Alliance Is The Way

SADTU, NEHAWU and SACCAWU members plus local community supporters were arrested on Thursday while picketing a Shoprite supermarket in Thembisile municipality, KwaMhlanga, in Mpumalanga. Among those arrested was the secretary of the COSATU local. This solidarity action for the striking Shoprite/Checkers workers organised by SACCAWU, led and structured by the COSATU local, is a good example of unity in action in the present stage of struggle. See the linked article below. Another very remarkable example of well-organised unity in action between different mass organisations is given by the youth. Following their common experience in their joint actions relating to Zimbabwe, the Progressive Youth Alliance Secretariat announces a boycott by their members of Shoprite/Checkers, as well as joint action in relation to the Bayer and JC Morgan workers strike, as led by SACCAWU and SATAWU respectively. See the linked statement issued by the Progressive Youth Alliance Secretariat of the seven allied structures. More detailed reports have come through from the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), and COSATU has issued a statement. See the link for both messages combined in one document. There is bound to be further action on this matter during and after next week’s COSATU 9th National Congress, from Monday 18th to Thursday 21st September. Some of the assaulted and tortured ZCTU leaders were due to join the COSATU Congress as fraternal delegates. Let us hope they are still able to do so. Meanwhile in the South African bourgeois media a different rank of keyboard warriors has stepped forward to fire a pipsqueak volley against the massed columns of the actually existing organised working class, as compared to their own fantastic dreams of how it might have been, if only… In the process two of these writers reveal a lot about themselves. Terry Bell’s nostalgia for the old days when he campaigned in England with the Socialist Workers’ Party to raise their profile as well as his own, using the image of Moses Mayekiso, is obvious. Bell nowadays lives in Cape Town and writes for the bourgeois financial supplement, Business Report, which goes out with the Independent (O’Reilly) Group newspapers. As Bell rather reluctantly records, Mayekiso rejoined the ranks of the Congress Alliance, or rather never left them. So what is the real story of the last 21 years? It is of a growing and better-organised mass working-class movement and not, as Terry Bell loves to dream, a resurgence of Trotskyist or any other kind of factionalism. See the linked article. It is a good example of what is meant by the phrase “warped perspective”. Tim du Plessis, the editor of the Afrikaans weekly newspaper Rapport, writing in the English-language daily Business Day yesterday revealed his own kind of Boer wishful thinking, not in practice all that different from the Anglo kind of Terry Bell. Du Plessis writes, in the course of an irrational rant against Jacob Zuma: “He does not have the intellect, the vision or the spiritual power to handle one of the most difficult governing posts in the world.” As the Communist University has noted before in relation to the Mail and Guardian, this kind of disparagement of a black politician who has a record second to none in the liberation movement is racist snobbery of the worst kind. Du Plessis’ appeal is for the reassertion of an imaginary, safe, capitalist version of the African National Congress. This, also, is a fantasy which never was and never will be. See the linked article. Over 200 journalists have already been accredited to the COSATU 9th Congress, including a party from Al Jazeera and another from CNN, plus print, radio, TV and Internet media. They are not mistaken about the significance of this event. Comrade Randall Howard is confirmed in his position of General Secretary by SATAWU’s National Congress, as were SATAWU’s three presidents, Ezrom Mabyana (National President), June Dube (First Vice) and Robert Mashego (second vice) and the treasurer Nadeema Syms. All these comrades were returned unopposed. There was a contest for the post of Deputy General Secretary. The new Deputy GS is Cde. Nelson Lamityi. Click on these links: COSATU members arrested in Mpumalanga, 15 September 2006 (247 words) Progressive Youth Alliance supports Shoprite Checkers boycott (389 words) ZCTU Protests and COSATU solidarity (569 words) COSATU, How I miss Moses Mayekiso, Terry Bell, Business Report (908 words) SA dare not rely on judge to halt Zuma, Tim du Plessis, B Day (846 words)