In this issue:

• Red Alert:The uses and abuses of 'populism'

• Roll Back the Offensive Against the Workers and the Poor!

Red Alert: The uses and abuses of 'populism'

Blade Nzimande, General Secretary

The past week in South Africa has been characterised by significant developments for our country, and especially for the workers and the poor. It was a week that saw major strikes in a number of sectors and rising worker militancy. Equally significant has been the evident public sympathy towards workers' demands in many of these strikes.

This sympathy is directly related to a growing public groundswell of condemnation of gross senior management bonuses and so-called incentives and the thousand other ways in which the bosses in the private and public sectors appropriate the collective wealth of our country for personal gain. There is growing awareness that an arrogant bourgeoisie ' white and black ' is incapable of offering a strategic way forward to address the challenges of our society. The broad public can see that the selfish short-sightedness of the bosses is contributing to a deepening, dangerous and unsustainable polarisation of our society. This public groundswell is not mistaken.

In 1994 workers share of our country's wealth was more than 50% while profits for bosses were some 27%. By 2002, workers' share had dropped to 44%, while operating surplus for the capitalists had INCREASED to 33%. In the new South Africa, capitalists, black and white, have been doing what they always do - they have waged a bitter class struggle against working people.

And this is why the worker militancy of the last weeks must be understood to be about much more than immediate wage demands. It is raising questions about the accumulation trajectory under way in our society, about what kind of growth path is desirable and necessary. It is one thing to aim to achieve a growth of 6%, but there is no guarantee that this growth will contribute to overcoming the dualism of our economy. As the SACP we fully support these legitimate workers' struggles. They are an important platform to build the capacity of organised workers as the leading stratum of the working class as a whole.

Last week, there were also three other important national events - the Conference of the Financial Sector Campaign Coalition, the National Land Summit and the 84th anniversary celebrations of our Party.

The Financial Sector Conference brought together representatives from communities, labour, government and business. The aim of the conference was to evaluate progress made in the transformation of the financial sector to serve the interests of the workers and the poor, and to discuss challenges that lie ahead. The conference noted some progress but concluded that we are still far from creating the kind of financial sector needed to serve the interests of the workers and the poor. For us, as the SACP, the slowness and reluctance with which progress is being made exemplifies how, over the 11 years of our democracy, the capitalist market has proved singularly incapable of addressing the interests of the overwhelming majority of our people. The progress that has been made has been wrung, bitter step by step, through intense struggle and mobilization.

Last week saw the convening of the National Land Summit. It is a summit that had been called for by the SACP and other organizations representing the landless. The holding of this summit and the resolutions adopted mark an important qualitative development for the SACP's Red October Campaign to accelerate land and agrarian transformation. The Summit emerged with far-reaching resolutions, including the rejection of the market-based 'willing seller, willing buyer' principle. The Summit asked government to go back to the drawing board and come up with a new policy, which should include, where appropriate and necessary, land expropriation and the regulation of land prices as part of accelerating land and agrarian transformation. In effect, the summit was acknowledging the failure of the capitalist market to address the needs of the landless of our country.

The ideological counter-offensive

Of course, working class and popular advances will always be met with countervailing opposition. As more and more public opinion swings behind workers, as there is a growing acceptance, across a broad front of formations, of the limitations of the capitalist market, we should not be surprised to find rear-guard resistance and ideological reaction.

In the current situation the ideological reaction often takes the form of belittling the aspirations and demands of workers and the poor. Demands are portrayed as 'unrealistic' and 'ill-considered'. In this ideological counter-offensive, we find the increasing usage of the concept or, more accurately, the label 'populism'.

Historically, particularly within Marxism, 'populism' has been used to refer to the opportunistic exploitation of popular, sometimes demagogic, sentiments with a resonance amongst the masses, without due regard to revolutionary principles, or to sustainable organization and strategy.

Populism has taken many forms in many countries over the last two centuries - it has sometimes assumed a religious, ethnic or tribal character - typically using grievances around poverty and a sense of sectional exclusion. It is usually a process driven by elites, exploiting the problems and prejudices of the masses to advance a short-term political agenda. Populism (we see this in its various Latin American versions in the 20th century) is also often associated with a charismatic leader and a loyal band of followers committed to the person more than to an ideological cause.

In South Africa in the 1980s it was a concept, sometimes a label, used in what came to be known as the 'workerist/populist' debate that raged between and within the United Democratic Front and the trade union movement. The debate reflected the two key dimensions of our liberation struggle, which is simultaneously a struggle against national oppression and class exploitation. While the labels 'populism' and 'workerism' were often used merely polemically and unjustly, the debate did highlight the dangers of an excessive and one-sided emphasis on either class or national mobilization and organization. In the 1980s there was, indeed, a current within the trade union movement that rejected the national struggle, seeing the UDF and the ANC as 'populist' and inherently petit-bourgeois and 'anti-worker'. This ideological approach was 'workerist' or 'syndicalist' - seeing the trade union movement as the key and often as the exclusive means for organizing workers. But there were, also, 'populist' tendencies in the struggle in the 1980s - a tendency to regard townships, for instance, as undifferentiated communities without competing class interests, or a tendency to rely on sheer popular militancy and charismatic leadership figures without regard to sustainable organization.

The clandestine predecessor of this publication (Umsebenzi was re-launched in the underground in 1985) constantly called for a rejection of both populism and workerism, in favour of a working-class led, broad-based national liberation struggle. In our present situation, no doubt, there are also both workerist and populist tendencies and we need to ensure that we overcome the limitations and one-sidedness of both.

So much for the serious use of such terms, but of late we have seen a return of the now very loosely applied label of 'populism', especially in the media. In the 1990s, the media often referred to ANC leaders with a real or perceived popular appeal as 'populist'. There was also the simple and confusing conflation of the label 'left' and the label 'populist'. Cde Chris Hani and Zeph Mothopeng of the PAC were equally and indiscriminately labeled 'left-populists'.

More recently, the media have been using the term 'populist' indiscriminately for those assumed to be 'Jacob Zuma supporters' - it is a convenient label behind which to hide and confuse a diversity of issues (including concerns around internal organizational democracy) that emerged, for instance, at the ANC's important National General Council.

The label is now also increasingly used in attempts to delegitimise genuine working class and popular (as opposed to populist) demands. This is done by contrasting worker and popular demands with supposedly 'realistic' market-friendly policies that have a 'sober appreciation of global and domestic realities'. Our campaign for an amnesty for the two million workers and poor black-listed by the credit bureaux is, of course, a prime target for this ideological counter-offensive label: 'populist'. The same label is also applied to our call for a new model to finance low-cost housing.

Interestingly, three and four years ago our demand for universal access by the poor to the banking system and to affordable financial products was also castigated as 'populist'. Now that we have made decisive advances in this regard, winning the Umzansi bank account, some of those who were accusing us of populism are claiming this as their initiative! (Now THAT'S populism!)

The present ideological counter-offensive also expresses itself through an attempt to project the interests of the capitalist class as 'national interests', whilst the interests of the workers are belittled as 'sectionalist' and 'narrow' and their energetic pursuit is said to be 'populist'. These kinds of arguments lead inexorably to the conclusion that the only 'realistic' way forward is to lower the cost of doing business (for business, of course), amongst other things through lowering the costs of labour (again, for business of course).

Why an amnesty for the black-listed?

We initially floated the call for an amnesty for workers and the poor black-listed by the credit bureaux at our SACP Special National Congress in April this year. We have repeated and intensified the call to mark our 84th SACP anniversary. And we have now already achieved our first objectives in making this admittedly bold demand.

In the last few days, the credit bureaux, which have been hiding inscrutably in the deepest of bunkers, have come stumbling out, hands in the air, crying 'don't shoot, don't shoot ' we're just the messengers.' This is already progress. Our campaign has forced these institutions, often literally holding the power of life and death over poor households, to emerge into the light of day so that we can all see them and hear what they have to say.

What they have to say is, itself, interesting and instructive. They tell us 'apartheid ended eleven years ago', but black-listings only last 3 to 5 years. 'So', they tell us, 'current black-listings have nothing to do with the apartheid past.' Obviously, the credit bureaux seem to think that the legacy of three centuries of colonial dispossession and several decades of apartheid barbarism has nothing whatsoever to do with the present plight of millions of South Africans ' apartheid, after all, 'is dead'.

The second thing that the credit bureaux say is that if the poor get an amnesty the 'stability of the financial sector' will be affected. And here we see the old ploy of separating the stability of our economy from the interests and the needs of millions of citizens. For the credit bureaux stability means stability for financial capital, and not sustainable economic stability for the great majority of South Africans. Do the bureaux honestly imagine that having two million South Africans blacklisted is not hugely destabilizing? These are two million citizens (most with their own wider family and household responsibilities) who are excluded from access to credit, many for trivial amounts and because of exploitative interest rates. This reality is unsustainable and, if you emerge from your bunkers ladies and gentlemen, you will realize that it is profoundly destabilizing.

This crisis is what informs our call for a blacklisting amnesty. It is not a populist call. It is made in all seriousness. How do we imagine that the new Credit Bill before parliament will be able to achieve its intended regulatory impact with this huge back-log of citizens stranded in a black-listed limbo? Yes, specific black-listings might expire after some years, but the impact of a listing will often have driven households into back-door loan-shark indebtedness where interest rates are astronomical. The impact of a listing in the actual conditions of our society is, typically, not a short-term affair, it is often a life (and death) sentence.

Our amnesty call is also not informed by unrealistic expectations or promises. In our popular mobilization we are calling on poor households and communities to be disciplined and realistic. We envisage the amnesty as a one-off measure that enables working class and poor households to get back on their feet. Such an amnesty should also not be seen as an isolated silver bullet. The regulation of the credit bureaux, and of loan-sharks, the overall transformation of the financial sector, job creation, building sustainable households and communities, state-led micro-credit for small businesses, a new model for financing low cost housing, massive land reform - all of these measures need to be seen as part and parcel of an overall attempt to help working class families and communities get up onto their feet in sustainable ways.

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Roll Back the Offensive Against the Workers and the Poor!

SACP 84th anniversary message

As we celebrate the 84th anniversary of the Communist Party in South Africa it is clear that the working people of our country are once more stirring. They are re-affirming their legitimate, central role within our new democracy. The needs and aspirations of workers and the urban and rural poor must be at the centre of everything - if not, there will be no sustainable growth, no sustainable development, no sustainable democracy in our country.

This is what millions of workers said on June 27th in the COSATU-led national stayaway for jobs and against mass retrenchments.

This is what SAA workers and staff have been saying in their strike action that has caught an arrogant management by surprise.

This is what Pick n Pay workers have been saying to their bosses - you cannot expect to make unprecedented profits out of the hard work of your employees, and then award yourselves all kinds of perks, incentives and bonuses, while workers passively agree.

This is what municipal workers are saying. This is what teachers and health-workers have been saying.

This is what ANC branch delegates to the July ANC national general council were affirming when they sang: 'Asifuni iagenda yama-capitalist'.

And this, interestingly, is what an increasing spectrum of broad public opinion is also beginning to understand. More and more there is the recognition that economic stabilisation and modest growth over the last decade has brought untold wealth to a privileged few, while the wage-gap increases, and hundreds of thousands of workers are rendered unemployed or casualised.

Increasingly broad public anger is directed, not at striking workers, but at management. Perhaps for the first time in our country, during the teachers and health-workers strike, there was broad public support for the demands of these public sector workers. In the past week, even the Business Day and Business Report are pointing fingers at SAA management and not workers.

The public groundswell is growing against gross senior management bonuses and so-called incentives and the thousand other ways in which the bosses in the private and public sector appropriate the collective wealth of our country for personal gain. There is growing awareness that an arrogant bourgeoisie ' white and black ' is incapable of offering a strategic way forward to address the challenges of our society. There is a growing public awareness that the bosses can only think as far as their own pockets. This public groundswell is not mistaken.

In 1994 workers share of our country's wealth was more than 50% while profits for bosses were some 27%.

By 2002, workers' share had dropped to 44%, while operating surplus for the capitalists had INCREASED to 33%.

In the new South Africa, capitalists, black and white, have been doing what they always do ? they have waged a bitter class struggle against working people.

This is why the SACP says: LET US DEFEAT THE OFFENSIVE OF THE BOSSES AGAINST THE WORKERS AND THE POOR!

BUILD WORKERS' POWER NOW!

An amnesty for workers and poor black-listed by the credit bureaux In celebrating our 84th SACP anniversary, as part of our contribution to the struggle of working people and the poor, this year we are highlighting the plight of more than two million South Africans black-listed by the Credit Bureaux. The great majority of us who are black-listed are workers and poor.

We are the victims of high-interest rates, of loans sharks, of retrenchments, of a widening wage gap, of unscrupulous credit practices by retailers - we must be given a once-off amnesty. We must be given a chance to get back on our feet.

Credit bureaux and their industry associations seem to think it is no problem that more than two million borrowers are blacklisted and cannot access credit. This blacklisting affects not just those of us directly blacklisted, but our families and dependents as well. It is possible that some 10 million South Africans, a quarter of our population, are affected.

This is a national crisis. We call on government to intervene on the side of the poor. In the past decade, government's well-intentioned schemes to extend credit, especially micro-loans, to the poor have not achieved the results hoped for. This has led to the emergence of an extensive and unscrupulous micro-lending industry, with mashonisas charging exorbitant interest.

Practices of this kind have left millions of poor borrowers caught in debt traps and blacklisted by credit bureaux. We fully support government's commitment to adopting a new credit policy and to implementing laws that will remedy these shortcomings.

Government's research shows that in our country over R360bn is provided in credit every year. But the poor pay far more interest for the little credit that they get - in fact the lowest income earners pay an average interest rate that is SEVEN times more than that paid by the rich. High income earners pay an interest rate of around 26% on average for their credit. The lowest income earners pay an incredible 175% average interest rate!

No wonder millions of our people are caught in debt spirals and end up blacklisted. It is time to wipe the slate clean and close this chapter of massive exploitation of the poor.

In calling for an amnesty for the blacklisted we are not calling for a sentimental or charitable gesture. It is a necessary step to ensure the success of the new National Credit legislation currently tabled in parliament as a bill. The new credit bill requires credit bureaux to provide consumers with their own personal credit profiles free of charge and to verify all information they sell. We welcome these measures, but they are just the beginning of transforming this sector.

We demand a new financing model for low-cost housing

In addition to an amnesty for the black-listed, we are also calling on government and the banks to develop a different model for the financing of loans for low-cost housing.

As a result of our collective financial sector struggles, the banks have now committed to providing R42 billion to finance low-cost housing in our country. This is the first time ever that South African mainstream banks have committed themselves on this scale to funding low-cost housing. But the banks will want the interest on this funding to be paid by working class households on a compound interest basis. This is much more burdensome and costly for families than interest that is calculated as simple interest. There is absolutely no reason (apart from profit-maximisation) that low-cost housing loans should be based on the most expensive model. If the R42-billion commitment is to have a real impact, and if it is to be sustainable for working class families, then a different model must be developed.

Unrealistic?

But some will say these are unrealistic demands. To these sceptics we have two answers. The first is: why should there be amnesties, debt relief and special financial vehicles for some, but not for the millions of poor of our country?

Through the TRC process we have given an amnesty to some of the worst apartheid-era killers and torturers.
have given an amnesty to the wealthy who illegally took their money out of the country.
now, there is talk of baling out President Mugabe with a huge South African loan to make sure that he is not black-listed by the IMF. Private sector economists assure us that there are billions of rand available for this bale-out and that it should not affect our economy.
As an SACP we have not in principle opposed any of these interventions. But if these things can be done, then there is absolutely no moral or financial reason why the black-listed poor of our country should not also enjoy an amnesty and debt relief.

Victories are possible

Our second response to the sceptics comes from our own experience with the financial sector campaign. When we first began this campaign we were told by our opponents - and even by some of our friends - that our immediate demands were 'unrealistic'. But through mobilisation, through collective activism, through engagement with our colleagues in government, through participation in NEDLAC, through hundreds of local-level pickets, marches and demonstrations, together we have begun to win some of our demands.

Over the last 12 months our financial sector campaign has notched some important victories.

In October 2004, exactly four years since the launch of our Red October campaign for the transformation of the financial sector, the major capitalist banks announced the launch of a new affordable bank account for workers and the poor - the Mzansi account. This was in direct response to our struggle for universal access to affordable banking and other financial services for millions of us excluded from these services in the past. The Mzansi account now stands at more than 1 million new customers, 56% of whom are women.

In addition, the Financial Sector Charter Council, made up of community representatives, labour, government and business was formally constituted towards the end of last year. This Council is an important platform through which to continue to wage our struggles, to supplement ongoing mobilisation, and to hold the capitalist financial institutions to account on how they are responding to the challenge of provision of finance for development.

We have already mentioned the Bill in Parliament to regulate the Credit Bureaux and to force greater transparency upon them.

We have also already mentioned the capitalist financial sector's commitment to provide R42 billion to finance low-cost housing - the first time ever that South African mainstream banks have committed themselves to funding low-cost housing on this scale.

Let us be very clear. These are all partial victories that we have wrung out of a reluctant profit-maximising, capitalist financial sector. Every victory requires ongoing vigilance and mobilization. The banks will do everything to slow-down, half implement, or even 'forget' their commitments.

The lesson we draw from our partial victories is not that capitalist banks are well-meaning and generous benefactors. The lesson we draw is that with popular mobilization and constructive pressure on government we CAN roll back the capitalist financial sector, and force it to meet the needs of workers and the poor. But this is an ongoing class struggle.

WE DEMAND: An amnesty for blacklisted!

WE DEMAND: A new model for financing low-cost housing!

ROLL BACK THE OFFENSIVE AGAINST THE WORKERS AND POOR! BUILD WORKING CLASS POWER NOW!