website is www.kyklosproductions.com, his blog, jackrasmus.com, and twitter handle, @drjackrasmus.