World Class, Part One

The Johannesburg YCL meets this afternoon at 17h00 at the SATAWU offices, 13th floor, Old Mutual Building, 29 Kerk Street, between Loveday and Harrison. They will discuss Clausewitz “On War”. Next week at the same time and place they will discuss Rosa Luxemburg’s “The Mass Strike”. See link to document, below. Things move fast. One union after another has committed to the mass stayaway scheduled for tomorrow and likely to continue through until Monday in many places. See the Northern Cape SACP flyer linked below (download it, edit it, use it). In Cape Town Tony Ehrenreich, Evan Abrahams and maybe 40 others un-named are at present probably still in prison following a police attack on a SATAWU march yesterday. Those who watch TV must have seen police firing into the backs of a crowd of jammed up people struggling to get away, and one person after another falling to the ground. See the link below for News24’s version. The bourgeoisie likes to boast of being “world class”. But it is the working class that is the truly international class. Joint action by SAPPI employees in South Africa and the USA proves it once again – see link. The most perfectly stupid communication of the week of SA’s general strike in favour of jobs is a pathetic proposal from the two-and-a-half foreign-funded revolutionaries of a tiny Cape Town NGO called AIDC to start a different thing. COSATU’s millions of striking members are not the point, from their point of view. They want the working class to drop everything it has done and is doing, and instead follow their half-baked, thumb-sucked prescription. Their idea is to cross out “Jobs and Poverty” and replace it with something called “Right to Work”. Why? So that they can split the movement at this moment of high class struggle, for the sake of their petty-bourgeois egos, or perhaps for the sake of their overseas funders, or both. To the back of the class with them! Click on these links: The Mass Strike compilation, C1, 4 and 8, Luxemburg, 1906 (11361 words) SACP, COSATU National Stayaway Flyer for 18 May 2006 (Notice) 40 held after Cape Town rampage (910 words) Joint Statement of CEPPWAWU and USW (392 words)