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Mondli Makhanya’s article last week, Dear Saftu, please grow up (City Press, November 4 2018), opens with some faint praise for the SA Federation of Trade Unions (Saftu) for bringing in “a breath of fresh air” and asserting that “Saftu has done very well in its young life”.
However, it soon degenerates into crude insults – that “Saftu has behaved like a brat pack of ideologues whose knee-jerk reaction to everything is to reject. Using ideologically laced language and ideologically loaded logic, it says no to all initiatives aimed at fixing the country.”
The federation categorically rejects this and the author’s failure to make any serious analysis of his views.
It is not Saftu that is “not engaging with the subject in a cogent manner”, but Makhanya himself.
Saftu is always prepared to engage in discussions on “fixing the country”, but will never simply go along with bogus “solutions” from the very capitalists who are responsible for the massive problems of unemployment, poverty and inequality.
That is why the federation reacted so angrily to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s statement that it was time for South Africa to do away with vilifying businesspeople, that the label white monopoly capital should be discarded and that job-creating entrepreneurs should be treated as heroes.
Makhanya is exceptionally aggrieved at Saftu labelling business as the “class enemy of the unemployed, the poor and the hungry in the country”, and that it would “campaign even more aggressively to condemn the exploiters and profiteers who have led South Africa into an economic catastrophe and inflicted misery on to the poor majority”.
Makhanya dismisses this as “a silly riposte that just seemed to be done for the sake of making a noise”.
Yet there is overwhelming evidence of such an economic catastrophe.
Unemployment stands at 37.3% by the expanded definition. Almost 10 million people are unemployed, 30.4 million are living in poverty, 26% of people go hungry every day and this is the most unequal society on the planet!
How could we possibly not describe this as “a catastrophe”? As City Press’ renowned columnist Terry Bell puts it in the same edition: “The South African economy is well and truly up the creek.”
And why should we not lay the blame on those responsible – the white monopoly capitalist class and ANC leaders who have presided over this catastrophe for 24 years?
Evidence that the country is indeed ruled by a capitalist class was seen at the recent SA Investment Conference, at which the president was forced to cajole business leaders to invest money in the country.
It is shocking that an ANC president has to admit that the only way out of the economic crisis is to beg from the very capitalist class that caused it in the first place, and who have been on a “strike of capital” for decades.
The reason Saftu calls these people the “class enemy” is that all this wealth being donated would not exist but for the exploitation of the labour of the working class, who create the surplus value that is expropriated by their employers as profits.
Not only do employers pay a fraction of the wealth produced to their workers in wages, they are constantly looking for ways to cut their wage bill even further.
“Much more insidious,” adds Bell, “is the fact that government was long ago captured ideologically by what has variously been dubbed the Washington Consensus or neoliberalism, a system that serves the interests of big business. Trade unions and human rights groups have long maintained that this system has led to the obscene wage and welfare gap, and increased hunger and homelessness in a world of plenty.”
Evidence that the economy is heavily monopolised comes from economist Neva Makgetla of Trade & Industrial Policy Strategies.
He says that about 600 companies – out of 700 000 registered for tax – account for two-thirds of all company income, measured by paid tax. On the JSE, 20 companies hold 80% of listed assets.
Evidence that capitalism is still racially skewed came in this year’s City Press Wealth Index.
It showed that the 50 richest people, worth R323 billion collectively, are largely white and male, and, in the past 10 years, the dominance of white men has increased rather than fallen.
Read: Wealth Index: SA’s corporate elite – whiter than ever
In 2008, 13 black people appeared on the list of the top 50 wealthiest executives and board members of JSE-listed companies. Now, there are just five out of 50!
Yet, despite all this evidence that Saftu’s views are correct, Makhanya objects when we say that “this crisis-ridden capitalist system has to be replaced by a new growth path based on the nationalisation of the mines, banks and industrial monopolies, and to build a new democratic socialist order in which the wealth created by the labour of the working class is owned, controlled and shared by the working people and not a superrich capitalist elite”.
Makhanya concludes with a statement of his own that Saftu cannot disagree with – that “there is a country to be rebuilt, problems to be solved, an economy to be revived and a society to be repaired”.
Yes, but Saftu is confident that its socialist policies are the only way we can achieve any of this.
. Chavalala is president of the SA Federation of Trade Unions
