The South African Communist Party wishes all South Africans, and working people around the world a happy new year, and a 21st century that will see equality, freedom and solidarity nurtured more thoroughly than they have been in the 20th century. As we end this decade and this century there are grounds for hope, but also for concern.
The democratic breakthrough in our own country, powered by the struggles of millions of
ordinary people, continues to be a dynamic factor, not just within our country, but in our
region, our continent, and indeed internationally. The aspirations kindled by our
struggle must be kept in play, and the unity of the national liberation movement must be
fostered. Within South Africa much still needs to be achieved. The racial bastions
of power, privilege and wealth have been breached, but the deep inequality of our society
remains, and new inequalities are developing.
Structural unemployment persists, and as South Africa’s economy has, inevitably,
become more exposed to global market forces, so the resolution of our unemployment crisis
becomes more difficult.
Globally, the 1990s have ended on a note quite different from that on which they began. We have traveled, in the space of a decade, from an extreme of capitalist triumphalism, occasioned by the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the implosion of the old Soviet Union, to the WTO Seattle Round.
While capitalism remains, by far, the hegemonic system internationally and within our
country, its untrammeled domination is meeting with more and more opposition. It is
an opposition that comes from those who are concerned with the profit-driven destruction
of our environment, and from those who, perhaps out of religious conviction, are deeply
concerned about the Zama
Zama, casino, “free market” values pervading every domain of our lives. It
is an opposition increasingly expressed by democratic governments in the South alarmed
that, in this past decade, eighty countries have become poorer than at the beginning of
the 1990s, despite all the promises about the new globalisation
“free-way”. And it is an opposition that comes
from those millions around the world who have lost the prospect of ever having a decent
job. For us, the most important lesson at the end of this decade and century is that
capitalism is incapable of addressing even the most basic of needs for millions of
ordinary people throughout the world. Instead all indications point to worsening poverty
and disease as capitalist
globalisation deepens.
Many of these forces struggling against capitalist barbarism may not see themselves as
socialists, but as the SACP we believe that we are all fundamentally in the same
trench. We sincerely hope that the coming century will see much greater moral and
political unity between all forces and individuals who hold dear the basic values of human
equality,
freedom and solidarity.
In the light of all this the SACP is firmly of the view that the three most important challenges facing humanity in the coming period is the eradication of poverty and exploitation, the creation of mass-based and people-driven democracies as well as the fight against the Aids pandemic.
We should use this historic moment of the dawning of a new decade and
century as an opportunity to take forward these struggles, including the elimination of
gender and racially based inequalities. In particular, the struggle to eradicate poverty
on our continent, in order to make this century truly a century of the African working
people and the poor.
3 January 2000
Issued by the SACP Department of Information & Publicity
E-Mail: sacp1@wn.apc.org
South African Communist Party Head Office
COSATU House No. 1 Leyds Street
7th Floor Braamfontein 2001
Republic of South Africa
(Tel: 27 11 339-3621/2)
(Fax: 27 11 339-4244)