The African National Congress (ANC) membership should reject a key draft document that will be presented to the party’s national conference in December, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) said on Thursday.
Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi called for the ANC’s ”overwhelmingly working-class and poor membership” instead to return to the ”traditional transformational policies of the movement”.
The draft Strategy and Tactics document and 12 other policy documents will be discussed at the ANC policy conference in June ahead of the December conference.
”The document pays lip-service to the ANC’s traditional bias towards the workers and the poor while in reality, behind the thin disguise of a ‘national democratic society’, it provides a theoretical justification for the accommodation and strengthening of capitalism, and all the exploitation and inequality that it breeds,” said Vavi.
Vavi said the document — which sets the tone for the other draft policy documents — was ”full of obscure concepts and language alien to the movement and its traditions” and misused Marxist jargon.
”This disguises fundamental deviations from key policies of the movement behind ‘revolutionary’ rhetoric.”
The document was silent on the need to adopt radical measures to break up historical structures of economic power and ownership, he said.
”Instead it bends over backwards to accommodate the existing owners of capital.”
The government’s task was relegated to that of a referee between labour and capital rather than advancing a pro-working-class agenda, Vavi said.
The ANC itself was limited to ”monitoring and evaluating” the government and not driving or developing policy.
The document spoke of measures to manage capital in the interests of the poor but offered no coherent programme.
Emerging black capital could not be accepted as a motive force of the revolution and it had no record of pursuing the national democratic revolution, Vavi said.
He said the federation saw the document as a warning that the working class should not claim the ANC as their organisation in a statement on guarding against ”narrow sectoral interest”.
Cosatu saw the ANC conferences as an opportunity to campaign for a programme that would advance the cause of workers and the poor.
The party’s policy documents would be judged on promised real improvements to the lives of the majority, Vavi said.
Cosatu is part of the tri-partite alliance with the ANC and the South African Communist Party.
The document suggested that South Africa had arrived at a new, classless concept called a ”national democratic society”, Vavi said.
This ignored the historical evolution of the democratic movement, which was defined as a ”radical concept” to achieve economic, class and political liberation.
Cosatu would issue its responses to the other draft documents over the next two weeks, Vavi said. — Sapa