No Victory Without the Masses

As COSATU’s GS Zwelinzima Vavi has said more than once: “You can’t win in the boardroom what you have not won on the streets.” If a campaigning organisation should decide to take some funding, expand its private contacts with the establishment, neglect to grow its mass base, and settle down as an NGO, then most likely their leaders will become “Next Government Officials”. In other words they will most likely start selling bourgeois and imperialist politics back to the masses instead of representing them. Nowadays it sometimes appears that we are on our way to a better world, as it seemed in the 1960s, and that there is no way back. Recently there have been a string of victories of a “progressive” kind, especially in Latin America, and more are anticipated (e.g. in Nicaragua, Mexico, Ecuador and Peru). There is a revolution going on in Nepal. But if these things tempt us towards an unspecific “global” view and to abandon the “street” - the masses, the people - in favour of the boardroom or the bosberaad, then we are doomed to repeat the disappointments of the latter part of the twentieth century. The Imperialist beast does not change its spots. It should never be given the benefit of the doubt. Just to show that the beast is not sleeping, but on the contrary highly active, you can see the latest US torture revelations all over the Internet today, in pictures. Or you can read the links below about what has been going on in Haiti (but Rene Preval has at least been declared elected President, thank goodness) and about the huge bases that the US is still constructing in Iraq. The duty of leadership is to educate, organise, and mobilise the masses, not to decide for them or on their behalf or to make secret deals with the enemy. That is not "quiet diplomacy". It is betrayal of trust and neglect of the primary duty, which is owed to the masses, not the bosses. Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas. Neither the overt imperialists nor their shyer cousins the liberal democrats have ever funded mass organisations of people’s power, except as part of plots to divert, frustrate, and destroy them. No such autonomous democratic organisations have ever arisen and survived unless they were funded by the contributions of their members. It is a condition of membership of the COSATU federation that affiliates must be entirely supported by their members. Movements that open their planning with proposals about where to get capitalist funding are heading for irrelevance at best, or at worst, to entrapment and scandal. COSATU’s CEC has resolved in accordance with such principles that it will continue its Jobs and Poverty Campaign through local and sectoral mobilisations leading up to four major sectoral national strikes in May. Many other important resolutions were passed, and the whole report constitutes a tactical working-class agenda of depth and breadth. See the linked document below, plus the document giving COSATU’s views on ASGISA. The Communist University meets tonight in the Women’s Jail, 1 Kotze Street, Constitution Hill, at 17h00 to discuss Alexandra Kollontai’s “The Social Basis of the Woman Question” (1909) Muff Andersson will open the discussion. Links: Chaos, Suppression and Fraud in Haiti, Concannon, Counterpunch (2635 words) US permanent bases in Iraq, Tom Engelhardt (2959 words) SACP Statement on 2006-7 Budget (502 words) COSATU Central Executive Committee report, 060217 (2245 words) COSATU Comments on ASGISA (5391 words)