Class traitors cleave to an unjust status quo

Undermining President Jacob Zuma’s leadership of the ANC militates against working class interests and must be opposed, writes Mmoloki Cwaile

The ANC's fourth national general council in October 2015 succeeded in diagnosing the challenges facing the ANC and characterised them as "internal divisions within the movement".

These had "exploded into the public arena, due to problems that had not been attended to over a period of time", it said.

Fair comment, because the need to return land and wealth to black Africans - which shaped struggles against colonialism, imperialism and apartheid - have not found expression yet.

Importantly, the council affirmed "the centrality and authority of branches and internal democracy within the ANC", saying the "ANC does not discourage healthy competition for positions of leadership and responsibility; but such competition must not take away the fundamental right of branches to decide on the leadership of the ANC."

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Factionalism, crass materialism and conspicuous consumption should be defeated to help unity and cohesion, it said.

Whereas this guidance by the council is understood and appreciated, it is the class contradictions and contending ideological views and practices on the preferred approach in leading the second phase of the National Democratic Revolution that make it difficult for the contending forces to find each other.

The ANC has identified poverty, unemployment and inequality as dominant issues. President Jacob Zuma has repeatedly asserted that these would be resolved only by returning land and redistributing wealth to black Africans.

In its efforts to make fundamental redress, Zuma's administration has:

Made amendments to mining and petroleum laws to appropriate rights and benefits to communities and traditional leadership, and to position the government at the centre of their control;

Led South Africa in becoming part of the Brics formation/s in building an alternative developmental economic apparatus and new world order;

Agitated for law reform to return land to the masses ;

Explored shale gas and oil, both central to the ocean economy;

Improved the government's capacity on security and energy; and

Introduced National Health Insurance to facilitate access to quality healthcare for more than 40 million South Africans without medical aid.

All the efforts to overthrow the ANC resonate well with those who seek to defend the status quo and enjoy the extension of capital to their benefit - and to the exclusion of the masses.

A shift to a neo-liberal narrative (resulting from alterations made to the "Ready to Govern" document) left whites with all the land and wealth they had arrogantly appropriated between 1894 and 1994.

In What is Marxism? Emile Burns(first published in 1939), said that, based on the teachings of Karl Marx, "real power" rests with the class that is dominant in the system of production, and described state institutions, including courts, as "material appendages ... repressive with the function of maintaining the existing class division and class privilege".

block_quotes_start If the state machine works only to preserve the status quo ... it is clear that no advance to a higher form of production is possible without defeat of the state machine block_quotes_end

Courts are always represented as something above society, something "impartial", whose only purpose is to maintain law and order.

But in maintaining law and order they maintain the existing system, coming into operation against any attempt to change the system.

However far democracy may go in the representative institution, it is unable to penetrate the tough core of the state machine, Burns argues.

He says that "if the state machine works only to preserve the status quo ... it is clear that no advance to a higher form of production is possible without defeat of the state machine".

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Marx supported democratic institutions because he saw them as one of the "fields of the class struggle". They are therefore not necessarily purposeless as they are part of the whole struggle - but they cannot by themselves bring a new order to society.

This explains why other state institutions are hard at work to defeat any effort aimed at making fundamental changes to a society that, in its content and form, remains subject to the economic markets.

The SACP, Cosatu and others accept neo-liberal policy and methods and side with the ruling class, whose interests contradict those of the class that the SACP and Cosatu purport to represent. They are on good terms with the strategic enemy of their own revolution, monopoly capital.

The SACP and Cosatu have entered the battle in support of the expression of who is preferred to replace Zuma as president.

Efforts aimed at unseating Zuma are effectively undermining ANC internal democracy.

The SACP and Cosatu cannot seek to advance class interests without class politics. They are not truthful to the class interests.

Cwaile, a member of the ANC's North West provincial executive committee, writes in his personal capacity