Abasebenzi

Umsebenzi Online is the SACP’s fortnightly on-line publication. Communist University subscribers should all by now be subscribed to it. The Umsebenzi Online distribution list contains more than 1,700 subscribers but it needs to be much more than that. 17,000 would be better and 170,000 better still, but really we need a circulation of millions, to match that of the “Sunday Times” and the “Daily Sun”.

Please help Umsebenzi Online to grow. With their permission, add addresses of new subscribers by clicking here, typing in an e-mail address, and clicking “Subscribe”. The person will receive an automatic e-mail from the Umsebenzi Online group requesting confirmation. This is the easiest way to get new subscribers on to the Umsebenzi Online list, and all of you can do it. Please do it, comrades. Get between one and ten new subscribers for Umsebenzi Online today.

The latest Umsebenzi Online is a tribute to Cde President Fidel Castro Ruz, the Commander in Chief, loved by billions. Click on the link below to read it, or click here to download it in MS-Word format.

The cartoon is by Steve Bell of the Guardian newspaper, of London.

The next linked document is an intervention of the “NAMA 11”. “NAMA” stands for “non-agricultural market access” and the 11 are a group of concerned trade union centres working together.

More precisely, NAMA refers to the demand by the Imperialists that in return for allowing agricultural produce into their metropolitan markets, they must be allowed to monopolise and dominate all other fields (extraction, manufacturing, transport, services, banking, media et cetera) in their former colonies. This is the kind of blackmail known as “Hobson’s Choice”. It is actually a recipe for “neocolonisation”.

The “NAMA 11” includes COSATU. Read the short document to see how these negotiators have tried to make the best of a bad job.

Time is short today. There are many direct statements about the budget, and many hundreds of indirect ones. The budget is theatre and ballyhoo. Even the serious question of why Trevor Manuel is Finance Minister, which is a major political question in relation to the entire post-1990 history of South Africa, is somehow turned into soap opera by Manuel, with assistance from the media and others. See the third link below.

If it becomes possible to post some working-class responses to the budget later, we will do so.

Click on these links:

Umsebenzi Online, V7, 3, 20 February 2008 (3030 words)

NAMA 11 Trade Union response to NAMA draft modalities, COSATU (546 words)

Goodbye Trevor, Felicity Duncan, Moneyweb (386 words)

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