Portside

Although advances for the South African people have been made under ANC leadership, continuing poverty and unemployment made worse by the recession and decline in the value of the Rand. The solution to our frustrations with the ANC will not be solved if the reasons that have led to the failure to assert working class hegemony within the tripartite alliance of ANC, COSATU and SACP is not accurately diagnosed. This was the question before the SACP Convention.

Many Portside readers follow developments in the international socialist movement, including recent developments in South Africa. Here is the declaration from the recently concluded Congress of the South African Communist Party. Some readers may find it a hopeful sign of the SACP's returning to its role as a critical partner in the governing coalition with COSATU in the governing coalition. Others may feel that the SACP is not being critical enough. What do you think?

South African President Jacob Zuma's reshuffling of Cabinet members without consulting the ANC has created a crisis. The trade union federation Cosatu and the South African Communist Party, have called upon him to resign. Zuma's opponents charge that he has disrespected the ANC and the country and that those who still protect him do so out of their own self-interest. He won’t go of his own volition and needs to be made to do so.

South African anti-apartheid activist Ahmed Kathrada, who was sentenced to life imprisonment alongside Nelson Mandela, died Tuesday, aged 87. Affectionately known as “Uncle Kathy,” the liberation struggle stalwart spent 26-years in prison under the apartheid government and went on to be an open critic of President Jacob Zuma. He was one of the most senior African National Congress (ANC) leaders to criticize Zuma as allegations of government corruption mounted.

They undertook secret missions against South Africa's apartheid regime. Sensational story hidden for over 40 years. In the 1960s, a group of leftists risked everything to revive the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. These international activists who embraced a working-class radicalism that was internationalist, cosmopolitan, anti-imperialist, and anticapitalist - and most important, steadfastly opposed to legalized racial oppression in South Africa.

The ANC’s historical losses in local elections should serve as a wake up call for the future, the trade union federation, COSATU, stated in a press release.

What fashioned Marx, Marxist theories and challenges faced in South Africa. Essential today is an international solidarity movement uniting the broad masses of people of all lands under the leadership of organized labor, of hand and brain, to stop the perfidious transnational corporations, their government tools, and capitalism's imperialist wars - towards a new internationalism of the working class, labor masses, and freedom loving people everywhere.

It is no exaggeration to suggest that the legitimacy not only of President Jacob Zuma and the ANC, but also the notion of the liberation struggle itself is in shreds. For some of us, it was unthinkable that such an alliance of forces could degenerate into a moneymaking, lawless and violent operation represented by people who were prepared to trample on the values that we understood the movement to embody. Certainly, this did not happen overnight.

An outline for social transformation in the United States, inspired by South Africa's Freedom Charter. The Democracy Charter, summarized below, seeks to enlarge the public's understanding of the connectedness of these issues as a way to achieve a social transformation of American society. This is the ultimate purpose of our movement.

This past weekend, COSATU, South Africa's labor federation voted to expel NUMSA, the National Union of Metal Workers. To give readers a better understanding, Portside is posting many of the relevant documents (sorry for length of this post): Tyotyo James (COSATU deputy president) interview prior to expulsion; COSATU official statement; NUMSA response to the expulsion; ANC Secretary General Gwede Mantashe on Developments in COSATU.