Blade Nzimande
May Day 2000 takes place in the wake of continued job losses and against the background of unprecedented mass mobilisation and action by the workers to defend their jobs.
Despite negative and silent coverage by the bosses’ media, the workers’ struggles have focused the attention of the country on the urgency to stem retrenchments and create new quality and sustainable jobs.
Economic restructuring has hurt the working class more.
The South African siege economy of the apartheid order needs to be restructured in order to be set on a growth and developmental path that will benefit the majority of our people. But the brunt of the restructuring of the economy has been borne only by the working class. This is neither desirable nor inevitable.
The working class has been subjected to widespread retrenchments, casualisation and ideologically driven outsourcing. It is black workers who are bearing the brunt of joblessness and unemployment. This state of affairs is leading to a highly undesirable outcome, whereby the African worker in particular seems to be set to become the least beneficiary of our transition to democracy.
We are faced with a very real danger that the beneficiaries of our democracy will only be a small black elite and Afrikaner capital. A democracy consolidated on the platform of such serious blows to the working class can only be a deformed democracy, likely to be unsustainable unless premised on economic restructuring that primarily benefits the working class and the poor.
We cannot really talk of eradicating racism in our country unless we defend the black working class and the poor, who constitute the overwhelming majority of the people of our land. Similarly, this means that the national question can never be resolved unless it is tackled simultaneously with class inequalities and gender inequalities.
The fundamental basis of racism in our country is economic inequality.
The continued crisis of unemployment requires a serious relook at our economic policies. We need a fresh look at how domestic public and private capital is mobilised and channeled towards growing our economy and a foundation for sustainable job creation.
We need a transformed and job-creating economy led by an active state intervening in the economy in favour of the poor and the working class.
The South African Communist Party notes the more positive signs of growth in the economy, which offer us an important window of opportunity. However, decisive action is required to ensure that this growth turns out to be more than just temporary, modest and cyclical.
The challenges of chronic structural unemployment, poverty and inequality require sustained and increased growth rates linked to development. The key question is: what is to be the principal accelerator of growth and development?
Since mid-1996 hopes had been vested in attracting substantial flows of foreign direct investment (FDI) through a programme of self-imposed fiscal austerity. Whatever contribution the austerity programme may have made to stabilisation, FDI flows have been disappointing and, indeed, financial liberalisation has seen a net outflow of capital.
We need much greater emphasis placed on the mobilisation and co-ordination of budgetary, parastatal and domestic private capital for a more concerted infra-structural development approach.
In this connection, the convening of major summits in the key industrial sectors of our economy is critical. Where government, labour and the private sector have begun to collectively elaborate industrial sector plans – as in the case of the auto industry, and also as in the response to the gold crisis last year – important progress can be made.
Central to economic growth is a review of the government’s economic policy so as to boost public investments and savings and provide for a basic income grant for the unemployed. Transforming the economy means that policy must seek to promote basic needs-producing sectors, which have higher employment creating potential.
In underlining the need for government to play a much more pro-active industrial policy role, the SACP is concerned that more than R1-billion was under-spent by the Department of Trade and Industry last year.
We need budgetary priorities that are more aligned with a vision of infrastructural and industrial development as the key accelerator for growth, job creation and development. Such a growth path needs to be powered by a mix of budgetary, parastatal, co- operative and domestic private capitals, while seeking to attract FDI at the same time. All of this requires an economically active state that is capable of and willing to plan, co-ordinate and discipline the capital resources of our society, including private capital.
As part of this, parastatals must remain in the hands of the state. Privatisation of our assets as a goal in itself will only aggravate the already very grave situation.
More attention needs to be paid to the promotion of cooperative and collective economic ventures. Poor peasants and small producers can then direct the economy at a local level. Banks and other financial institutions should be required to grant favourable bank rates to loans from co-operatives.
They would enable many of the most marginalised in our society, including rural women and people involved in small- scale, survivalist activities to combine resources and create a basis for the more effective channeling of resources. As a party committed to a socialist vision, we would also see such activities as having the potential to provide a practical learning experience that could be built on in a broader socialist transformation.
Blade Nzimande is the general secretary of the South African Communist Party