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Today marks the 28th anniversary of the International Workers Day, also known as May Day, since the democratic breakthrough we achieved in April 1994 through decades of our struggle for liberation, democracy and universal social emancipation. The key question is: What are the conditions of the South African working-class, how much tangible progress have we made since 1994 towards the achievement of all the goals of the Freedom Charter, the basic programme of our national democratic revolution? Put differently, how far are we towards successfully completing the national democratic revolution?  

Millions of our people, the majority of whom is the working-class, have realised massive social advances building on our April 1994 democratic breakthrough. We have rolled back the apartheid workplace through post-1994 labour legislation, based on the recognition of human and workers’ rights that we won through struggle. These rights are enshrined in our constitution, in the Bill of Rights, not as an accident of history but as the direct fruit of our own struggle.

Through active mobilisation by COSATU, its affiliates and other supportive trade unions, and through our Alliance in key centres of power, such as the ANC-led government and majority in parliament, we secured labour law amendments to improve the labour relations framework. These amendments did not occur without opposition by the capitalist bosses, who remain determined to roll back workers’ hard-won rights and gains. We need to build and strengthen maximum worker unity and power to defend our hard-won gains and progressive labour law advances and deepen the struggle to achieve more improvements, defend them and ultimately end the barbarity of capitalist exploitation.  

In the same way, we need to stand together to defend the massive social advances that benefit millions of our people. To name but a few, we are referring here to the millions of homes allocated for free by the government to working-class and poor families that cannot afford, to the massive electrification and provision of water and education at all levels, and to the social grants without which many of their beneficiaries will sink deeper into abject poverty or destitute. 

The commendable social advances we made since our April 1994 democratic breakthrough are facing the real threat of erosion because of the neoliberal policy regime and its failures, because of corporate and corrupt capture of the state, and because of the associated social decay. Because of this, instead of advancing decisively towards completing the liberation of the formerly oppressed and achieving universal social emancipation, our democratic transition is being forced to go against the Freedom Charter. Most especially, it is the economic content of the Freedom Charter that is under siege because of neoliberalism, state capture, and social decay. 

Let us unite to tackle neoliberalism, corporate and corrupt capture of the state, and the associated social decay.

Let us take what has happened unabatedly to public infrastructure as if our country is a stateless capitalist society, for example. This includes railway and electricity transmission and distribution infrastructure, which has been vandalised, looted and destroyed. If truth be told, we inherited from our unpleasant past working most of the infrastructure that is deteriorating and has in many areas now been destroyed. If you look at the rail infrastructure and commuter rail transport across the country, for instance, there has been virtually no public investment in expanding it to areas that were excluded under apartheid and to the new human settlements that have massively expanded post-1994. This shows a lack of proper national development planning. In all this, workers are the most affected. 

For example, there are no more commuter rail transport services in all railway infrastructure corridors that have been destroyed through vandalism and theft of rail tracks, cables, steel and other metals, train station building materials and other components. As a result, workers spend more from their meagre wages on transport than before, because the affordable trains that they relied on are no longer available. Fares in other modes of transport cost workers higher than train tickets. 

Similarly, when there is no electricity because of the power failures caused by the theft of copper cables, other electric conductors and components, it is the workers who suffer the most. The food they can afford rots in refrigerators, while the rich and well off have uninterrupted power supply systems such as expensive generators and solar panels and can afford more food to grow their stomachs. 

It is the workers under social coercion, under the yoke of capitalist inequality and exploitation, who are without lighting because of power cuts and have to walk in the dark on the streets, in townships, in informal settlements and in villages, in the early hours of the morning and the evening, and at night either going to or coming from work. During those hours of the day, the affected workers are more exposed to the acts of criminality that have infested many of our communities, with women the most vulnerable, while their capitalist bosses are still dreaming in their luxury beds, waiting to hear how much profits the workers produced for them to heap up so that they can continue wallowing in privately accumulated social wealth. 

The experience of workers under rolling load-shedding is the same. In other workplaces, when there is no electricity, the capitalist bosses simply place workers in short-time or dismiss them without pay until electricity supply is restored. Let us call the state a spade. It is both the successive colonial and apartheid regimes and the post-apartheid government that caused the conditions for rolling load-shedding. 

The successive colonial and apartheid regimes excluded the formerly oppressed from electrification, building power generation capacity for the white community and the industries that they owned. After apartheid, while the democratically elected government commendably expanded electrification to cover the formerly excluded, because of the neoliberal economic policy called GEAR that the government imposed in 1996, it deprived Eskom of adequate recapitalisation and modernisation. 

In pursuit of neoliberalism, the government took a decision at the end of the 1990s to not advance public investment in new power generation capacity but to convert power generation into a new field of profit-making by profit-driven interests. This decision went against warnings, recorded in the same decision, a White Paper on Energy, that South Africa was destined for electricity shortage within a decade without early, proper planning investment preparations to prevent poor performance by its aging power generation capacity. 

When the Medupi and Kusile power stations came forward, it was too late. Frequent rolling load-shedding took precedence, also hamstringing growth in the levels of national production and employment creation. The Medupi and Kusile power stations were fatally flawed right from conception and design. During the construction phase, the two projects were compromised by poor work, substandard quality and, to this day, remain incomplete, with monumental cost escalations. Governance decay, mismanagement and industrial scale looting systematically entrenched under corporate and corrupt capture of the state, worsening what neoliberal economic policy orientation has started.      

We need to build maximum worker unity and forge patriotic and popular left fronts to stop the decay bringing our country down. The destruction of public infrastructure must stop. This can only happen if decisive action is taken by the state and supported by popular mobilisation, with the working-class at the forefront. The destroyed public infrastructure must be rebuilt, through public investment. Similarly, for this to happen, we need to build and intensify popular mobilisation and be the first to hold the government accountable. The democratically elected ANC-led government must build developmental state capacity, drive public investment in the economy and perform better than the successive oppressor regimes that we had to fight against and end in 1994. 

In the past when we were oppressed, the successive oppressor regimes invested in the productive sector not only in power generation, transmission and distribution but also in steel manufacturing and network infrastructure areas, such as in railways and related commuter and freight transport equipment, in ports, in communication and telecommunication, and in water. The successive oppressor regimes drove this separate development agenda to serve the needs of the white community, excluding the oppressed majority except where it was necessary to facilitate their movement to super-exploitation. 

Let us tackle the oligarchs in all sectors of our economy and push national transformation towards a capable democratic and truly developmental state. 

A capable democratic developmental state must advance decisively towards the goals of the Freedom Charter, through redress, transformation and inclusive development, to socially uplift the formerly oppressed and serve the needs of the people as a whole. Neoliberalism will have none of that. Instead, it will tell the people that the role of the government is to look after profit-driven interests, assuming that the needs of the masses will flow from a trickle-down of state support for private wealth accumulation interests to thrive. We say, “No ways to that. A capable democratic developmental state must serve the needs of the people as a whole and put people before profits.”

Putting profits before people has resulted in the emergence of a new oligarchy, over and above the oligarchs who commanded control in the economy of our country during the apartheid era. The oligarchs have no interest in serving the needs of the people. Their agenda regarding the production and distribution of wealth is limited to endlessly increasing accumulation for no one but themselves. The neoliberal idea of trickle-down is false considering the reality in countries such as South Africa. 

A massive amount of wealth in our country is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority of individuals, while the masses, who make up millions of the immense majority, are ravaged by astronomical levels of mass inequality, poverty, unemployment, and are exploited in low-wage jobs and suffering under the yoke of the monumental problem of inability to support their lives—a crisis of social reproduction. Why this is not in the Guinness World Records is more probably a function of the capitalist system.  

While heaping up millions and millions of rand in executive pay, the oligarchs intransigently deprive the workers, the downtrodden exploited in the economy, of any notable improvements in their employment conditions, including wage increases that would be reasonable for workers to consider accepting. Here we are referring to the likes of Sibanye-Stillwater CEO, Neal Froneman, who the company paid an astronomical R300 million in 2021 as its latest annual report reveals.  

Today, the SACP reiterates its unwavering solidarity for the National Union of Mineworkers, and for the co-operation it has forged in struggle with the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union, in pursuit of the common interests of the downtrodden at Sibanye-Stillwater. The two unions are leading a strike declared on 9 March 2022 by the workers, which has today entered its 51st day. 

Under the stewardship of Froneman, who without doubt wants nothing but millions of rands for himself as clearly showed by his 2021 annual pay, Sibanye-Stillwater is offering the workers increases of merely 7.8 per cent to their peanut wages in year one, 7.2 per cent in year two and 6.8 per cent in year three of a three-year bargaining cycle starting in 2022. The workers have rejected the insult. Instead of the neoliberal trickle-down, which they have never seen, guided by their experience, they are continuing with their strike action. They are actively confronting social injustice and inequality in the distribution of production income. 

Meanwhile, uncritical economists and commentators in the print media, on television screens, on radio, and on the internet, say the workers are unreasonable and Froneman is the reasonable man. This is obviously gibberish to any standard of social justice. The workers who have had to embark on the strike at Sibanye-Stillwater will not in their entire hard-working life receive the millions of rands that the oligarch and his counterparts in other sectors received in just one year, 2021. The SACP expresses its support for all the workers and their united effort.  

Compare the staggering personal acquisition of wealth by the oligarchs, not only at Sibanye-Stillwater but also at other mining houses, and in other large enterprises in different sectors of our economy, with the emerging clamping of access to the miserable R350 Social Relief of Distress grant. As if that were not enough, should the government not extend the Social Relief of Distress grant beyond the end of March 2023, its beneficiaries will fall deeper into the merciless conditions of inequality, unemployment, poverty and the crisis of social reproduction.  

While the millions of the poor who have benefited from the meagre R350 Social Relief of Distress grant are facing an unpleasant situation, in the mobile ICT network sector, at MTN to be specific, the CEO Ralph Mupita was paid a whopping R84.2 million in just one year, 2021. Together with Vodacom, MTN is in the duopoly that dominates the mobile ICT network sector in our country. Like other behemoths in the sector in other parts of the world, the duopoly raked in huge amounts of profits during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when many sectors were under lockdown and an increasing number of people worked from home.

The mobile ICT network behemoths drove up the cost of mobile communication data and other digital communication pathways, relying on their dominance in mobile communication and digital connectivity infrastructure. The recent auctioning off of the high frequency broadband spectrum will deepen the Vodacom and MTN duopoly, its top two beneficiaries or capturers of the lion’s share of the national resource.

The SACP calls on the working-class and other progressive sections of our society to deepen the struggle to achieve transformation and de-monopolisation of the mobile ICT network sector, and every other sector of our economy. We must ensure countrywide digital connectivity, including in rural areas, and bring down the cost of mobile communication data, including through the rollout of free Wi-Fi hotspots for working-class and poor areas. Just like water, the source of life, the high frequency broadband spectrum, which is a national resource, is a key means of production. Facilitating access to the broadband spectrum, mobile communication data is increasingly taking the centre stage in every economic activity and social life. The working-class and progressive sections of our society need to stand up to challenge neoliberalism and the fostering of private monopoly, which goes against the direction of the Freedom Charter. 

Let us strengthen workplace and industrial organisation of workers to respond strategically to new advances in technological change and their impact on work.

The industrial revolution which began in the eighteenth century, with machine invention as its foundation, has deepened and widened since then. Advances in new forms of energy, such as the discovery of electricity and its ubiquitous distribution, contributed by no small measure to the advance in the industrial revolution. Based on electric power, the intensification of digital electronics, digital systems, digital computers, digital applications and digital platforms—in two words digitisation and digitalisation, including more profound automation and robotisation of production—is deepening and expanding in scope. As a result, new questions have arisen about the impact on work and the future of work and workers. 

In industries such e-commerce and linked with it the delivery of the goods bought online or transport through the rides requested via online platforms, workers are managed not by team leaders, not by supervisors, not managers. New trends, such as algorithmic management, have come to the fore. There is a shift in employment relations, in terms of which workers are removed from labour rights under the pretext that they are independent contractors. This had implications for trade unions. In these sectors, trade union organisation is virtually absent and there are serious violations of the basic conditions of employment and occupational health and safety. 

In other sectors, such as the banking sector, paid work that was performed by tellers before is performed by account holders themselves through digital banking applications but as unpaid work. Certain banks have even shutdown many Automated Teller Machines known in short as ATMs. Without expiations, all the banks have increased banking services inside the banks, repelling account holders to the remaining ATMs and most especially to the digital banking applications. Restaurants have also embarked on this shift, moving paid work from the tellers to unpaid work by the customers via touch screens and digital applications. 

Examples of the changing social character of work based new advances in the electric powered digital technology are multiplying and we cannot cover each one of them or all sectors now. These include online tasking, which is akin to digital labour brokering. 

All these require effective industrial trade unions and strategic trade union responses. We cannot overemphasise the crucial importance of building such strategic unionism and the capacity to engage with the Digital Industrial Revolution, which is likely to deepen under Quantum Computing Development. 

Technology is a product of human labour and the social relations of production. While others want us to focus narrowly on efficiency and productivity, they turn a blind eye to the much-needed scrutiny of the class content of who is benefiting the most in economic terms. 

As Karl Marx said a long time ago, capitalist bosses want new advances in production technology not to lighten the toil of the downtrodden who they exploit but to deepen the exploitation and maximise profits and endless capital accumulation for themselves. This is the context in which the capitalist bosses retrench the workers who find their jobs redundant because of advances in productivity, whose gains they monopolise. As the capitalist bosses retrench more and more workers and unemployment rises to crisis-high levels and persists like it is the case in South Africa, the number of people with the purchasing power to buy the goods and services produced falls. This leads to a crisis of overproduction or overcapacity because the goods and services are not produced to look after the needs of everyone but are produced as commodities for sale. 

The SACP says, let us build and strengthen strategic unionism and societal power to shape the direction of technical change in the interests of, and to look after, the needs of the people as a whole.   

Let us study in full and produce a comprehensive response to the complete report of the commission of inquiry into state capture, to dismantle corporate, corrupt and criminal capture of the state.   

The SACP welcomes the release of the latest part of the report of the state capture inquiry commission, as we did with every single part previously released. We stand firm in cautioning against selective considerations of what every part of the report says or does not say and what has to happen based on that. What South Africa needs to ensure that corporate, corrupt and criminal capture of the state does not rear its ugly head again is rigour in both studying the entire report part by part from the front cover of the first part to the back cover of the final part and in producing a response in view of its findings and recommendations. 

A selective and partial response with its eyes bent against certain individuals or entities and turning a blind eye to others will not help but cause more problems. For example, the commission admits to the weakness that because of time constraints, and presumably this goes for resources as well, it could not follow through on the inquiry to reach definitive conclusions and make findings and recommendations on certain matters. We need a comprehensive response that covers the report in its entirety, including its strengths and weaknesses, to dismantle corporate, corrupt and criminal capture of the state. The SACP will itself produce its own comprehensive response, covering the commission’s report in its entirety, and publish it at an appropriate time. 

The SACP has already called for the entire criminal justice system to conduct and complete its investigations and prosecutions based on evidence without being selective, without fear or favour. The foreign-controlled multinational corporations from the United States, Germany, the Netherlands and elsewhere that aided, were complicit in, or benefited from the acts of state capture must not be left out.  No stone must be left untouched. This includes the tender system, which was clearly manipulated and is probably still being manipulated, as COVID-19 procurement irregularities and corruption show. We must unite and together stop the tenderisation of the state and public entities. To emphasise, we need to build a capable democratic developmental state with its own capacity to serve the people and to do so diligently.  

We want to take this International Workers Day opportunity to emphasise our other crucial stance aimed at dismantling state capture networks. As the SACP, we are calling on the state to leave no stone unturned, to go all out, to recover all the funds that were stolen from the state and seize all ill-gotten and unjustified wealth. 

We do not need biased agendas driven through some sections of the media to read the commission’s report for us. For example, a certain story by one newspaper published today shoves false content down the throat of the report. What one thing the story claims is said in the report is absolutely not in the report. It is nothing but the malicious content of whoever is in charge of the newspaper’s editorial propaganda. As part of dealing with state capture, it is crucial to tackle such agendas. While sections of the media played an important role in helping us to expose state capture, if truth be told some media houses, editors and journalists published misleading stories, of which a part was driven by factional interests, or was in defence of state capture networks and propagated their fabricated version against the truth. This is the category in which the story falls.

Let us unite to push the advance towards caring social policy, towards a comprehensive social security system.

As the SACP, we want to take this opportunity to reiterate our call, that the government should extend the Social Relief of Distress grant beyond the end of March 2023. Instead of clamping down on access to this miserable grant, amidst crisis-high unemployment affecting 12.5 million active and discouraged work-seekers, the government should gradually improve the grant and use it as a foundation to build a universal basic income grant. 

Advancing social protection towards a comprehensive social security system is not against, but it is, in contradiction, part and parcel of pursuing an inclusive economic growth path. There is something wrong with those who juxtapose the two.  

Let us build the unity of the socialist axis of our democratic movement

Our message on this day will be incomplete if we do not emphasise one critical point. As the SACP, we want to caution against attempts by certain sections of individuals who are hellbent on trying to drive a wedge between the Communist Party and COSATU. If communist and progressive trade union movements allow themselves to drift apart from each other, they will both be defeated. This warning by Lenin remains as relevant as ever. Let us strengthen our joint efforts in closely safeguarding our alliance as the socialist axis. 

We also have the duty to promote co-operations such as the one the NUM has forged with AMCU in the mining sector, to reach out to other organised workers towards greater unity in action, and to organise the unorganised workers into the trade unions. This might not assume a unitary organisational form at the beginning, but it can contribute positively to advances towards broader and greater worker unity of purpose. In the working-class movement, there is perhaps nothing more important than unity in action, which results from unity in perspective. The feasible organisational configuration this may take will vary from time to time based on the material conditions obtaining at every corresponding moment.

We cannot overemphasise the great importance of building broader worker unity towards working-class power and hegemony in all key sites of the struggle. When we are united and strong, there will be no significant centre of power in our society that can exercise that power without the impact of the working-class.

Issued by the South African Communist Party