New workers’ party to challenge ANC in the offing

The South African Federation of Trade Unions (Saftu) is set to mobilise “working-class and progressive civil society” next year, to develop “a fighting programme” to challenge the ANC’s hegemony.

This was among the resolutions endorsed by more than 300 delegates who attended the Saftu central committee (CC) gathering in Ekurhuleni.

The committee – the federation’s highest decision-making body in between congresses – was addressed by Saftu’s national office-bearers, including general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi and president Mac Chavalala.

A Saftu political workshop is to precede “the conference of the left”, paving the way for forming a workers’ party, is also on the cards.

What remained unclear in the no-holds-barred deliberations, was the future of the already established Marxist-Leninist leaning Socialist Revolutionary Workers’ Party (SRWP) – a brainchild of the National Union of Metalworkers’ of South Africa – which was launched last year with much fanfare only to perform dismally in the 2019 polls, without winning a single seat in parliament or in provincial legislatures.

“It is a question we should tackle head-on,” said one delegate. “What happens to the SRWP? Are we going to be fishing from the same pond?”

The Saftu national resolution read: “The only way out of the crisis has to be through a mass movement of the working class based on a programme, guided by the principles of Marxism-Leninism for the nationalisation of minerals, manufacturing monopolies, banks and the land – in line with the aspiration expressed in the Freedom Charter.”

“The ANC is fast losing the trust of the urban working class, demonstrated by its performance in the industrial heartland – Gauteng – where it now enjoys a 50% support and 46% in the Nelson Mandela metro,” Vavi said.

“It has become a rural-based party, with 60% of its support drawn from the rural areas,” Vavi said.

“The mighty giant and prime liberation movement is falling.

“If the society is indeed going to implode as a result of the great variety of morbid symptoms we face, the challenge is that there is no single force that has the authority to redirect that anger.

“The Egyptian, Tunisian and Syrian revolutions were about the price of bread.

“Nobody can with certainty predict what could spark a revolution in South Africa. It could be sparked by a child knocked down by a blue light convoy, xenophobic attacks or anything.”

More worryingly, the working class itself is too weak, fragmented and divided to drive a revolution to the socialist reconstruction of South Africa, Vavi said.

“The worst that could happen is a country descending into anarchy as in Libya; a civil war as in Syria or an American imperialist take-over as seen in Egypt.”

To attract working-class support, Vavi said the building of any working-class party could not be done “in the boardroom, but in the streets through campaigns”.

The doomsayers, he said, thought a trade union movement like Saftu, with diverse political and organisational backgrounds, “would not survive six months”.

“Here we are, 31 months later, stronger, with better levels of unity among our diverse forces.”

– brians@citizen.co.za

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