April 19th, 2018

Response to NUMSA’s call to set up a Socialist Revolutionary Workers’ Party

* The ANC of AngloAmerican’s partner, the millionaire black bourgeoisie launches a fierce attack against the working class
* With the collaboration of COSATU trade union bureaucracy and the SACP, the ANC wants to make the workers pay for the crisis with the labour reform and giving all the wealth of the oppressed nation to imperialism

In the face of hunger, the looting of minerals, water and land
Before the direct attack to the workers' conquests
With general strikes and street fights...

The South African working class confronts ANC and the regime of its executioners
The leadership of the metal workers union (NUMSA) calls for the construction of a "Socialist Revolutionary Workers’ Party"...
a step forward to set up a new revolutionary leadership of the working class
Workers seek to break through to fight against their oppressors and expel from their ranks COSATU’s treacherous trade union bureaucracy

NUMSA’s leadership, in a new year’s salutation of its general secretary Irvin Jin addressing the affiliated and the working class in general, called to build a “Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party”. For this to happen, it proposed a course of actionwhich included a denounce on Zuma (who was president back then) and on Ramaphosa (who at that time was preparing to be the future president and who later ended up taking up this place after ANC and the parliament removed Zuma after the fear of the ruling classes of a mass revolutionary uprising that overthrows him).
We are before a call of NUMSA which has enormous importance to the workers not only of South Africa; it is also one to be followed by all the class-conscious workers of the world.This called was made by this metal workers’ union that confronted Zuma by fighting on the streets and refused to support the other bourgeois gang (led by Ramaphosa) with which the ANC tried to put an end to both its and the government’s crises, after years of concentrating a fierce attack on the workers' movement and handing over the South African nation to imperialism. It is a union that broke away from COSATU (federation of trade unions). It has been fighting against ANC government and the infamous regime of reconciliation that saved the bourgeoisie and the South Africa semi-colonial state when the revolutionary masses crushed Apartheid, so that it is the same dog but with a different collar of the transnational companies, which continues to oppress and plunder the entire nation.

As the workers can see, NUMA’s denounces Ramaphosa (the new president) as a "capitalist multimillionaire committed to those whose hands are stained with the blood of the 34 miners of Marikana" killed by the state. This call is decidedly a brave cry of the working class because it not only takes as its task the struggle for “trial and punishment”of the killers of the 34 Marikana mine workers, but because it also denounces that the state and AngloAmerican were which killed them. And it also raises as its own the fight flag of the Marikana miners for wages of 12,500 rands per month for the entire working class, a necessary demand that must converge with the struggle for the "sliding scale of wages and hours of work", with the reduction of the working day hours and one more shift in all factories for all the unemployed to enter work.
NUMSA puts as a motion a program for immediate action, which raises a list of demands for the working class that openly attacks the exploiters and their regime and government; defends the right to strike and attacks the labor reform that actually amounts to slavery for the South African working class, as is everywhere for the entire world working class. Capitalists come to impose a direct wage reduction and the declaration of the NUMSA calls to engage in battle against this attack.

Undoubtedly, the comrades propose a course of action that expresses the feeling and predisposition to fight of millions of workers in South Africa and throughout the region. NUMSA is fighting to obtain full rights to the temporary and contracted workers, not only through judicial presentations, but in the streets.
This call to put up a “Revolutionary Workers’ Party” is a step forward, because it does not come from the blue, nor stays as empty words; on the contrary, it is a call from the workers' ranks to join the struggles with a list of demands to stop the attack of the capitalists and prepare a counter-offensive of the masses against it.

The revolutionary socialists cannot but make this proposal known to all the workers of the world. But it is also our obligation, based on the fact that we are united by this call of the workers of NUMSA to join in the struggle, to present our point of view, our program and our contributions to this appeal because the South African and international working class need this call to be concreted in real life so a true instrument of revolutionary struggle of the workers of South Africa emerges, to advance along the road of socialist revolution, the only solution for the working class to solve all their needs and put an end to the imperialist looting.

We will intervene in this debate because the internationalist socialists are part of the fight of the Marikana workers and their widows and their demand for justice. We intervene in this call because from black Africa, from Zimbabwe, we fight alongside the teachers, the railroad workers, the health workers and today also the Hwange miners, calling for the Marikana program of 12,500 rands and the fight against the union bureaucracies to be a combat of the entire working class of the region, who are punished, suffering and a thousand times enslaved by the white imperialist masters. We intervene in this debate with our contributions, to help this appeal to fulfill its objectives because we actually believe that COSATU collaborationist Stalinist bureaucracy, which has sustained this infamous regime of the ANC of ​​bourgeois black millionaires stockpiling their fortunes amidst a sea of ​​black slaves, has not done anything more than to guard the same imperialist interests that the white bourgeoisie and the Boer defended with Apartheid.

We also are to make this appeal known because –for sure, it is clear for the entire world working class that with the treacherous leaderships that we have at our head, we can no longer fight. They divide our struggles; bleed them away leaving them isolated, while the bosses and their governments concentrate their forces to defeat them one by one. They are paid with the coins thrown at them by the capitalists, the same coins that trickle down from the fortunes created through the super-exploitation of the working class; the paid bureaucrats sell the exploited just like Judas. This happens in South Africa, in Zimbabwe with the ZCTU, in Latin America with the "Bolivarian" trade union bureaucracies, servants of the native bourgeoisies, in USA with the AFL-CIO, as also happens in imperialist Europe, where most of the trade union centrals are controlled and manipulated fiercely, under control of the state, by the communist parties that yesterday handed over the USSR, China, Cuba, Vietnam and other former workers states to imperialism and today surrender each of the workers' conquests, creating the workers the worst conditions for their struggle. They preach class collaboration, as they have done in South Africa with that infamous government of subjugation of the workers to their executioners, while the capitalists have launched a brutal class war. For this the latter have been concerned not only about having more than enough police and other repressive forces and the sabers of their generals, opening real massacres as we see today in Syria, Palestine, Tunisia and the whole Maghreb and the Middle East; they have also coopted the unions to the bosses’ state and corrupted their leaders, with the help of a “left” completely sold out -"Socialist" in the words and traitor in the facts-; with their laws they regulate those unions, corrupting them, and creating and recreating traitorous bureaucracies permanently.

A revolutionary workers party is built through the struggle for the socialist revolution and fighting for it every day, fighting at every step to set up self-determination and self-organizing associations of the masses that coordinate their struggles and their demands; only then the working class will be able to get rid of the leaderships that betray them and to really set up the revolutionary leadership the workers deserve.
Millions of unemployed and underemployed workers, immigrants, treated as outcasts by the bourgeois society are not organized in the trade union federations or the trade unions. Any serious struggle, like the one already being waged by the working class of South Africa, needs to organize the millions who enter the fight. It is about for the revolutionary unions to set up ad hoc organizations that fit best to the political struggle the masses have ahead, such as the factory committees, the unemployed committees, and committees of immigrants (who are attacked at every step by counter-revolutionary pogroms to tear down the workers' ranks).
Committees for water, for housing, of consumers against the high cost of living, are the organizations that the unions should call for to unite the vast majority of workers and poor people of South Africa.
At every step, as we saw in Marikana, the bourgeoisie organizes gangs to attack immigrants, and massacre workers with their murderous police. The struggle to set up strike pickets, which are the embryo of the workers' militia, is essential to carry out any serious struggle that minimally attacks the interests of the capitalists and the government and the infamous regime of the Anglo-American and the transnationals.

The treacherous bureaucracy of COSATU was the one that repressed and sold out the Marikana miners. Any serious fight against the union bureaucracy will put the fight for the self-defense committees and a real working-class militia on the order of the day, which will be strengthened by integrating the rank and file soldiers, the children of the people within the class and revolutionary unions.
This is the task of a revolutionary party and a revolutionary leadership of the trade unions... to organize and set up the armed dual-power organizations of the working class, uniting their ranks, conquering their majority. Because that day, which we must prepare hour by hour and minute by minute, will be the day of liberation, the day of the socialist revolution.

That is why we consider the call of the NUMSA to be a step forward to set up a movement for the construction of a new revolutionary party so that the workers have at their head the leadership they need and deserve to succeed.

To deepen the process of rupture of the working class with the ANC and the bourgeoisie, the NUMSA should call COSATU and all organizations that speak on behalf of the working class to break with the government and the bosses' politicians
In order to get rid of the union bureaucracies...
The only road is conquering worker democracy
Open the way to those who fight!  General revolutionary strike!
Down with the ANC government and the regime of the capitalists and the imperialist transnationals

The NUMSA, which has just called to build a Revolutionary Workers' Party, together with the SAFTU and other unions opposed to the government and the regime, has called to a general strike for next April 25 against the labor reform and the ruthless attack of the capitalists on the poor people. It now has in its hands the possibility of fighting to unite the working class, beginning by calling all workers' organizations to break with the bourgeoisie and its politicians, including in this call even COSATU, to conquer the workers' political independence and confront the Ramaphosa government, the regime of Reconciliation and its Anglo-American leaders and other imperialist butchers.

As expected, the bureaucracy will oppose to any worker's movement or action that breaks the limits and conservatism of the state-ized unions. But a courageous voice that summons the whole of the workers’ base to conquer their assemblies, defend them with pickets and vote in it to their most representative rotating delegates for the current political struggle that the workers' movement needs, would break all barriers erected by those bureaucrats sold to Capital that keep us in isolated struggles and partial economic demands, putting us on our knees before the Ministry of Labor or the justice of those at the top. As if each of our particular demands could be obtained without breaking with the employers' institutions, and without elevating them to a unified political struggle of the entire labor movement against the government of the ANC and the infamous regime that act in a centralized manner to defeat us sector by sector!
The COSATU bureaucracy can no longer speak on behalf of the working class. It only subordinates the working class to the bourgeoisie. The struggle to set up a revolutionary movement of the working class must wipe out the union bureaucracy, agent of the bourgeoisie.
Down with the collaborationist bureaucracy! Out with the Ministry of Labor, the state, the employers and their politicians from our organizations! Out with the statutes and organic bodies of the bureaucracy and their state-ized unions! That the delegates go to collect the union fees in the working places of factories and establishments! For recallable leaders and factory delegates, whose mandate could be terminated by the grassroots assembly, when it so decides! Let the leaders, once their term is over, return to work!

We must conquer the road to the revolutionary general strike!

The NUMSA, which has enormous authority before the most courageous of the South African workers and youth vanguard, can become a lever for the workers to conquer their organizations of direct democracy, self-determination and armament, for the mass political struggle against the Black bourgeoisie and the imperialist plunderers who are the most important bourgeois fraction in every semicolonial country, since it handles the main springs of the economy and "national" politics.

The immediate task is no other than to set up a congress of employed and unemployed workers, of militant students, to vote a unified plan of struggle and to conquer the general strike, which puts the fall of the government and the dismantling of the political and military apparatus of this infamous regime of transnationals and imperialist bankers on the order of the day.

Participation in this congress of the committees of the unemployed, immigrants and those who fight for water for the people, becomes decisive to raise a unified list of demands of the working class and the exploited.
It is urgent to unite the forces of all those who fight, because it is already clear that to get the slightest of demands, the government of Ramaphosa and the ANC must be ousted. In order to achieve this, it is necessary to organize a great fight so that the workers can once and for all put a foot in the chest to the capitalists and transnationals and make them kneel and not vice versa any more

Out with Ramaphosa! Down with the regime of Reconciliation!
For a unified set of demands of all the exploited!

Down with the labor reform! For a wage of 12,500 Rands as demanded by Marikana miners! Reduction of the working day! Decent work for all! Free water for all the poor people!
Expropriation of the AngloAmerican, the transnationals and the bankers without compensation!
National Struggle Committee!
Self-defence committee! General strike!

Those on the top come for all
We have to go for all of them! Capitalists should pay for the crisis!

The militant workers' vanguard, which seeks to regroup its forces under a revolutionary program, is fighting today in a South Africa convulsed by the crisis of the BRICS (those countries that the imperialist media presented to the world as the new "emerging markets"  that would counteract the effects of the crack of the world economy), which forces the bourgeoisie, as decided at the 2017 G20 meeting in Hamburg, to deepen its brutal attack on the working class and the great exploited masses, taking away their conquests, freezing the wages, leaving public services such as health and education in ruins, with disinvestment in the mining sector, imposing a regime of labor exploitation that makes workers work in subhuman conditions, equal to or worse than in the nineteenth century, where we cannot even have water due to the privatization offensive on this and other natural resources.

This recipe for labor flexibility is the same applied by Hollande, and today deepened by Macron to get the 36 hours workweek out of the French working class, and the one Temer imposed in Brazil by decree. It is one of the plans of the transnationals and the world oligarchy to make the workers pay for the former two’s crisis, their theft from the people and their plundering the world.

The world working class has not surrendered. Today a general strike takes place in France, reminiscent of the combats of the 1968 "French May", where workers and students took the streets in barricade combats against the French imperialist republic and its hunger plans.
The workers of Spain, the USA, Germany, France... do not even allow imperialism to promote large-scale counter-revolutionary adventures in the semicolonial world. So Imperialism has sent, as in Syria, Putin and Al Assad to do the dirty work, as Zionism does by crushing the Palestinian nation.
The world capitalist system, in its crisis, plunges millions of the exploited in the world into catastrophe. This system, today bankrupt, will not fall by itself. You have to throw it away. The exploiters come for everything. The world working class fights, but it is time for our struggles to have a general staff that tells the workers that the victory will only come if we go for all of them. Because the exploiters will only grant even the least of the conquests if they foresee losing everything they have. We, workers already know that every conquest we have achieved - such as an increase in wages or better working conditions - we lose at every step if we do not fight to defeat the enemy class.

The class war is here. The trade war between the imperialist powers and the looting of the semi-colonial world by them includes, as a premise, that they have already begun a speed race to see which one defeats its own working class first and thus is given a free hand for their adventures as “world conquerors”.

But bankrupt capitalism is sustained because it buys a minority composed of labor bureaucrats and aristocrats in all the countries, who act as a real police within the unions and the organizations of struggle of the masses. The treacherous trade union bureaucracy of COSATU is of the same ilk of and as treacherous and surrenderer as the union bureaucracy of the rest of the world.
This is the advantage the exploiters enjoy. The union leaderships and bureaucracies disorganize and surrender from the inside all the struggles of the workers.

In South Africa, the working class engaged in a battle against this plan. In October of 2017 the workers went to the General Strike trying to sweep away the hated Zuma government and all the institutions of the Reconciliation regime. But this struggle was diverted by the COSATU to a march of pressure on the parliament to sack the president. The parliament ignored this "request" from COSATU, whose only interest was to prevent the masses with their independent actions from overthrowing the government and opening the way with their battles towards the workers' and socialist revolution. At that time the NUMSA, unfortunately, did not call the workers' rank and file to conquer assemblies in all the factories and other workplaces and vote a national struggle committee that organizes the fight because for the workers to defeat the government with their struggle. So NUMSA stayed thus powerless to dispute the leadership of the workers movement to the COSATU bureaucracy. This is a lesson we must draw in order to strengthen  our struggle for the  general strike on April 25th.

NUMSA leadership has said a great truth: Ramaphosa is a murderer

Months later, when 2018 has already started, before the hatred that continued to grow in the ranks of the exploited, Zuma was led to resign by his peers and instead the office was assumed by his then Vice President, Ramaphosa. Thus imperialism and the black bourgeoisie tried to patch up the regime of Reconciliation to advance their plans of hunger, misery and super exploitation. Irvin Jim (general secretary of NUMSA who called for a Revolutionary Workers Party) said that "NUMSA shares SAFTU's view that Cyril Ramaphosa is a deeply compromised capitalist multimillionaire, with his hands stained with the blood of the 34 victims of Marikana who were shot in cold blood by the state to shield White Monopoly capital in general and Lonmin in particular." Then, the revolutionary socialists add to this, we have to prepare the working class so that they can defeat him in a revolutionary way with their organizations and actions of struggle.

The general strike called for April 25 is a great step forward in that sense, which is why, in addition to the call for all workers' organizations to break with the bourgeoisie and constitute a Committee of National Struggle, it is necessary for the NUMSA to include in its call the imperative need that workers and exploited have to fight to put an end to the government of Ramaphosa in order to get their demands... a government that was voted for by no one but that puppet parliament where they conspire at the back and against the poor people and all the laws against the workers are voted, previously agreed in the embassies of the dominant powers between the CEOS of the AngloAmerican and other imperialist gangs, and their smaller partners of the local bourgeoisie.

For a program of revolutionary action to unify the workers’ ranks throughout the whole Southern Africa

Against the power of those at the top, the power of the exploited must be upheld. The demands that unify us are those that are heard in the clamor of each demonstration: Down with the labor reform! Free water for all the poor people! 12,500 Rands of minimum living wage, moving according to the escalation of inflation! Jobs for all the unemployed! Enough of temporary workers! Equal pay for equal work! Everybody must have a stable job with the wage of the collective agreement! Open the accounting books of all companies! For the workers' control of the mining industry, with workers' board of state owned companies, in mining and all the key branches of the economy!
To conquer bread, work, wages, land, housing, cheap loans for the ruined middle classes: Out with imperialism! Not a single rand to the IMF! Expropriation without compensation of the transnationals, the Anglo-American, the mines, the land and the banks and place them under workers' control! Single state bank under workers' control; foreign trade monopoly! There is the money to grant cheap loans to the small merchants and ruined peasants! There is the money for public, free and high quality education and health! There's the money to build houses and a public works plan! Debt condonation for the poor!
Only the working class expropriating imperialism and the new black bourgeoisie can guarantee an emergency workers' plan and thus take the masses out of their suffering. To do so, they must arm themselves, set up the Workers' and People's Councils, the committees of ordinary soldiers, the workers' and popular militias, to expropriate the bourgeoisie and destroy their power. Out with Ramaphosa and the ANC! Down with the regime of Reconciliation! Down with the officer caste of the Pretoria army! Out with the imperialist pirates from South Africa! Government of the workers and popular organizations based on the self-determination and armament bodies of the masses in struggle! For a Workers' and Socialist Black Republic!

A revolutionary workers party in South Africa needs
a program to fight for the victory of the socialist revolution
Two possible alternatives: Either a party that submits itself to the capitalist gangs and ends up being a new fraud for the exploited who face the Reconciliation regime and the ANC government and its chiefs, the Anglo-American, IMF and other imperialist pirates.
Or a Party that calls on the workers' organizations to break with the bourgeoisie, and the working class to set up the self-determination and direct democracy bodies to defeat the labor reform, expropriate imperialism and the black bourgeoisie and conquer the land, the water and national independence for all.

There can be no room for misunderstandings. Mandela and the ANC’s “Freedom Charter” was no more than a deception by which the black bourgeoisie submitted the working class. This question is decisive because it has to do with the strategy, the program, the struggle of the working class and the construction of its revolutionary party.
We insist, there can be no ambiguities or half-measures, let alone when the capitalists have waged a brutal war against the workers. They should be told the truth. What democracy did Mandela and the ANC and the union leaders who betrayed one by one the struggles for the liberation of black Africa are speaking about? "Pure democracy", in general, does not exist. It is a deception. Democracy is always a class democracy.
As Lenin said, "Unless you want to mock common sense and history, of course you cannot talk about 'pure democracy' as there are different classes; you can only talk about class democracy (...) 'Pure democracy' is a lie of a liberal who dupes the workers. History knows the bourgeois democracy, which comes after feudalism, and the proletarian democracy that replaces the bourgeois democracy (...) The bourgeois democracy, which constitutes a great historical progress compared to the Middle Ages, always remains - and it cannot be otherwise under capitalism- narrow, amputated, false, hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a trap and deception for the exploited, for the poor."
For this reason, we consider it a totally mistaken and confusing formulation made by the NUMSA comrades when they state: "The ANC government will only be able to sustain this program if it implements the Freedom Charter in its entirety. The resolution to expropriate land without compensation which was adopted at the ANC’s national conference last month will have to be implemented with speed..." " ...Unfortunately, the ANC has a long history of failig to implement the resolutions adopted at its conferences. We remain highly skeptical until we see decisive action on the part of the governing party in this regard. "

Because it is not about maintaining the same program as the ANC. Stalinism, Mandela and the black bourgeoisie did not betray the "Freedom Charter" but instead ruled with it, enriched themselves with it and strengthened the submission of our nation to imperialism with double and triple chains.

What revolutionaries cannot do is to betray socialism, that is, the government of the working class and their allies: the rural and city workers and poor, which constitute 90% of the nation.
In the new party that the NUMSA is calling for, the defense of the Freedom Charter will be simply the bridge through which the Communist Party traitors -who want to wash their dirty clothes from selling out the workers and their allies- will enter the new revolutionary party; through that bridge there will also enter the pseudo socialists, the "anticapitalists" in word and servants of the bourgeoisie in the facts; both of whom will make the bourgeoisie enter to subjugate the workers.
When the ship sinks, those who sailed yesterday seek to get off quickly and, behind the scenes and behind of the working-class fighters, what they are trying to do is a new ANC that saves the businesses of the bourgeoisie when they collapse before the eyes of the workers of the world.

We insist. Those who call to set up a Revolutionary Party, cannot  reiterate the formulas of "The Freedom Charter" (adopted at the People's Congress, Kliptown, June 26, 1955), which states that "all men and women will have the right to vote and stand as candidates for all bodies that make laws; All persons shall have the right to participate in the administration of the country; The rights of the people will be the same, regardless of their race, color or sex; All the organs of the minority, advisory councils, councils and authorities will be replaced by democratic self-government bodies." Actually, the only freedom that the workers in the republic have from the Freedom Charter is the freedom to die of hunger. It is in those “democratic organs of self-government” that the new black bourgeoisie regrouped their forces to plunder business and to starve the people.

What the Freedom Charter says is a lie. It is a deception. No serious worker with a class conscience can believe it. The "rights of the people" are not the same for all, neither in South Africa nor in the world. The workers, the slaves, the unemployed, the immigrants do not have the same rights as the bourgeois and rich of this country. They do not have the same rights as the managers of the transnationals, the corrupt politicians and the white generals of Pretoria under the orders of the Pentagon and Wall Street.

The revolutionary socialists affirm that when the black bourgeoisie had the first opportunity to govern, usurping the power that was given to it by the working class whose vanguard was at the heart of the struggle against Apartheid -as the NUMSA comrades say very correctly-, they agreed with imperialism on the new ways of plundering the nation and exploiting workers. The reason is the black bourgeoisie knows very well that their class interests are contrary to the interests of the proletariat; that is why Stalinism was responsible for making the workers movement swallow the lie that there could be a nation with "equal rights" without defeating imperialism and its junior partners of the native bourgeoisie by the way of revolution.

The autochthonous bourgeoisie -as demonstrated by Mandela- is incapable of confronting imperialism, because it has one and a thousand ties that bind it to the imperialist bourgeoisie in all the businesses of plundering and looting the nation. The local bourgeois are "brave" when repressing the workers, but totally cowardly when it comes to even imagining having to fight in a struggle against imperialism; because they know that for this they must mobilize the masses, which in the dynamics of the struggle will not only attack the imperialists’ private property and expropriate them, but will do so against the whole of the capitalists, including the perverse and black bourgeoisie. What Stalinism and the reformist left propose is an alliance of the working class with the bourgeoisie, which means that workers give in to their demands and stop fighting against the bosses. The workers fight for the worker and popular alliance, where the proletariat rises as the leader of the oppressed nation, gaining that place through the street combat against the bourgeoisie.
The labor movement has nothing that ties it to imperialism or its servants of the South African bourgeoisie; it only has chains to break. This is the reason why the working and popular masses of South Africa need as their leadership one that calls them to set up their self-determination, armament and direct democracy bodies to conquer their political independence and do not leave stone on stone of the bourgeois power, its state and band of armed men; so conquering power for the exploited, to solve the pending tasks that the bourgeois democracy of semi-colonial South Africa could not and will not solve: expelling and expropriating imperialism, achieving national independence and recovering the land for the poor people. This is the path to take firm steps for the workers’ and socialist revolution. 

We must break with the Communist Party, which has betrayed all of our struggles;
it is the undertaker of the workers' states and the supporters of
Al Assad and Putin in the genocide against the Syrian people

In other of his sentences, Irvin Jim states the following: "... Furthermore, the ANC has been enabled in its corruption by the leadership of the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the trade union federation COSATU who actively continue to mislead members of the working class into supporting their worst butchers, for their own selfish narrow political agenda.” Starting from this point of coincidence, then, the revolutionary socialists affirm that it is necessary to call the whole of the working class, and the COSATU base in particular, to break with Stalinism and the Communist Party; what would lead the workers to sweep away the ANC and its government, since the PC and the bureaucracy are part of it. Because we are not facing "selfish narrow politics" -a question in which we differ with the comrades of NUMSA-, but the  main counterrevolutionary leadership together with the social democracy. It is a traitor of the WORLD working class; for the Communist Parties are the surrenderers of the greatest conquests of the international proletariat, such as the USSR and the working states of Eastern Europe. They are who handed over China as a sweat-shop of millions of workers for the sake of the export of the imperialist transnationals. They are the ones who have given Cuba to Obama and the US establishment who today with Trump can see the star spangled banner flag fluttering in Havana. They are the ones that have supported all the regimes and governments of the black bourgeoisies that expropriated the anti-colonial struggle from us; THEY ARE THE ONES THAT WITH THE PKK BROKE THE MILITARY FRONT OF THE SYRIAN MASSES AND SUPPORTED THE SYRIAN GENOCIDE perpetrated by Al Assad and Putin, on behalf of the USA and other ruling powers.

 The emergence of the "New Left" in South Africa must be prevented!

We know that currents that speak of the "New Left" such as the ISO, the SWP, and other minority groups, have written their positions relying on the program of "The Freedom Charter", which is no other than the same that they raise under the nickname of "Real Democracy" on which Stalinists, renegades of Trotskyism and various Social Democrats ally themselves in the same spaces with supposedly "progressive" bourgeois. Their program tells the workers that "by fighting for more democracy we can conquer our demands"; while it has already been historically demonstrated that even to reach the elementary democratic demands of any semi-colony, as it is to break the political, economic and military agreements with imperialism, to conquer national independence and land for the poor people, it is necessary for the working class to impose its own power with the method of the workers' and socialist revolution. These parties, whose referents are the Syriza in Greece (today ruling party) and the Podemos in the Spanish State have become, when not the direct applicators of imperialism and bankers’ plans, a new obstacle that the proletariat and the exploited must overcome to have prospects of success.

Against the postulates of the New Left and its vile deceptions of the workers' and youth's vanguard, the revolutionary socialists affirm that the question of power, of insurrection and revolution on the part of the working class leading all the exploited in South Africa, is a fundamental point in any program of a "Revolutionary Workers Party". Without considering this objective there will be no "Revolutionary Workers Party", because it will not be anti-imperialist or anti-capitalist, it will be a party that prepares for times of peace and elections and not for the class war that the bourgeoisie and its agents have declared to the workers' movement and the exploited.

Open the way to militant internationalism!

The workers' movement in South Africa must be re-founded on the basis of resuming the proletarian internationalism that the Stalinists undertook to destroy by supporting sectors of the bourgeoisie or recycling themselves as a new bourgeoisie. Recovering militant internationalism must be a question of life and death for the working class in any part of the world. The bourgeoisie could prevent the triumph of the revolution in the Maghreb and the Middle East, and today it comes for everything in South Africa. No doubt that if they finish crushing the heroic Syrian revolution, we will get worse and worse in Africa, Europe, the United States and the rest of the world.
The working class must recover its militant internationalism to face the class war that the bourgeoisie has declared. We workers do not have a fatherland, only chains to be broken; we face the same enemies on both sides of the border. The Black workers are treated like second-hand workers, because in the same places that we were treated as slaves centuries ago, today we continue to do the worst jobs with the lowest salaries and terrible working conditions. That is why our strength is not tied to any Black bourgeois, but to the world working class, starting with our class brothers from the United States and Europe who in France face the labor reform in the streets. The revolution of the Black exploited is attempting to break through, with the workers and exploited of the United States that fight against the murders by the police, yesterday under Obama and today under Trump, with the Black Lives Matter movement, the movement for a minimum wage of $ 15 an hour; with the Black organizations that fight to free themselves as a nation, and with the Black workers exploited in imperialist Europe.

In South Africa, Zimbabwe, the Congo, etc., the working class of southern Africa is standing up, facing imperialism and the governments of the "liberation movements" that gave up the anti-colonial struggle to become minor partners and employees of transnational imperialist corporations. It is urgent to centralize the forces of the rebellion of the Black working class throughout the south of the continent: For a congress of workers' organizations from all over Southern Africa! To break with imperialism, to overthrow the Black bourgeoisie, recover the land and national independence and to make emerge the true Black, workers’ and socialist republics of Southern Africa.

The forces for this have already emerged; they are in the streets, in the mines, in the countryside, in those who fight for water, and especially in the dock workers of South Africa, who against the direction of COSATU refused to embark cargo for the Zionist state of Israel in solidarity with the Palestinian masses and their struggle. There, deep within the working class is the true tradition of the struggle against Apartheid, that regime of opprobrium that supported the Zionist state of Israel.

To take steps towards the unity and internationalist coordination of the working class, from the NUMSA it is necessary to call CONLUTAS and the Trade Union Network with 80 unions from dozens of countries to carry out coordinated actions in support of the Syrian masses, who suffer from brutal genocide on the part of Assad and Putin, under the command of Trump and other imperialist murderers. It is not possible that representatives of dozens of unions meet and do not call at the same time in different parts of the planet for an international plan of struggle to confront the imperialist pirates, the native bourgeois and the traitorous bureaucrats who tie our hands country by country and prevent us from fighting to defeat the capitalists. The example to follow is the strike of the stevedores of the Spanish State that beat the bosses with the help of the coordinated struggle of the workers of all the European ports in their support. Or that of the thousands of young people and workers from Libya, Tunisia and all the Maghreb and Middle East who left their countries to go and fight with the Syrian people against the genocidal tyrant and the imperialist octopi.

From the FLTI that is fighting together with the Syrian,the Maghreb and the Middle Eastmasses; the workers of Latin America, the Pacific Rim, Europe and South Africa, we want to make the NUMSA workers receive our contribution to the debate established around their appeal to the construction of a "Revolutionary Workers Party". Well, we want to make known among the fierce South African working class and against "The Freedom Charter" and its policy of class collaboration, the program of Trotskyism -the revolutionary Marxism of our time that many pseudo leftists have long since abandoned to become nurses of capitalism-. In its “Permanent Revolution” theory/program Trotskyism affirms that,"With respect to the countries of delayed bourgeois development, and in particular the colonial and semicolonial ones, the theory of permanent revolution means that the integral and effective resolution of their democratic aims and their national emancipation can only be conceived through the dictatorship of the proletariat, where the latter is wielding power as the leader of the oppressed nation and, above all, of its peasant masses.
The agrarian problem, and with it the national problem, assign to the peasants, who constitute the overwhelming majority of the population of the backward countries, an exceptional position in the democratic revolution. Without the alliance of the proletariat with the peasants, the objectives of the democratic revolution not only cannot be realized, but even be seriously posed. However, the alliance of these two classes is only feasible by fighting irreconcilably against the influence of the liberal-national bourgeoisie".
This is the party that the South African working class and the entire region need to succeed. A revolutionary internationalist party that will emerge as a product of the struggle of the workers of the world to re-found the Fourth International, the world party of THE WORKERS’ AND SOCIALIST REVOLUTION.

 Collective for the Refoundation of the
Fourth International – FLTI

Workers International League (WIL),
 of Zimbabwe.