This platform for community struggle and action is the first of four that outline a common platform and a programme of action the MWP proposes for each of the three main theatres of struggle we have identified: communities, workers, students and youth. We are also adding a platform and programme of action for women.
In this community platform, we explain why MWP believes these platforms are critical as a first step towards uniting the struggles of the working class at a local level and then building up to regional, provincial, and national levels for each theatre of struggle.
We provide a brief overview of the history of service delivery protests, their number, and their frequency over time, which has earned South Africa the accolade of protest capital of the world. We draw attention to the fact that because these struggles take place in isolation from each other, their potential power is weakened. This has enabled the Government to largely ignore them. We believe uniting these struggles requires a common platform.
All the struggles in each separate theatre are ultimately bound together by a common thread – the ANC-led Government of National Unity’s neo-liberal capitalist policies. Since its formation the GNU has embarked on a much more clearly coordinated attack on the working class across all areas of service delivery as well as conscious attempts to divide the working class and to weaken the defences of the organised workers in both the private and the public sector.
The unification of the struggle in each theatre can simultaneously serve as the assembly of the forces and laying the foundation for unity of struggle on the political plane under the banner of a mass workers party that serves the interest of the working class. The MWP believes in the necessity for a mass workers’ party on a socialist programme because there are no lasting solutions to the problems workers and the poor face under the capitalist system. Communities can, therefore, use the platforms to forge this unity to bridge the struggles for reforms and the fight against the capitalist system itself. As a first step, there is a need to break the isolation of separate struggles and build a formidable force that the Government and big business cannot ignore.
The community platform also sets out the context within which these struggles occur. It explains the economic roots of the problems that communities, workers, women, students, and youth face. The GNU represents the common commitment of all its coalition partners to placing the burden of the economic crisis of capitalism on the shoulders of the working class. This crisis is the accumulated result of the policies pursued by the ANC Government since it first came to power in 1994. The imposition of the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) strategy in 1996, followed a decade of a systematic retreat from the more radical, albeit social democratic rather than socialist clauses of the Freedom Charter. The Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) on which the ANC campaigned for the 1994 elections was no more than a half way house toward the full frontal assault on the working class that GEAR represented.
Communities can use the platform to propose a set of demands to develop a programme of action around the critical issues they are confronting, such as housing, water, electricity, and other services, that the communities themselves must decide how to prioritise.
Over the next few months, the MWP will publish platforms and programmes of action for the three remaining theatres of struggle for workers, students and youth as well develop one for the womens’ struggle.
If you agree with us and would like to join us in building a united socialist civic federation across the country, sign up below and to access the programme please go to:
