Capitalist Road

COSATU’s Sibusiso Gumede had a good article published in the Johannesburg Star yesterday on the public transport situation in South Africa (see the link below). There is expected to be a march on November 18th on this issue, as part of the 2006 Red October Campaign. Further details will follow when they are known. SACP GS Dr Blade Nzimande has been in Cuba. Click on the link below for a short report published in the China People’s Daily. The Sandinista Daniel Ortega has won the presidential election in Nicaragua. Viva! In South Africa the mass media are dominated by the story of the Schabir Shaik appeal. Schabir, a highly respected struggle veteran and not a young man, is to go down for 15 years on the basis of the absurd “encrypted fax”. There may be an appeal to the Constitutional Court, but it is hard to see what that ossified entity would want to do for Schabir. Most likely nothing. Objectively it seems there is a new form of politics in South Africa that could be called Scorpionism. Those who think it is good that people in leadership have fallen, on the grounds that it will help to hold down the formation of the new bourgeoisie, or corruption, should take a look at Bulelani Ngcuka and Penuell Maduna today. These former promoters of Scorpionism are now both multi-millionaires. At this moment Commissioner of Police (a foe of the Scorpions) Jackie Selebi, ANC NEC member Ngoako Ramatlhodi, and ANC Deputy President Jacob Zuma are among the prominent struggle figures being hunted and smeared by the goggas, and there are many other not-so-prominent ones. It is possible to foresee a situation where a large part of the revolutionary cadre would be behind bars or banished to obscurity and poverty, while elsewhere a new set of faces are found in the corporate boardrooms and the political chambers - not less, but even more bourgeois than before. At more or less random intervals the Scorpions would then continue to cull the leadership in the most arbitrary and disruptive fashion. This is an unreasonable “Court of the Star Chamber”, risen from the dead in South Africa. You can’t reason with a scorpion. Everything is done to render the Scorpion-branded power more apparently abstract, whereas of course it is bourgeois and cannot be anything else. There is no abstract “struggle against corruption”, any more than there is an abstract “war against terror”. It is the capitalist system itself that is corrupt, and it is the armies and police of the bourgeoisie who are the principal sources of terror. The concrete struggle is a class struggle, as always. See COSATU’s and the YCL’s releases on the subject linked below. Meanwhile the South African Communist Party continues to expand its practice of fruitful inner-party democracy. The SACP Gauteng Provincial Council is set to meet on Sunday the 19th November. Click on these links: Public transport is unsafe and unreliable, Sibusiso Gumede, The Star (660 words) SA communist leader condemns U.S. blockade, Peoples Daily (190 words) COSATU on Schabir Shaik appeal court decision (615 words) YCLSA on Schabir Shaik appeal court decision (370 words)