6-22-05,9;42am

The ANC's mid-term National General Council is upon us. This is indeed a very important gathering of our movement, coming as it does as we move deeper into the second decade of our freedom. The SACP appreciates that we have been invited to participate actively in the NGC. It is an opportunity for frank and open reflection on our collective strengths, weaknesses and on the challenges facing our entire movement (including allied formations). There must be no holy cows. As a contribution to the process, we have brought out this special edition of Umsebenzi Online.

In this edition we publish an analysis of the challenges facing our movement. We also publish SACP discussion notes on two of the ANC NGC documents. Our interventions are direct and frank, and we trust that that they will contribute to a comradely debate at the NGC and beyond.

In our discussion papers we deal with a wide range of general issues. But the forthcoming NGC also takes place against the immediate background of the withdrawal from office of the second most senior office-bearer in government and in the ANC, cde Jacob Zuma. Cde Zuma will now be formally charged with corruption. Whatever our views on these developments, it is obvious that they pose a very serious challenge for our movement, and they will need to be managed in a unifying, non-factionalist manner. We must all approach the forthcoming NGC with a solid commitment to deepen the unity of our movement. It is a conjuncture that calls for soberness, political clarity and a struggle against all forms of pettiness. It is important to ensure that we do not lose sight of the core strategic challenges facing our revolution at this juncture. As we enter the second decade of our freedom, the working class is embarking on a major mobilization drive and struggles to contest the current, brutal capitalist accumulation path that still grinds on in our country. It is a trajectory that has shed over a million jobs, without creating nearly sufficient new jobs. This last week COSATU - our ally and largest trade union federation in our country - launched its jobs and poverty campaign, with nationwide pickets in shopping malls, protesting the failure by the major clothing retailers to source their products locally. This is to be followed by a national stayaway and marches in the major centres of our country from Monday 27 June 2005.

In previous editions of Umsebenzi Online we have pledged our full support to this action, which is scheduled to roll-on for the next nine months. On our side we have started mobilization of all our Party structures to ensure that this rolling mass action is a success. The NGC must itself reflect upon the key issues that are being raised by the trade union movement.

The NGC also takes place against the backdrop of the forthcoming G8 Summit. We are already being lectured to by some in the financial media, we are being told that we should do all the 'right' things to ensure that the G8 countries 'reward' us with investments. There are ideological forces in our country, like the DA, whose entire political programme is premised on genuflecting to the G8. Whether it is the developments around cde Zuma or worker rights, these forces do not give our local challenges their own value and dignity - they are all conceptualized as useful sacrifices to the G8, tokens of our compliance. These forces do not look at their own country with the eyes of South Africans, but always through the lens of messrs. Standard and Poor. Of course, we have been here before. In the latter part of the 1990s, we were told that getting the macro-economic 'fundamentals' would be richly rewarded with huge flows of foreign investment. We are still waiting.

We are not arguing that we can somehow insulate ourselves entirely from global realities. But to seek to meekly and uncritically ingratiate ourselves with imperialism, without simultaneously seeking to mobilize our own domestic resources, using the domestic political balance of forces favourable to the national democratic bloc of forces, will simply take us back to where we have been over the last 11 years. We are pleased that government's recent policy thrust is now much more towards this more balanced approach. A critical challenge of the NGC, therefore, is (as we note in one of the papers published here) to mobilize the 'collective power of millions of workers and rural and urban poor, whose collective strength has defeated the most obdurate and entrenched of colonial systems in Africa'.

For our part as the SACP we will strive to contribute towards building a strong ANC and a strong Alliance, based on advancing the interests of the workers and the poor as a basis for advancing the rest of society. We will contribute to this by escalating our own mass mobilization around our major campaigns on land, the financial sector and the building of co-operatives. It is absolutely clear, as our Special Congress in April noted, that further decisive advances in our national democratic revolution can only be made through the intensified mobilization of the key motive forces of the national democratic revolution. We believe this should be one of the key tasks for the NGC, building a campaigning ANC rooted in the mass of the people on the ground, the key motive forces of the revolution.

--Blade Nzimande is General Secretary of the South African Communist Party.