1 July 2023
Saturday 1 July 2023 is an International Day of Co-operatives, first celebrated over a century ago and proclaimed by the United Nations Assembly in 1995. Co-operatives, as associations and enterprises jointly owned and democratically controlled by their members, have a great potential to mobilise and organise people to work together to address their social, economic, and cultural needs.
While the experience of thriving co-operatives from other countries has showed that workers and communities can build their own enterprises and empower themselves, and that capitalist bosses are unnecessary, there is a weakness in government involving poor support for co-operatives or treating them as mere “by the way” in policy attention and enterprise support programmes. This deeply concerns the SACP and needs to change as a matter of urgency, because South Africa will fail to resolve the persistent high levels of racialised and gendered class inequalities, mass unemployment and poverty through capitalist empowerment and associated trickle-down notion.
It is now over a decade since the passing of the national co-operative development strategy. However, co-operatives in South Africa continue to face the same systemic and structural challenges which inhibit the development of a thriving co-operatives sector. The future of the co-operatives sector is hanging in a balance. Affected here are thousands of co-operatives, with over a million members, which were registered after the passing of the co-operatives development legislation and related policy 20 years ago.
The SACP calls for adequate financial and non-financial support for co-operatives, including a major review of the co-operatives development strategy (which has not been implemented) and the co-operatives support institutions provided for in the amended Co-operatives Act of 2013.
We are concerned about the latest moves to dismantle the Co-operative Bank Development Agency. The agency has endured 10 years of under-funding from the National Treasury. This impacted it and its success negatively, also affecting the promotion and growth of the co-operative banking sector in our country.
The SACP will step up its campaign to organise more co-operative banks and other co-operatives, attaching great importance to, but not focusing only on townships and villages.
On this International Co-operative Day, the SACP says:
Let us mobilise and organise worker-owned and community-based co-operatives.
Let us support the establishment of co-operative banks for workers and communities.
Let us build a well organised and powerful progressive co-operative movement.
ISSUED BY THE SOUTH AFRICAN COMMUNIST PARTY | SACP
EST. 1921 AS THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF SOUTH AFRICA | CPSA
Dr Alex Mohubetswane Mashilo:
SACP Central Committee Member, National Spokesperson
Political Bureau Secretary for Policy and Research
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