8-2-06, 8:30 pm

Blade Nzimande, is General Secretary of the South African Communist Party (SACP)

The weekend of 29-30 July 2006 marked the culmination of the SACP’s month-long 85th anniversary celebrations. The highlight of our anniversary activities were the Red Saturday demand for a once-off amnesty for all that are blacklisted by the faceless Credit Bureaux, the holding of our anniversary gala dinner, addressed by the Minister of Public Enterprises, Cde Alec Erwin, and the holding of the national rally in Pietermaritzburg.

The anniversary rally was attended by close to 15 000 people, drawn in the main from Pietermaritzburg and its surroundings, but also attended by hundreds of our comrades from other provinces. The rally was preceded by intense communist mobilisation, including blitzing with pamphlets, loud hailing in local communities, household visits, and face to face contact with many people of our people in and around Pietermaritzburg. The mobilisation was done in line with the proud traditions of communist organisation in our country. It is this type of organisation and mobilisation that has seen the huge successes of our campaigns and the growing membership and support for the SACP amongst millions of our people.

The communist mobilisation capacity we have witnessed in the last few weeks must be maintained, and directed towards taking forward our many campaigns towards the launch of our 2006 Red October Campaign. Most importantly this mobilisation capacity must immediately be directed towards effective participation in the women’s month during this August, which is South Africa’s women’s month.

Wathint’abafazi, wathint’imbokodo: Celebrating the 1956 historic Women’s March

The SACP will be joining millions of women, and indeed all South Africans, in the celebration of the historic Women’s March of 1956 next week. Through this event we truly need to honour all the pioneers of the more than a century old women’s struggles in South Africa, against colonialism, apartheid, women’s oppression and class exploitation. However most critically we need to use this occasion to recommit ourselves to the organisation and mobilisation of South African women from all walks of life, especially women workers and the poor.

The 9 August 2006 celebrations will see the culmination of work that has been done by many progressive women’s and political organisations towards the establishment of a progressive women’s movement in our country. The SACP fully supports and has thrown its full weight behind the formation of such a movement. As we have pointed in our earlier editions of this publication, the SACP is firmly of the view that a progressive women’s movement is of absolute necessity in consolidating and advancing the national democratic revolution.

The SACP’s approach to the building of a progressive women’s movement is guided by our strategic slogan, Socialism is the future, build it now. From the standpoint of the SACP the building of the women’s movement must be part of building capacity for, momentum towards, and elements of, SOCIALISM. The complete emancipation of women must be seen as an integral component of the struggle for socialism, and this is the only basis for consolidating and safeguarding the national democratic revolution. Our strategic perspectives derive from our belief that the main content of the national democratic revolution in the current phase is that of building working class power in all centres of influence and power to address the interrelated challenges of resolving the national, gender and class contradictions in South African society.

The SACP is also firmly of the view that much as these contradictions are, and should not, be collapsed into each other, none can be effectively addressed in isolation from the others. It is also our belief that much as the struggle for gender equality should be waged by women and men, the gender content of our revolution cannot be effectively addressed unless we have a strong, working-class led progressive women’s movement at the head of such a struggle.

Build a progressive women’s organisation from below! Specific role and tasks of the SACP

Communist women have had a long and heroic contribution and role in South African women’s struggles. From the late 1920’s communist women like Ray Alexander and Josie Mpama argued for, and consistently and actively participated in, directing some of the energies of the Party towards women’s organisation in the national liberation struggle and in the struggle for socialism. In addition, someone like Ray Alexander truly played a pioneering role in consistently raising, and struggling for, placing the question of women organisation as a priority in building a progressive trade union movement.

In the 1940’s, Dora Tamana, a communist woman from Cape Town, also played an important role in the mobilisation of women in poor communities around co-operatives and in the building of crèches to look after the children of poor working women.

Again, women communists like Florence Matomela, Josie Mpama and Ray Alexander played a crucial role in the formation and struggles of the Federation of South African Women in the 1950s. All these women communists firmly believed that organisation of women must be a bottom up process, especially driven through the organisation of working class and poor women. The SACP needs to build on this rich legacy, by ensuring that working class and poor rural women become the bedrock of a progressive women’s movement.

Whilst the SACP accepts the logic and necessity to build a progressive women’s movement that unite women across classes, working class women must be at the head of such a movement if it is to effectively respond to the challenges of the true emancipation of women. Failure to stamp the authority of working class women in such a movement can only lead to the hijacking of this movement by elitist and BEE-type interests, thus reproducing and exacerbating the very widening class inequalities in broader South African society. We must struggle against the ‘BEE-isation’ of the women’s movement!

If the working class, in alliance with the landless rural poor, is indeed the leading motive force of our revolution, this must find strong resonance within a progressive women’s movement. Asserting working class leadership is not something achieved through resolutions and boardroom type discussions, but through concrete struggles that energetically take up issues affecting women workers and poor women. It is only by placing the interests of the working class at the centre of a progressive women’s movement that women’s unity can be cemented. This does not mean ignoring the interests of professional and other middle class women, but these have to be subjected to the leadership of working class women.

The progressive women’s movement must be an activist movement, and the SACP is well placed to connect its own activism and campaigns to the building of a women’s movement. The SACP is concerned that the very necessary efforts that have been put into the building of a progressive women’s movement have been somehow pursued bureaucratically, and not driven by grassroots campaigns and activism. We hope that the Launch Conference of the women’s movement, scheduled for 5-8 August 2006, will lay a strong foundation towards addressing this deficiency.

The necessity for working class leadership is also underlined by the fact that there is a growing and disproportionate influence of the middle classes and the bourgeoisie, both black and white, on some of our economic policies and gender perspectives. Currently the more prominent discourses on gender equality and women emancipation are those addressing issues of women from the standpoint of narrow BEE, and elite-driven affirmative action.

In order to achieve the goal of building a women’s movement from below, it is important that the SACP use the platform of its own campaigns (financial sector transformation, building co-operatives, land and agrarian transformation, etc) to organise women and bring their perspectives to bear on the women’s movement as a whole. These campaigns have already mobilised hundreds of thousands of ordinary women, in stokvels, in burial societies, in the church societies and other co-operative and grassroots socio-economic activities. The only consistent platform for building a progressive women’s movement is by taking up issues that daily confront women, especially working class and poor women.

The SACP also has a specific responsibility to bring to bear its own ideological perspectives into this movement. This should be done through a consistent Marxist-Leninist analyses of women’s and gender struggles, including sustained political education and cadre development programmes, especially for working class women.

It is also important for the SACP to consistently point out that we should not make the mistake of thinking that women are already not organised in various activities to advance their own interests. The challenge is how to harness these into a progressive women’s movement.

As part of its contribution to this effort, and in celebration of the heroic struggles of the women of 1956, the SACP will be convening district women and gender forums during the month of August 2006, to plan its own strategies for building a working class led progressive women’s movement.

We shall keep the Red Flag flying, with and for the ordinary women of our country and the world!

From SACP Umsebenzi Online