Solidarity Forever

The Johannesburg Central Branch of the SACP has a Branch General Meeting (BGM) on Sunday, May 21st in the SATAWU offices, 13th Floor, Old Mutual Building, 29 Kerk Street, between Loveday and Harrison, Johannesburg. The Communist University had a full house yesterday evening and a first-class discussion. We decided to use the new SACP Central Committee “State Power” document next week, instead of Lenin’s “3 Sources and 3 Component Parts of Marxism”. We had a wonderful and detailed report-back from Thando Tshangela on his visit to Cuba, which we hope Comrade Thando will put into writing so that it may go up on the Communist University web site. COSATU GS Zwelinzima Vavi was deported from Zimbabwe once again. He left for that country immediately after the General Strike rally in Library Gardens, Johannesburg, to attend the ZCTU Congress. He had been invited as a guest to represent COSATU at the National Congress of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions which is to take place on 19-20 May, but, along with several other international invited guests to the Congress, including those from Norway, Zambia and Swaziland, he has been barred from attending by the government. COSATU affiliate CEPPWAWU is the first (to our knowledge) to propose solidarity action with SATAWU to resolve the security guards dispute with their vicious and reactionary employers. And about time! See link. The same South African union, CEPPWAWU, is also acting in solidarity internationally with the United Steelworkers (USW) in the USA. See link. This is the way to go. On the other side of the street of the street from the solidarity side, there are the dividers, moving in the opposite direction. Yesterday we looked at the AIDC. On the AIDC web site there is a list of “partners”. Whether they are funders or just chums is not clear. One of those listed is “Jubilee South Africa”. AIDC and Jubilee SA are partners. The same day, a tragic message was received from this Jubilee SA. From the point of view of its National Executive Committee (NEC), it relates how the Jubilee staff took over the offices and the bank account, spent all the money and denounced the NEC. Now the money is gone and the staff have run away. It is a sad story of degeneration, but a very good case study. It all started, thinks the NEC, when Eddie Cottle went to Cape Town. He demanded to continue receiving his salary, even though the office is in Johannesburg. The subsequent row got ugly. See how it happened, according to the NEC. It would be nice to know on which side of the row the partner AIDC is sitting, and where Eddie Cottle is now. Another Cape Town resident is British Socialist Workers Party hack Terry Bell, who now has a regular column in the “Business Report”. His latest column is a treacherous stab in the back for our comrades in SATAWU. It is a case study, for after the strike, in how a bourgeois journalist tries to set up the working-class movement against a phantom “public opinion” of which they themselves pretend to be the mouthpiece. This is the Murdoch style of journalism, brought to South Africa by a sub-Trotskyist paranoid sick self-pitying sellout. Click on these links: CEPPWAWU proposes solidarity action with SATAWU (193 words) US Steelworkers in mutual support and action with SA TU, CEPPWAWU (790 words) Jubilee South Africa collapse, George Dor and MP Giyose (2759 words)