AT THE SADTU NATONALGENERAL COUNCIL, KOPANONG CONFERENCE CENTRE, 10 SEPTEMBER 2009

Cde President of SADTU
The Acting General Secretary
The entire leadership collective
The leadership of COSATU and the ANC
Former leaders present here
And most importantly, dear delegates

I bring you greeting of the Central Committee of the SACP and its entire membership.  The SACP once more is deeply honoured to address this august gathering, the parliament of educators in the country.

When we addressed you last year, we were on the verge of political brink and had gone on the ground to defend and deepen the unity of our movement.  Today, the April 22 elections have confirmed that the ANC led alliance is the only trusted organization by our people.  The forces of doom have failed.  The progressive agenda has once more triumphed!  We want to thank SADTU for the role that SADTU played in mobilizing millions of our people to vote the ANC

The Global Capitalist Crisis

As we gather here today, the world capitalist system is in the midst of probably its worst economic crisis since 1929.  Capitalism is, of course, seldom crisis free, and there have been a series of crises over the past decade and a half.  Many commentators have started to predict that we have seen  the end of the crisis.  This has also been accompanied by initial illusions that the “South Africa’s economy is well insulated”, and that “our fundamentals are all fine.”

But for workers on the shop-floor, hammered by a torrent of retrenchments and shortened working-weeks, casualisation, high food prices, high electricity prices, the news of the recession have not come as a surprise.

They understand much better that what has continuously driven and influenced our economic policy has not been working for them.  It is they who when they cast their votes on the 22nd April, did so conscious of the fact that our policy, intervention going forward will have to prioritise “decent job creation.”

To probably understand the moment we are going through, we should firstly understand the critical elements of the phase we are now in, the first unique feature of the current development of capital is in its globalised character where trans-national economic activity driven by trans-national corporations has emerged as the dominant and dynamic activity.  Secondly has been the financialisation of investment which tricked the crisis, thus the crisis was initially referred to as a ‘global financial crisis’.  Thirdly is the fact that capital has continued to develop at the expense of the environment.

By its nature, capitalist production is anarchic as Marx explained and capitalism is unable to develop along a path of uninterrupted growth and development.  The system periodically collapses into periods of crisis and periods of success – ‘cyclical boom and bursts’.

The big bosses always produce for their own profits and not to meet the needs of humanity.  The more they make profit, the more they speculate profits for future operations and therefore over-produce and plunge the market into a crisis.

In response to this crisis what we have witnessed is that governments in advanced capitalist countries have deployed massive sums of money in form of ‘bail outs’ and ‘stimulus package’ in order to restore capitalist profitability.  Other interventions include “firmer regulation of the financial markets”, calls for “an end to wage stagnation”, the need for “global social capital” and firm austere measurers by governments and household”.

The bail outs must however be understood that they have gone beyond just financing deficits but have included significant funding of “rescue packages” directed at strategically important capitalist enterprises, sometimes even involving taking some degree of state ownership in them, be they financial institutions or those in the motor industry.  Governments of advanced capitalist countries are pumping large sums of money to protect their own companies – US would protect General Motors and Japan Toyota for example.

We must also appreciate what Marx said when he says “as soon as it is no longer a question of sharing profits, but of sharing losses, everyone tries to reduce his own share to a minimum and to shove it off another. The class, as such, must inevitably lose.  How
much the individual capitalist must bear of the loss i.e. to what extent he must share in it at all is decided by strength and cunning and competition then it becomes a fight amongst hostile brothers”.

The bail outs will secure much of the capitalist centers of General Motors or Toyota whilst the plants of these companies who are in the periphery will bear the brunt.

With this in mind, the challenge is then for us to develop a process to properly respond to the challenge.

But we have just been through one of the biggest global commodity booms, and while some key sectors of capital did very well, we did not create nearly enough jobs and the systemic problems of the South African economy (huge inequalities, spatial marginalization of at least half the population, and crisis-levels of unemployment) persisted and were even actively reproduced in the midst of 5% growth.

We have not taken advantage of our position at the time, to embed in the state certain features. When we talk about the task of building a developmental state, we mainly refer to a state that has a coherent strategic plan to maximize its resourced to uplift the well being of its citizens.

The mortality rate in our country remains high, majority of our people do not have access to proper health care. Unemployment remains unacceptably high, poverty levels and inequality have deepened.

A developmental state must be a state that helps us to address these issues.  We must be careful that we must not succumb to those who want to use the crisis to make sure that we are flatfooted and we do nothing.  As Fidel Castro would put it, any crisis presents us with a moment to provide solutions.

One of the important interventions for us to maneuver our way during this hostile global period is to adopt a coherent industrial policy with particular focus on the vulnerable sectors.

We must also defend the infrastructure development programmes which have already been embarked on.  However, we cannot just be satisfied with a multi-billion rand infrastructure programme. We need to ask critical questions of it.  We need to assess whether the huge capital spending is transforming the systemic weaknesses of our economy.  To what extent, for instance, is our infrastructure programme simply reinforcing the spatial inequities of our society? Is it really re-shaping the persisting apartheid geography of our cities, towns and rural hinterland? And this is where the ANC-alliance April 22 electoral mandate to commit focused attention to rural development, for instance, comes in.  Infrastructure construction cannot simply be targeted to lowering the logistics costs to our mineral exporters, moving from coal and oil fields t ports.  While this is an important component, simply confining our infrastructure spent to this kind of goal will lock us into the same systemic features of the apartheid economy, while our former Bantustan rural areas continue to be marginalized through poor infrastructure.

We need also to ensure that our industrial policy programme aligns much more energetically with our infrastructure construction.  Too many of the construction materials, components and technologies are being imported when they could be produced locally. This means we spend billions of rands but fail to maximize the local job-creation possibilities.  It also means that we reproduce our historic trade deficit vulnerabilities – we remain an exporter of primary commodities and an importer of more expensive capital goods.

These, then, are the two core strategic responses we need to make to the present recession:
• Sustaining our state-led mass infrastructure programme;  and
• Aligning an industrial policy with this programme.
Together, these two major strategic interventions need to place us onto a new growth path that creates decent work and that overcomes the other systemic weaknesses in our economy.

There are, of course, also many more specific and short-term interventions that we need to make in order to weather the recession. These include all of the matters agreed upon in the NEDLAC framework document, among them:  the massification of the expanded public works programme; much tougher interventions to block illegal imports; the strategic application of tariff protections; a review of executive salaries; and the defence and consolidation of a comprehensive social security net.

The global capitalist crisis is wreaking havoc on the lives of workers and poor throughout the world, including here in SA. While implementing defensive measures to mitigate the effects of this crisis as best as possible, we also need to use the crisis to boldly implement transformational measures that place our economy and our country on a worker and poor-friendly growth path.

For the SACP, given the resolutions taken at the 12th Congress as well as at our policy conference, it is important that we intensify the struggle to build working class hegemony in all key sites of power, especially in the state.  In undertaking this task, our programme, The South African Road to Socialism, poses the challenge thus:

“The NDR requires a strong state.  Its strength needs to lie not in its capacity to exert bureaucratic power, but in its strategic coherence, its skill and catalyzing capacity and, above all, in its ability to help weld together a multi-class national democratic movement buttressed by mobilized popular and working class power.  Without these realties in a world dominated by powerful transnational corporations, no country can hope to embark on a developmental path”.

One of the critical terrains for building a radical, working-class led developmental state is that of exposing and seeking to roll back and disrupt the intersection between the holding of public office and business interests, and to defeat the corrupting influence that this has had, and continue to have, on our movement as a whole. Many of u sitting here have knowledge of corrupt activities be it in the nutrition support programmes or the learner support material printing and distribution and we are quite, thus weakening the strategic capacity of the state to deliver services to our people.  We must expose corruption wherever it exists and defend the integrity of the liberation movement.

To paraphrase the Secretary General of the ANC, deployment to positions as school principals and in the department of education should not be based on who can best facilitate opportunities for wealth accumulation for those in positions of power and as a promotion scheme for our friends in the union.

Unless we confront corruption and the tendency to deploy our friends to key positions we will, in the words of the Cde Gwede, move one way and that is downwards. As part of fighting corruption, we must start to pose difficult questions about the role of service providers and their place in the trade union movement.

Transform and build a people centered Education system

 What the crisis has clearly thrown at us is that it has silenced the triumphalistic nature of the post soviet collapse. The neo-liberal triumphalism had captured all sectors of society ranging from culture to education.

The challenge now for us is to transform our education system from the foundation level, to ascertain that it does not continue to deepen and inculcate the norms, values and ethos of a discredited system.

We need an education system that teaches the values of social solidarity as opposed to individualism.  We need an education system that is tolerant and embraces other forms of organization of production, distribution and consumption in society.  We need to build a caring society and there is no better place to inculcate these values than in the education system.  Our curriculum must respond to these.

The Freedom Charter proudly declares that “The aim of education shall be to teach the youth to love their people and their culture, to honour human brotherhood, liberty and peace”.

Our educators must demonstrate and represent these values.  Their conditions of work must be improved to allow them to properly undertake this huge responsibility.

In that regard, we must pose the question; what is that SADTU is practically doing to advance our call for the teaching of historical and dialectical materialism in our schools in order to better prepare our learners for the harsh realities of life? What programme do we have in place to give meaning to the declaration of the ANC Manifesto that education shall be one of the five priorities of government?

Commentators have gone to town to comment about the state of unreadiness of learners coming from the schooling system into higher education.  Will this NGC, comprised of the advanced cadres of the education fraternity, help us properly respond to what clearly is a major policy gap in our education system? Whilst methods of assessment have changed at the schooling level, this has not been accompanied by a change at assessments methods at higher education level including a change in admission policies.

Conclusion

The task to deepen and build a progressive agenda driven by the developmental state that does not merely seek to privilege capital in its policy outlook will not be an easy one. The struggle for a National Health Insurance system – for which we must launch a class war against those who are opposing it, for free quality public education and decent job creation will not be an easy one. Our policy positions and leaders will be caricatured and publicly embarrassed.

Despite the failures of Capitalism, we will be told that Socialism is not an alternative.

At the heart of our strategic, tactical and programmatic response must be the mass mobilization of the working class – the leading motive force of our national democratic revolution – to provide the mass power, strategic focus and tactical flexibility to overcome the current capitalist crises and lead us onto a new developmental growth path.

Chairperson, the SACP wishes the delegates to this National General Council all the best in their deliberations.  We are keenly awaiting the outcomes of this meeting and ready to go to battle with you in our endeavor to radically transform our society.

Thank you.