COSATU Organisational Resolutions, Plus

The resolutions of a Congress are the real collective decisions of the combined membership. If people complain that there is too much attention given to personalities, then they may find themselves to be the ones to blame, if they themselves are guilty of ignoring the resolutions. On the Communist University you get the resolutions of the 9th COSATU Congress, not yet complete or in the absolutely final form at first, but sufficient to begin to study them. The CU’s aim is to get them all up here this week. Nobody can say that these resolutions are irrelevant or uninteresting. See the links below for the Organisational ones. The Socio-Economic ones will start appearing from tomorrow.. In addition, the very significant post-Congress interview of COSATU GS Zwelinzima Vavi from the Sunday Time Business section is linked below. In this interview the position as between the organisation COSATU and the question of ANC Deputy President Jacob Zuma’s individual political trajectory is clearly laid out. The movement has good reason to be grateful to Jacob Zuma because he was the one who bravely stood up to the Scorpions and stared down their relentless intimidation (with the support of COSATU the SACP, and the ANC itself of course). Without his stand the movement would have found it very difficult to deal with this cancer, which arose within the ANC itself. Yet as the Vavi interview clearly shows, the COSATU support for Zuma against the Penuell Maduna/Bulelani Ngcuka plot does not amount to a political carte blanche for Zuma at all, and never has done. Others, like Ngoako Ramatlhodi, are now free to come out and bear witness to the campaign of smear and victimisation, almost amounting to a Stalinist purge, that was carried out during the Maduna/Ngcuka rampage, and the spotlight may well turn on those who watched the “Hollywood” events of the last few years with folded arms, doing nothing, like for example the President’s Office. Vavi’s interview also spells out emphatically that he believes that our movement is “finished” unless it finds means of organising the casual workers and the unemployed of this country. This task is on the extreme frontier of political experience. If successful, such a drive by revolutionary cadres to organise the inherently unorganised will be a first in the world under capitalist conditions. Hitherto, the revolutionaries have depended upon and taken advantage of the fact that capital creates the a priori organisation of the workers as employed people (giving rise to its own “gravedigger”, the working proletariat). Now, we are forced to provide even the primary degree of organisation, or face fragmentation and a menacing lumpen proletariat, like that of the time of Louis Bonaparte (and which he suborned with “whisky and sausages” - see Karl Marx’s “18th Brumaire”). Those who have stood up to US Imperialism on the world stage during these same terrible years will also be remembered forever. One such is Hassan Nasrallah, leader of the heroic Hezbollah “Party of God” which stood up to and fought off the murderous Israeli terrorists who bombed and invadede their country of Lebanon in July and August of this year. Last Friday Hassan Nasrallah made a speech in a huge open square in Beirut. As’ad Abukhalil says that it was the biggest demonstration ever in the history of Lebanon. Nasrallah’s speech is linked below. These things are heritage, worthy of preservation on our South African Heritage Day weekend. Don’t forget the Red October Transport Campaign meeting tomorrow at 10h00 in COSATU House. There is also a Helen Joseph memorial meeting at the Bunting Road Art and Architecture building of the University of Johannesburg (formerly RAU) at 17h00 tomorrow, at which Minister of Arts and Culture Cde Pallo Jordan will speak, among others. Click on these links: 9th Congress, Organisational, 1 of 5, Constitutional Amendments (339 words) 9th Congress, Organisational, 2 of 5, Quota System in Federation (581 words) 9th Congress, Organisational, 3 of 5, Solidarity amongst affiliates (440 words) 9th Congress, Organisational, 4 of 5, Non-trading Public Holidays (196 words) 9th Congress, Organisational, 5 of 5, HIV and AIDS (321 words) Pro-poor is real COSATU candidate, GS Zwelinzima Vavi, S Times (949 words) Nasrallah, full text of Beirut rally speech, 060922, Just World News (7623 words)