Collaborate, think, to rebuild the left

Imraan Buccus’s nauseating article about his imaginary left (” Left wing dips into ocean of irrelevance“) got me thinking, so perhaps it’s not all bad. In reality, the Trotskyite and Stalinist lefts have both crashed and burned and all that remains of them are zombie liars.

In the Stalinist case, I think it was a tragedy, because they actually had some potential for courageous action before Joe Slovo died and Blade Nzimande and Jeremy Cronin turned the South African Communist Party into a choked septic tank.

This was confirmed by listening to [ANC secretary general] Gwede Mantashe proclaiming that socialism was represented by the SACP policies of getting the petit bourgeoisie deeper into debt and empowering the medical aid industry.

In the Trotskyite case, it’s much more of a farce, because South Africa has never had a Trotskyite individual or organisation with any merit whatsoever. The Trotskyite denialism about the decision by Abahlali baseMjondolo to stop taking the Trotskyite shilling in favour of the Democratic Alliance dollar is hilarious – it’s like a pitiful parent devotedly insisting that his daughter can’t possibly be a crack whore, even though she’s posted videos of herself smoking the stuff on YouTube and has a list of her prices on Facebook.

The only question worth asking is how these clowns were able to fool people such as Noam Chomsky and John Pilger – perhaps it’s easy to fool people who want to be fooled.

To my mind, the big question is how we can save the proposed National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) movement for socialism from being taken over by clowns and charlatans. I don’t think there’s any danger that the Economic Freedom Fighters will be undermined by Trotskyites – Julius Malema’s merry men are very politically sussed indeed.

But, despite the fact that Numsa leader Irvin Jim has some guts (he faced down the SACP on their own ground, something beyond the capacity of cowards like John Saul), Numsa is a very politically confused organisation and is far too tied up with the right-wing, anti-worker activities of Zwelinzima Vavi et al. What Numsa needs to do is get together with the EFF and work out a way of collaborating in public activities in the run-up to the 2016 polls.

We need a solid socialist movement that repudiates the disastrous failures of the past and exploits the concrete accomplishments of Chartism (which was always socialist in practice). If Numsa wastes its time participating in the manufactured squabbles of psuedo-leftism, then it will ruin our country’s best hope of getting out of the socioeconomic crisis that the ruling class and its pseudo-left allies plunged us into when it helped global plutocracy to install the Zuma gang in power. – Mathew Blatchford, Fort Hare

ANC claims our history as its own

If it’s left to the ANC, there will never be a “shared history” in South Africa (” Is shared history in South Africa a fallacy?”). The only history the ANC government permits to surface is the history of the ANC. We saw this in the run-up to the elections, with the programme 20 Years of Democracy screened every evening on SABC3, at 6.30 pm, before the news.

It was all about the achievements of the ANC – endless capitalising on the heritage of Nelson Mandela. Other organisations that participated in the struggle for freedom were not acknowledged. Nobody else got a look in.

We have to create a shared history. Mixed-race areas such as the Western Cape, with its Cape coloureds, and KwaZulu-Natal, with its mixture of Indian, Zulu and colonial culture, are where this will happen.

In these areas people already have a sense of a shared history. History is alive in these communities because they are shaped by a varied past, which is being rediscovered daily. In the Western Cape, for example, the Khoisan heritage has been embraced by many coloured people.

In the past, much of South African history was written by white people. When we accept that these scholars preserved knowledge of the African past that can be reworked and researched, we will be able to say this is all “our history”. We must get past the cleavage of white/black/coloured scholarship and write without bias towards any one group.

As a coloured person, I cannot accept anything but a “shared history”. I carry the seeds of major civilisations in my identity (African, European and Asian) and I believe these belong to all South Africans. At the moment, we are in nation-building mode and discovering ourselves as Africans.

For now, black identity takes priority, but we also need to assert our relationship to the older colonial societies that partly shaped us.

They left us with many positive attributes – and there is no shame in acknowledging that. – Irma Liberty, Rondebosch

Department’s resistance drives women to illegal abortions

Ina Skosana’s ” Contraceptives: South Africans are still out of the loop” cites the department of health as indicating that “two-thirds of sexually active women in South Africa are using contraception to prevent unplanned pregnancy, yet almost 90 000 abortions were performed in government clinics and hospitals in the 2012-2013 financial year – almost 20 000 more than the previous year …”.

Strangely, from its own collated data, the national department of health records that in South Africa 77 851 abortions were conducted in 2011 to 2012 and 82 920 in 2012 to 2013. That is 7 000 less than 90 000 and certainly not 20 000 more than in the past year. The department is not implementing more abortions; poor women battle to access them.

You have a better chance if you are in Gauteng or the Western Cape, but in rural provinces such services are poorly planned. Nationally, less than 50% of designated facilities are operational and 9% of pregnancy-related deaths are from pregnancy-related sepsis – in all likelihood, from illegal abortions.

So illegal abortion providers have a good market niche in South Africa because the national department reneges on providing safe services.

Even when using contraception, women may find they need abortions; contraception can fail. Abortion remains an essential recourse to enable women to fulfil their right to decide on whether and when to have children.

We applaud the health department’s continuing commitment to ensuring that all women have access to a full range of reproductive healthcare options. We would like to see this matched by the department’s fulfilling its commitment to ensure that all women have access to safe and legal abortion. – African Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town and WISH Associates