Johannesburg - Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi will address the United Front people’s assembly in Boksburg, outside Joburg, on Sunday – placing his tenuous position in the labour federation under greater strain.
The National Union of Metalworkers of SA (Numsa) has spearheaded the front, launched following a resolution adopted at its special national congress a year ago.
Numsa would not be a political party, its general secretary, Irvin Jim, told delegates on Saturday.
“Numsa is and will remain a trade union, inspired by Marxism- Leninism. It will not convert itself into a political party.”
Jim said Numsa saw itself as having played a leading role in the formation last year of the United Front to resist, fight, and defeat the system of private greed.
“We have invited all of you gathered in this important assembly to help shape this important journey we must undertake together.”
Jim said the working class was not the political property of the ANC or the SACP.
“(The working class’s) presence in the ANC and SACP is premised on the sole fact that these organisations are able to protect and advance the class interests of the working class.”
However, neither organisation continued to champion the interests of the working class or socialism.
He said the dream of a new South Africa in which all people lived with equality was dead.
“Our call for a united front of the working class and a movement for socialism is precisely a defence of the national democratic programme, the Freedom Charter, which remains the only programme that is capable of laying the basis for socialist transformation of South African society,” said Jim. Jim clarified that the aim of the assembly was to “define” its agenda.
“We resolved to use this weekend with all working-class organisations, who are working with us to basically debate and define the agenda and make sure that all people over the country… have formed themselves into a united front.”
Numsa president Andrew Chirwa reiterated the United Front was not a political party but would help build a “true democracy”.
Numsa was expelled from Cosatu) last month and could appeal at the next national congress due to be held in September next year.
Earlier, Aids activist Zackie Achmat said South Africa’s democracy was under threat because the ANC had been captured by apartheid state agents – not that the ANC had captured the state.
He said the working class was divided with no serious political movement and that this had led to the rise of the EFF and perceptions the DA ran efficient governments.
Numsa deputy general secretary of Karl Cloete said on Saturday’s meeting may as well have been the national launch of the United Front, as several hundred activists gathered to discuss the founding principles of the front aimed at marrying working class struggles with shop floor issues.
Among the guiding principles include full organisational independent and autonomy of the various organisations which will compose the front.
Further, ideological orientation, political affiliation, religion and gender will not be a condition for denying or preventing participation in its programmes, a draft document says.
However, a battle against neoliberalism and the implementation of the Freedom Charter is its fundamental raison d’être.
Among the unions present at the launch were the General Industries Workers Union of South Africa (GIWUSA), the SA Football Players Union, the National Council of Trade Unions (Nactu), the SA State and Allied Workers Union and of course the National Union of Metalworkers of SA.
It appeared that Numsa’s Cosatu-ally, the Food and Allied Workers Union, did not make it to the meeting.
About 16 members of the SA Students Congress (Sasco) – which is part of the ANC Youth League-led Progress Youth Alliance – were also present. Cloete said the leaders planned to contest SRC elections across universities in the name of the United Front.
Among those at the gathering were members of the Treatment Action Campaign, Equal Education and Section 27. Also prominent was former intelligence minister Ronnie Kasrils and members of his Vukani! Sidikiwe campaign.
Jim said the union saw itself playing a leading role in the formation of the front, however, that it would not form a political party in the mantle of Bantu Holomisa’s UDM or the EFF.
The union’s “democratic and revolutionary” was for the working class to rally an “immense majority” to win economic and political power for the majority of the South African working class. Socialism was the “only solution to the human crisis in South Africa and the world, today”, he said.
Among the campaign areas the front would target was poverty, inequality, unemployment, inferior and low-quality jobs, the apartheid wage gap, a national minimum wage; banning labour brokers, fighting violent crime and gender discrimination.
It would also prioritise environmental destruction and global warming; opposing the National Development Plan and E-tolls, the youth wage subsidy and apartheid spatial development.
“Twenty years into our neoliberal capitalist democracy, it has become clear to us, the working class, that sections of the black petit bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie who took part in the broad liberation alliance are viciously jostling for hegemony,” Jim said.
“(They are) attempting to represent their interests as the interests of all Africans by claiming the black and African working class…
“The dream for a … a new post-1994 South Africa in which we would all live peacefully and happily, in equality and justice is dead.
“The only track for the (national democratic revolution) is towards socialism because we believe many of the major objectives of the (revolution) can be fully achieved in the process of socialist construction.”– Additional reporting by Sapa
Political Bureau