FACES Pressing for freedom: a 1999 SWAPO rally in Katatura November 29 rally. Here we are reproducing his speech entitled 'Socialism and the new world order'. FOR US, the oppressed in South Africa, the new world order means a continuation of the misery, suffering and plunder that international capt al has bestowed on our people for over three centuries.
The international bourgeois media tell us that apartheid is dying, but there is no dancing in the streets of South Africa.
Yes, our organisations are unbanned and our leaders are free; but fear walks our streets, and death catches a free ride on our Over 15,000 people have been killed in South África since the sig nailing of the new world order. We find ourselves walking to the graveyard when we thought wi rould be walking along the road of peace.
Bantustan puppets
The national situation in South Africa is shaped and dominated by the government's reform project and the urging of international capital.
Over the last two years this project has turned our world up Bantustan puppet 400 00W leaders who yesterday fragmented our country today appear before us as thestandard bearers of a new The police who yesterday could find every hidden copy today cannot trace whole gangs of killers who openly roam our Times have definitely changed when sections of our liberation movements, once so single minded and clear about taking power in the name of the people, today manoeuvre for seats on a nonelected government.
Broker
In Wosa's view the Do kick regime is acting as a reform broker on behalf of national and internaNo food but bullets aplenty for the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa Dec. 14. 199! No. 13 Reform broker and chief stooge: De Kler tional capital.
Comrades, the reforms in South Africa are the result of three things coming together: the depth of the social and economic crisis of apartheid-capitalism. the mass struggles in South Africa, and the world situation since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Gulf War.
Sharpeville
FW De Klerk'sspeech of February 1990 in which he announced the legalisation of the ANC, PAC. and other banned restricted organisations marked the beginning of a new phase in the struggle for freedom.
In 1960 the murderous volleys of but lets during the Sharpeville massacre sounded the end of the collaborationist and pacifist forms of struggle and catapulted the entire liberation move ment into three decades of armed strug gle.
De Klerk's moves are a part of an ofchestrated attempt to draw a line under that period. It signals an invitation to the liberation movement to probe a different trajectory of struggle, one which centrally involves a negotiation process betwee the ruler and the ruled.
As l've said, various developmen have given rise to the new situation. it • important to emphasise the international factor.
Fundamental to the situation is the change in the grostrategy of the Soviet Union. This involves a withdrawal from the arena of military conflict in Souther Africa.
The 'targets of opportunity" Brezhney once viewed the situaton brought about by the anti-colonial strug gles in the Portuguese colonies, in Zine babwe, Namibia and South Africa - d no longer seen as such.
Soviet academics and theorists hav said quite openly, long before the aborte coup, that the notion of socialist revole tion in South Africa, even within thè new century, was mere pie in the sky.
The events in eastern Europe har diverted the attention of the though it is not always admitted.
public, for both economic and politic reasons investment capital will tend
fers in the 'third world war' and Zulu leader Butholezi flow into castern Europe over the next decade, thus reducing the flow to Africa, This will strengthen the relative strategic position of the South African regime as the 'regional superpower in Southern Africa and the Indian Ocean.
Cuban victors
The Russian decision to stop its com mitments in Southern Africa lad much to do with Angola's willingness to settle the Angola-Namibia issue The Russian stand facilitated Cuba's willingness to withdraw its forces from Angola, especially since they could doso with some credibility as the victors of the battle against the SADF at Cuito Cuinavalle in South Angola.
For its part, the SADF knew that it would once again be the undisputed military heavyweight champion Africa south of the Sahara, once the Cuban forces were withdrawn.
The Frontline states. especially Mozambique, Angola and Zambia could not withstand much more acabulsa tion from South Africa.
estimated 1.5 million deaths and $60 billion in damages to its neighbouring countries in 1980-88, cluding its war against the Namibian cople. In Mozambique, the social fabric The pressure from these frontline states on the liberation movements fo adopt different, non-military tactics and to negotiate with the government has been overwhelming.
The fact is that the security of some of these régimes has become doubtful be cause of the struggle in South Africa.
Unlike maior Arab states in the ArabIsraeli conflict, the frontline states are a pose of belligerence for very long. This is the international background to the present negotiations between the South African regime and a section of the liberation movement.
The prizes for the South African state include internanonal acceptance, ap parent economic recovery. and expansion into the markets of the African hinterland and the Indian Ocean, as well as co-opting a section of the liberation movement. Dependency and starvation In Southern Africa, as all over the ex-colonial the economic stranglehold of imperialism, aided and abetted by neo-colonial and comprador regimes, condemns the people there to perpetual dependency, to cycles of accelerating social revolt followed by debilitating repression, internecine conflict and starvation.
In our own region, Namibia is an eximple of the 'neo-colonial" solutio: government of the USA, are taking full advantage of the world-historic opporResented to them by 'the end of the Cold War, in order to stamp their authority on every region of the world. One consequence of this is bound to be a series of wars, such as that in the Persian Gulf.
This third world war against the 'third world' is reinforced by the needs of the vanced capitalist countries, one of the economic pivots of the world capitalist system in terms of investment opportunities, ( provision, profitable rescarch and development.
This war is also against the black workers, women, youth and children of the advanced capitalist countries. free market has bequeathed crime, pollution, sexism and racism. poor, George Bush, is well-suited to the shining military armour opened the post cold war era with the invasion Panama, imposing the rule of the 10% white minority, guaranteeing US control been used to train gangsters all over Genocide He was head of the CIA in 1975 just in Timor, where 200,000 of the 600,000 population were murdered.
Ha hen en his enso a car chies of Central America, now littered with tortured ana mutarea coars. ne nurtured a loving relationship with Is neighbournood bully of th Middle East. Plainly, this butcher should be lauded for the rare principle he shows as he leads us into the sunset of the new world order.
In the last redivision of the world be tween the imperialisms of North America, Europe and Japan, Africa south of the Sahara occupied a marginal position.
Most of the continent is in a pitiable HECOD, the result of accades of neo colonial, parasitic economics and petit bourseos contie pontis Although it is not spelled out anywhere, there can be little doubt that the region & being left to South African capital as its natural hinterland to be Carrying the hopes of western liberals - Mandela with US Democrat Jesse Jackson "developed'- exploited - in the interests of international monopoly capital.
One after the other, African countries are going to be pushed into a pyramid of nations, at the apex of which will stand a 'non-racial democratic South Africa in a position not unlike Japan in East Asia today.
This is i the trajectory of De Klerks reform initiative. Ás such, it can be casily understood asan restar partor tenem global redivision of spoils among the victors' of the Cold War.
The petit bourgeois regimes of Southern Africa are in no condition to generate a countervailing force, even if they had the motivation.
Black workers
The simple fact is that most of them are humiliatingly dependent on the S.African regime. Countries such as Zaire, Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Lesotho and Swaziland are already client states of the racist Pretoria regime. The task is then left to the workers of Southern Africa, particularly the black workers of Azania.
And comrades, despite what happened in castern Europe, socialism is not lead. It was never born. There are many, nunist Party, who want to throw the baby of socialism out with the dirty bathwater of stalinism.
But the socialist critique of the capitalist mode or producion 1s ever more relevant now than at the time Marx and engers oexan their Systemanc chil que of capitalism.
ex-colonial world and large parts of the First world' - think of Portugal, Spain, Greece, the US ghettoes, northem Ireland - know capitalism only as a condition of hellish poverty, sufferunconquerable base from which launch a series of decisive assaults on the sistem How and when the inherent contradictions of the capitalist system will signal the moment of assault, it is impos sible to say. It is however axiomatic that such a moment will come.
WOSA
As a tendency, we in WOSA have always warned against equating socialism with what existed easterr. Europe, China and the Usok. ye stood by int understanding that socialism meant a much more democtanc society than what exists in the most democratic of capitalist siates.
is necessary to renew our concep lon of socialism. For more than 150 years, socialism has meant society quantanyeiy supenor to capitansa terms of standards of living, of social equality, human freedom. pluralistic democracy, cultural divemity and the weakening institutionalised For marxists, this implied a withering 4W0Y01086010070Y08C38 ses and the state.
Only in the late 1920s and carly 30% was that consensus broken in favour of a radically reductionist definition of socialism. That definition was produced by stalinism, together with its syphilitic spread into large sections of the workers movement.
Wrecked economies
In castern Europe in 1989, what oc curred was indeed mass uprisings of workers and youth.
That they have taken on a direction of restoring capitalism can be understood when one examines the conseguences of 9u years of stalinist rule that nas ea to wrecked economies, lagging far behind the west, It is therefore understandable that the masses identify prosperity with the market-but this is rapidly changing.
If we take this regimes acted peopie as a means or refaining their control (as can be seen from the case with which the Hungarian government has embraced the S.African resime and others have embraced tas cism) then we can realise the extent to which the cause of socialism has been damaged. But in the medium term we believe the cause of socialism is assured.
I his is not simply because of the con tinued existence revoratonaty cur rents through most parts of the world but because of the continued class strug which inevitably arise from capitalism.
The periodic attacks on wages, the sacking or millons of workers in the interest of profit, the growth of social mass revolts, and the way the toiling millions of the 'third world' live in misery, poverty, starvation and home lessness are examples of capitalism in practice.
It is these inevitable contradictions that ensure the contnucd srowun and spread of a political current that goes bevona smmealate aemanas to d programme that secks to restructure of the workers and peasants of the world.
No. 13 Dec. 14, 1991
. Features -
Vally is a leader of SACCAWU, the militant South African commercial and catering workers union, in Johannesburg.