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)

Walking Wounded, Iron Heel

COSATU GS Zwelinzima Vavi calls them the “walking wounded’. These are the people whose lives have been devastated by the actions of the “Scorpions”. The nightmare of years of “investigation”, raids and leaks to the media could fall upon anyone. The indiscriminate nature of their aggression is part of their message. They want you to know that it is by their favour that you exist in peace, and that they can withdraw their favour and insult you at any time. This is how the whole Scorpion racket was designed to work by the US FBI, which trained them, from the beginning. See the linked article. The Scorpions also have their collaborators in the media, such as the City Press (see link), whose headline (“Ngoako gets Zum-ed”) is calculated to be disrespectful both to ex-Premier Ngoako Ramatlhodi and also to ANC Deputy President Jacob Zuma. Although the facts support Ramatlhodi, the story is written backside-first so as to leave an impression that there is doubt, and that the Scorpions should have the benefit of the doubt, and not the poor man who is not able to work as a result of their vicious smears. Nor are the Scorpions the only false-legal thugs lurking around South Africa. The ones who abducted Rashid Khalid and flew him out of the country from Waterkloof air force base were protected and untouchable. Khalid is still missing. See the linked article, written one year since Rashid Khalid was disappeared. Arbitrary actions, contempt for due process, and untouchability are some of the advance guards of fascism. The approach of fascism is noted and described by the great and ancient scholar-soldier-politician-writer Ury Avnery in Israel. The leader of the fascist party there is Avigdor Liberman, who has just been made Deputy Prime Minister of Israel. This is in conditions where the ruling Kadima Party is “fictitious” and its ally the Labor Party “decomposing”, and there is an atmosphere that reminds Avnery of “the last days of the Weimar republic” in Germany (which he can remember) just before the rise of the German nazi fascists. See the linked article. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Liberals have good intentions. In the USA there are liberals who are anti-Imperialist, and who say that Thomas Jefferson’s idea of an “Empire of Liberty” is an oxymoron, or in other words a contradiction in terms. These are the ones who gather round the “Lew Rockwell” web site these days. Ryan McMaken’s denunciation of US Imperialism is frank, and full of detail. But after more than two centuries he still thinks the only problem with liberalism is that it has not been properly tried. See the link below. But in fact liberal capitalism cannot escape from the logic of Imperialism. This is not because of wicked or foolish people who should have known better. It is because Imperialism is the only way capitalism can develop unless it is overthrown by the working proletariat. The US writer Jack London saw this clearly when he wrote the prophetic book “The Iron Heel” a hundred years or so ago. On the other hand the South African historian William Miller Macmillan could not see it at all when he wrote the oxymoronic pamphlet “Democratise the Empire” at the end of the Second World War. Click on these links: Vavi slams Scorpions raid on Ramatlhodi, Xolani Xundu, Sunday Times (462 words) Ngoako Ramatlhodi gets Scorpioned, Makhudu Sefara, City Press (870 words) A year later, Rashid nowhere to be seen, Juggie Naran, Tribune (987 words) The Lovable Man, Uri Avnery, Counterpunch (1624 words) Empire of Liberty, Ryan McMaken, Lew Rockwell (2470 words)

Simply The Best

The YCL’s Castro Ngobese is the best young talent in the Spokesperson business. His ground-breaking releases set a pace that few others can match. Comrade Castro was first out for the YCL with their rejection of the falsification of P W Botha’s role in history. Great headline, too. See the first link below. The rest of the documents linked below today are from Business Day and its spin-off, the Weekender. The Communist University trawls many sources, national and international but often, as today, the Business Day is the one that comes up with the goods. Peter Bruce, politically nutty, personally not always pleasant, is the successful editor of the daily paper, while Simba Makunike is listed as Executive Editor of the Weekender. Vukani Mde’s Political Diary is cooking again in the Weekender. Linked below are a couple of items from it that happen to glance briefly at Castro Ngobese’s work. Quality respects quality. The front page of the Weekender reports on the latest round of harassment of Ngoako Ramatlhodi by the Scorpions/NPA. Journalists should be like shop stewards. The bosses don’t usually victimise the heroes. They victimise the apparently compromised ones. The good shop steward knows that these have to be defended vigorously, or the boss will get a purchase and a leverage, and the courage to pick off others. Ramatlhodi may not be everybody’s idea of a political hero, but he must be defended. Heidelberg is a dorp in the hills south of Johannesburg. In it there is a rotten carcase of a company called Karan Beef, where management, security, police, army and prison officials braai together (with free meat from the company) and shoot workers together. P W Botha and Eugene de Kock would still feel at home in Heidelberg today. Maybe the Business Day could have been a bit stronger with this one, but at least they reported it for once (the strike at Karan has been on since July 28, 2006). This is the kind of story that needs a Sunday newspaper “investigative” report, over several pages, with photos. Neva Makgetla’s and Joseph Stiglitz’ articles both concentrate on the plight of the poor petty-bourgeoisie. When we say “the workers and the poor” we must know that the poor in question are petty-bourgeois, and that poor petty-bourgeois (as much as they might be capitalists in their minds) are generally poorer than employed workers, and often a lot poorer. Read these articles to see why. Rhoda Kadalie is not notably a friend of the working class (although a grand-daughter of the great Clements Kadalie of ICU fame) but is even less of a friend to the woman she refers to as “Queen BEE”, Brigalia Bam, who it seems has quite a few different honey-pots on the side apart from the job that makes her haughty tones so familiar to South Africans – the “Independent” Electoral Commission. It is quite possible there is a history between the Kadalies and the Bams, who are probably like the Hillys and the Billys in the Cape. Finally, showing how wide the Business Day can range in a short period, the engineer-politician Andrew Kenny had a worthwhile letter published in the Business Day about “global warming”. Meanwhile, our Communist University wikispace web site has been pumping good material for a year, has clocked up one-third of a million “page views”, and is the second most viewed out of 9619 other public wikispaces in the world. The SACP Johannesburg Central Branch meets today (Sunday Nov. 5th) at 10h00 in the SATAWU offices, 13th floor, Old Mutual Building, 29 Kerk Street, between Loveday and Harrison, Johannesburg. Further discussion of the NDR is anticipated, woth proposals looking forward to next year’s SACP Congress. Click on these links: YCL rejects falsification of P W Botha's role in history, YCLSA (573 words) PW deserves no honour, Vukani Mde, B Day Weekender (287 words) Ramatlhodi strikes, Mde, Brown and Musgrave, B Day Weekender (461 words) COSATU to Mdladlana, Amy Musgrave, Business Day (498 words) Army of the unemployable, Neva Makgetla, Business Day (713 words) Lose-lose tyranny of King Cotton, Joseph Stiglitz, Business Day (735 words) IEC, Brigalia Bam, and Lotto, Rhoda Kadalie, Business Day (799 words) Political science, Andrew Kenny, Business Day (319 words)

CU Taking Strain (it's today, 17h00)

Cde Nathaniel Komano writes: You stayed up till very late I can see! Tomorrow is SATURDAY the e mail that you sent this morning says we meet tomorrow,please clarify and the venue as well,are we meeting at COSATU? Answer: it's today, Friday, 17h00, COSATU House, 1st floor. Apologies once again.

Downsizing Human Ambition

The Communist University meets tomorrow evening at 17h00 at the 1st floor, COSATU House, 1 Leyds Street, Braamfontein. The topic is Volodia Teitelboim’s “1000 Days of Popular Unity”, an assessment of the fall of the Chilean broad-front, unity-in-action government which won the affection of people around the world until the vile Pinochet coup of September 11th, 1973. If you think it can’t happen again, or happen in an even worse way, or perhaps even happen here in SA, consider the following from SACP GS Dr Blade Nzimande’s report from Cuba in the latest Umsebenzi Online. It is based on a July 2006 declaration by “Mr Danger”, G W Bush, and other officials of the Imperialist US regime. They called it “Assistance to a Free Cuba”. In the USA the word “free” means the opposite of what it means elsewhere. "All properties would be returned to former owners, including all the homes from which millions of families would be dislodged, in less than a year and under the supervision and control of the US government via a US Commission for the Restitution of Property Rights. "All aspects of the economy would be privatized including education and health services; all the co-operatives would be dissolved and grand estates of old restored; social security and assistance would be eliminated including all pensions and retirement pay; and a special programme of public works would be organized for senior citizens that would employ them as long as their health allows… All of this would be the responsibility of another US government apparatus, the Standing Committee for Economic Reconstruction. "Since upon carrying out the above they would encounter the tenacious and invincible resistance of the people, maximum priority would be given to massive and generalized repression against all members of the (Communist) Party, all members of the social and mass organizations as well as other government symphathisers." It was clear yesterday at the Harold Wolpe Seminar addressed by Zac Yacoob and Geoff Budlender that South African development is presently held within a veterinary or livestock-rearing framework because of the usurpation of popular power by utilitarian constitutionalists. This is the syndrome that Frank Furedi refers to as “downsizing human ambition” (see the link below). The Wolpe seminar resembled nothing more than a convocation of (mostly white) farmers discussing the state of their cattle – the barns, the boreholes, the flukes, ticks and worms, and the grazing. “Socio-economic” was what the two learned judges called it, but their concern was almost entirely agricultural, with a slight leaning towards accounting, at the shop-keeping level. “Socio” certainly does not mean that they regard it as their duty to introduce socialism (proletarian power of the Paris Commune type would be “the law of the jungle” according to Zac Yacoob) any more than the ANC’s Joel Netshitenzhe did from the same pulpit a few weeks earlier. Next week’s CU text is “Barking Dogs and Building Bridges”, by Lauren Royston (see below). Trapped within the banality of petty incrementalism, South Africans can be suckers for cock-eyed charlatan schemes such as those of Hernando de Soto, which Royston successfully takes apart, and Peter Bruce’s fantasies about “Saving Capitalism” in last month’s “Maverick” magazine. P W Botha was another pinhead. He died some days ago. COSATU gives him a fitting send-off - see below. Thank goodness for Renée Bonorchis. Her open letter to Dali Mpofu (see below) is a joy to read. Mpofu is another man who has occupied the Wolpe podium in the cause of utopian petty-bourgeois so-called “development” of the “entrepreneurial” kind, not a lot different from de Soto’s. He was touted as a big millionaire at the time. That was just before he got his present salaried job at the SABC. Being a millionaire is no good in itself. It only works if everybody else can be persuaded to strive to emulate you. Otherwise you are not at the top of any human heap, you are just a poor little rich boy, all alone. Hence what Karl Marx and Frederick Engels called “bourgeois socialism” (in the 1848 Communist Manifesto). There will be a memorial meeting for Hilda Bernstein on Sunday, November 12th at 15h00 in the Women’s Jail Atrium, 1 Kotze Street, Constitution Hill. Hilda Bernstein was one of the last people to be elected to public office as a Communist in Johannesburg, among many other things in an extraordinary South African life. She died on September 8th, 2006 at the age of 91. This is a chance to pay respect to her memory. Click on these links: Putting the human back into humanism, Frank Furedi, Spiked (2669 words) Royston, Barking dogs, building bridges, contra de Soto (5469 words) P W Botha, COSATU Media Release (363 words) I understand you Dali, Renee Bonorchis, Business Day (728 words)

Link to Fikile Mbalula's paper

Thanks to Cde Tshidiso Moshao for reporting that the link to ANCYL President Fikile Mbalula's paper from Hlomelang sent out this morning did not work. Here it is again: The NDR, soul of revolutionary struggle, Fikile Mbalula, Hlomelang You can also go any time to the LATEST NEWS page of the CU web site any time to find the archived documents from each day. Or you can go to the Home Page and click on LATEST NEWS from there. Or you can use the excellent small search box up towards the top left-hand side of any page on that site. The CU regrets all mistakes and welcomes corrections.

Nzimande, Netshitenzhe, Manamela, Mbalula

It is undoubtedly part of the very definition of socialism that capitalism survives within it. When at last the capitalist and other exploiter classes have moved off the stage of history, leaving only the working proletariat, then at that stage we will also no longer have socialism. At that point we will have already passed out of socialism and arrived at communism - a society without class conflict. Under socialism there is still class contradiction. So, for example, SACP GS Dr Blade Nzimande, from Cuba, about Cuba, in the new Umsebenzi Online, writes of: “…a difficult dilemma between, on the one hand, the temptation to micro-manage every conceivable sector of the economy, including restaurants and other micro operations, thus dispersing the planning capacity of the state away from its overall developmental role, and, on the other hand, allowing the gradual growth and development of a (potentially reactionary) domestic bourgeoisie?” It is a question of which class is in charge. When the working class is in charge, it sets the limits of what the capitalists are allowed to do. ANC NEC member Joel Netshitenzhe is a guest in Umsebenzi Online this week. Writing in response to Cde Nzimande’s contribution in the previous edition, he asks, among other things: “…is the ANC expected to lie in ambush to expropriate the expropriators; when we seek to attract domestic and foreign investments and assure investors of a climate for their investments are we engaged in a hoax; in a small open economy linked to global markets, how else do we manage these challenges!” In Netshitenzhe’s idea of the National Democratic Revolution, neither the capitalist nor the working class is in charge. The “democratic state” (which is the creation and the possession of the ANC) is in charge, according to him. In the best interests of the poor and the black, everything possible must be done for the capitalist bosses. This is not a hoax, writes Netshitenzhe, because “The most an NDR can do is to reform the capitalist system to build a better life for all,” according to him. Read these views in Umsebenzi Online, linked below. We will continue to discuss the question of the NDR and socialism in plenary in the SACP Johannesburg Central Branch’s BGM on Sunday. YCLSA National Secretary Buti Manamela is also in Cuba with the SACP delegation. Writing from there, and reflecting on what he sees and what he recently has seen in the Eastern Cape, he keeps the matter down to simple things. The youth want simple things, he writes, such as jobs, water, shelter, education, healthcare and economic participation. The YCL is a materialist organisation. Read Cde Manamela’s article in the linked new edition of the YCL’s online publication “The Bottom Line”, which also contains a statement from YCL Spokesperson Castro Ngobese on the YCL‘s initiative in relation to school violence, and the Summit they are proposing, backed by SADTU, which it looks like is going to happen. This YCL means business – revolutionary business. ANCYL President Fikile Mbalula gets back to the NDR in the equivalent ANCYL publication, Hlomelang, also linked below. Echoing Cde Netshitenzhe, he writes that “the State… commands vast resources through the fiscus and public corporations which must be used to accumulate, utilize and allocate wealth in ways that facilitates growth and redistribution,” and that: “The festival of ideas goes on, let’s debate!” You can have a festival, while the ANC guides, and the capitalists are a motive force. Read it carefully, comrades. Click on these links: Umsebenzi Online, Vol 5, No. 67, 1 Nov 2006, (3005 words) Bottom Line, YCLSA, Issue 3, Vol 15, 1 November 2006 (1589 words) The NDR, soul of revolutionary struggle, Fikile Mbalula, Hlomelang (1666 words)

Correction

Neil Coleman has pointed out that the 2002 COSATU document "Theory of the Transition" (sent this morning) was not an individual piece, but was in fact a collective paper discussed and developed by the COSATU Political Commission, of which he is a part, before presentation as a COSATU position to the ANC. The Communist University regrets this error and apologises to all concerned. The document itself is not less, but actually more significant for this correction. The document has been renamed in the CU archive as follows: Theory of the Transition, COSATU, Feb 2002

Stool Pigeon

Hunters used to nail a pigeon to a stool. Its alarmed cries would attract other birds, which the hunter would then shoot. Hence the term “stool pigeon”, meaning an informant, especially an informant who is under duress. Clinton Nassif is a stool pigeon. He has been fitted up with an insurance fraud charge based on an allegation that his car turned into a write-off from being not quite a write-off when he crashed it. In his time of stress he suddenly started squealing to the Scorpions about Jacky Selebi, the Commissioner of Police. Selebi is a man who does not like the Scorpions at all, wants them disbanded and wants their staff returned to the ranks of the regular police, under his command. None of these are very nice people. It would be far better to write about all of them in the wry tones of a Damon Runyon than in the self-righteous style of the pulpit. So why is it that Karima Brown suddenly ups and takes sides with the Scorps against Selebi (see the link below), demanding his head? She wants him to jump before he is even charged, let alone tried. She follows the rule the Scorps learned from their masters, the US FBI: “Innocent until investigated” (and to hell with trials). The trouble with hanging somebody every time a stoolie squeals is that we will never know the truth. This kind of journalism only lets the truth come out skew, or sideways. For example, if Selebi jumps, and Clinton Nassif’s insurance problems suddenly disappear, and we get to hear about it, then that is some kind of truth, but a crabwise kind. When stoolies rule the roost, you’ll never really know who to believe, and journalism will have less connection with truth and more connection with power. It’s a shame when journalists forget how to tell the difference. Let’s hope Karima Brown’s amnesia is temporary. Neil Coleman is COSATU’s parliamentary co-ordinator. In his 2002 “Theory of the Transition”, written prior to a bilateral between the COSATU and the ANC in 2002, he reveals some history of ideas, including the NDR, and also some history of political sleight-of-hand, especially in the early 1990s. We were all weak then. We were not prepared, except perhaps the man who wrote the document called “Unmandated Reflections”, Thabo Mbeki. He was prepared to that extent, and used his preparation not once, but at least twice – once just around the time of the election in 1994 and then again seven years later in the “Briefing Notes” putsch. Coleman summarises all these things in the document linked below, including the Unmandated Reflections of Thabo Mbeki. It is a major reprise of all the main aspects of “transition” in South Africa, just as good today as it was when it was written. P W Botha died today. He defied the TRC. Did he then take his secrets to the grave? Not really. What secrets? There was less to him than met the eye. Banal is the word, i.e. cheap, or small-time. P W Botha was a petty thug, that’s all. Click on this link: If SA is to have any faith in police, Karima Brown, Business Day (788 words) Theory of the Transition, Neil Coleman, COSATU, Feb 2002 (10829 words)

Web 2.0

COSATU President Willie Madisha, 2nd Deputy President Violet Seboni, General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi, and National Treasurer Alina Rantsolase plus leaders of COSATU affiliates are in Vienna, Austria, to take part in the historic launch of the new International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC). This is a merger between the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) and the World Confederation of Labour (WCL). It will create the most representative and united international trade union organisation in history, a global workers’ challenge to the worldwide problem of globalisation. See the linked article from the London Financial Times, below. Meanwhile Mr George W Bush (a.k.a. “Mr Danger”) is trying in his mind to go even further than Imperialist globalisation, and right out into space. Why didn’t President Thabo Mbeki think of that? asks Rehana Rossouw in the linked article below, from the Weekender. Peter Bruce’s article on Saving Capitalism set off alarm bells concerning the political basis of apparently “innovative” but actually quite ancient “Social Credit”-type ideas, all of them designed to do precisely as Bruce’s apt headline suggests, in other words to rescue capitalism from its crisis. The last ditch of capitalism is of course fascism. The link between social credit and fascism is not necessarily obvious to the happy-go-lucky Bruces of this world (although the ethnic nature of the scheme he describes is a give-away) but to students of political history the link is quite well known and clear. Dr Derek Wall is a British green socialist who writes a regular blog called “another green world” and is the author of a book on anti-capitalism called “Babylon and Beyond”, published by Pluto Press. Dr Wall has kindly lent us an extract of his 2003 article “Ecosocialism of Fools” (linked below) which nicely pulls apart the actually very nasty fantasies of the pre-war Social Credit guru Major Douglas, as well as his modern successors. Never mind the names - follow the political argument. Wall’s title is adapted from August Bebel’s remark that “Anti-semitism is the socialism of fools”. See the link below for an example of how to place, and then deal with, the wackier side of “liberal” politics. The crisis of capitalism is not so much one of over-production or under-consumption, and is certainly not just a monetary fiddle. It is rather a crisis of imagination. The bourgeois mind, facing an open road to a freer future, collapses into a frantic fit of petty utilitarianism. Hence Peter Bruce’s phrase about “a slightly better life”, meaning a very marginal increase in the availability of the current categories of perceived good, and nothing more than that. South Africa has been an extreme example of this kind of philistine bourgeois reaction during the nearly thirteen years since the 1994 election. Another kind of reaction awaits those who try to introduce new ways of working into existing institutions. It turns out that what the outlaw Communist University, outside established institutions, has been doing has a name in “IT” circles: “Web 2.0”. Do click on that link and read the other definitions on that page of the latest jargon, such as “mash-up”. Shamus McGillicuddy and Carol Hildebrand, two specialist writers published by the US journal “SearchCIO” (CIO stands for Chief Information Officer”) write of the subversion of corporate “governance” brought about by the increasingly communistic nature of the Internet. This produces more-or-less acute anxiety among specialists about the attribution and credit for work that is now shared and mutually edited, and among managers about control and possession. At root it is a question of agency, where agency is slipping out of the hands of the owners of property, and into the collective imagination that is materialised as the Internet. Socialist Group, Keep Left and Socialism from Below are holding a Marxism Day from 10h00 to 17h00 on 25th November at Careers Center, Soweto (Old Potch road, past Bara taxi rank, behind BP Garage at Immink Drive) on eight bullet-pointed topics. Contact Claire Ceruti, czerwoni@gmail.com . Click on these links: Global realities demand new unionism, Ryder and Thys, ICFTU-WCL (777 words) Star-spangled banner over space, Rehana Rossouw, Weekender (458 words) Social Credit, Ecosocialism of Fools, Derek Wall, Capitalism Nature Socialism (6744 words) IT execs eager to exploit Web 2, Shamus McGillicuddy, SearchCIO (1252 words) Is Web 2 just another technology?, Carol Hildebrand, SearchCIO (1012 words)

Write On

South Africa is a friendly place. Even though there are 40 million people here, it seems like they all know each other personally. Enrique Orta is a good friend and comrade from the Cuban Embassy in Pretoria. He wrote a letter to the Saturday Star complaining about Michael Schmidt’s previous bad-mannered, unkind and insulting article. Both items are linked below. Schmidt could not even have the grace to leave it at that. He just had to have a second bite (see the bit in italics below Cde Enrique’s letter). Schmidt is a declared anarcho-syndicalist who uses his Saturday Star column as a bully pulpit. The proprietors obviously don’t mind so long as he keeps bashing the communists. Nobody is checking his facts, least of all himself. If you want to defend the honour of our Cuban comrades against the loud-mouthed vulgarian, Schmidt, please send your letters to the Saturday Star at saturdayletters@inl.co.za . Mac and Zarina Maharaj are going up against the NPA/Scorpions, challenging the constitutionality of the NPA act which allows powers like those taken by the ancient Greek Draco or later on in England by the Court of the Star Chamber. It is hard to see why, if ours is the “best constitution in the world”, we manage to end up with summary procedures like these, and like the “asset forfeiture”. Read the article, hope that you never fall into the hands of the Scorpions, and support Mac and Zarina! Makhosini Nkosi has had enough, at least. He is quitting as the Scorps’ public mouthpiece, for reasons given in the article (see the link below). The CU is not vindictive. We hope he gets a more respectable job this time round, that’s all. And we hope nobody else takes the stinking job that Nkosi has wisely left behind, no matter how desperate they may be. It’s a small world for Richard Calland, all right. He has talked to nearly everyone who is anyone, including the man who told him that “The President always takes the call” from his big capitalist boss (see the linked article). Which confirms what the CU has contended: the poor get toy-telephone “consultations”, and sometimes not even that. But the rich man’s telephone call gets answered by the President in person. “The rich man’s fart has no smell”, as Ngugi wrote in “Devil on the Cross”. But what Calland has also done is to take seriously the May 2006 SACP Bua Komanisi on State Power, which makes one realise how little the communists themselves have taken advantage, so far, of the discussion period opened up by the 2005 SACP Special National Congress and their own discussion document. Lebo Mathosa was killed in a car crash. People were shocked and saddened. South Africa is a family, after all. But as in an ordinary family, we don’t have to pretend that everything is perfect all the time, when it is not. The story of Lebo has more than one side. Here linked below is one version from the Sunday Times. Meanwhile the City Press went completely over the top and covered its paper with a special four-page Lebo supplement, as if this was Lady Diana all over again. Click on these links: Unions in Cuba support Fidel Castro, Enrique Orta, Saturday Star (470 words) When Castro falls unions will celebrate, Michael Schmidt, S Star (556 words) Angry Mac fights back, Makhudu Sefara, City Press (746 words) Makhosini Nkosi forced to quit Scorpions, Ngobeni, Mahlangu, S Times (332 words) With Richard Calland in the SA parlours of power, Sunday Times (1354 words) Lebo, made in a free South Africa, Andrew Donaldson, Sunday Times (1371 words)

On The Lump

It’s great to see that Vukani Mde’s Political Diary is back in the Weekender. No apologies also for repeating his article on Zwelinzima Vavi from the current Maverick magazine, although it was in the COSATU Daily News yesterday. This one needs to be archived on the CU. It is good in itself, and is also good evidence that the previous wall-to-wall reaction in the South African bourgeois press (what in the USA is called “MSM” – main stream media) is breaking up like an ice floe in the spring. See the link below. Another one repeated from the COSATU Daily News is George Stacey’s article from Business Report on the phenomenon that used to be called “the lump” in England when it started there (linked below). The “lump” means you get paid a lump sum for your work as a “labour-only subcontractor” instead of being properly and legally employed with all your rights as such. This system of contracting is now rampant in South Africa. It creates a hybrid class spanning from lumpens through self-disciplined workers to self-conscious petty-bourgeois entrepreneurs, and it requires new forms of organising. In England “the lump” caused the construction workers’ union (UCATT) to shrink down to a small remnant of government and local authority employees. Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) members in the union at the time took the view that anyone who went on the lump was a traitor and had to expelled and shunned. This turned out to be a big mistake. What else could the workers do? They had to eat. They had to take the work on the terms it was offered, or starve. Stacey, as a reasonable businessman, can see a lot wrong with the lump system. He hopes for government intervention and a change of heart by employers. It won’t happen. Either very clever new means of organising workers will have to be devised, possibly exploiting the Internet, or else we will have to wait for the dictatorship of the proletariat before this evil can be done away with. The Communist University has decided to meet on the first floor of COSATU House in future. We had a good attendance and a good discussion yesterday evening on the National Democratic Revolution, opened by YCL National Secretary Cde Buti Manamela. Next week’s reading is Volodia Teitelboim’s “1000 Days of Popular Unity”. The next Branch General Meeting of the SACP Johannesburg Central Branch will be held November 5th at 10h00 in the SATAWU offices, 13th floor, Old Mutual Building, 29 Kerk Street, between Loveday and Harrison. Our discussions on the NDR, state power and elections will continue in that BGM. Today’s Saturday Star carries a refutation by Cde Enrique Orta, Counsellor at the Cuban Embassy, of the liberal-syndicalist journalist Michael Schmidt’s disgusting previous article on Cuban Trade Unionism. Schmidt, in typical liberal fashion, wants to drive a wedge between the organised mass of the working class and their proletarian political leadership. Cde Enrique’s letter seems to have been subjected to some hostile sub-editing (e.g. President Fidel Castro is referred to simply as “Castro” in the cold-war manner), while Schmidt has been given a privileged “right to reply” in italics where he adds insult to injury concerning what he pompously calls his “position”. The letter is not yet on the Internet but it will be transcribed later this morning and put on the SA Friends of Cuba Dialogue Forum . Letters, please, in support of Cde Orta and the Cuban revolution, should be sent to the Saturday Star at saturdayletters@inl.co.za . Click on these links: The man in the middle of the storm Vukani Mde Maverick (2022 words) Job statistics hide crisis in building trade George Stacey B Report (1319)