Cde Khwezi Kadalie, veteran of the Anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa, toured England in February 2012, explaining the achievements and failures of the Liberation struggle and the ANC government.
The principle contradiction during the anti-apartheid struggle was between the white racist apartheid state and the black, indian and coloured masses of South Africa, he says. It is now between workers and capitalists.
Since the ANC did not follow the armed struggle to the point of the revolutionary overthrow of Aparthied, but negotiated the transfer of power from the Afrikaaner state to the ANC led government, bourgeois democracy has become more secure, but the principle beneficiaries of capitalist exploitation of the workers of South Africa remain firmly in place. In effect, Economic Apartheid remains in tact.
The all important demands of the masses, namely re-distribution of the land, and the transfer of South Africa’s mining, financial and industrial wealth to the masses who fought for the end of apartheid, as laid down in the Freedom Charter, the seminal platform of the liberation struggle, remain totally unfulfilled
Khwezi’s deep knowledge brings insight into the failings of 17 years of the ‘rainbow nation’ to address the crying needs of the masses, and why capitalist free-market fundamentalism continues to heap misery on the people of one of the world’s richest countries.
South Africans today languish under the burden of the capitalist crisis, and a crippling poverty – with an astounding 47% unemployment rate – that they have not before known even during the oppression of the apartheid years.
A new mass struggle is needed, he says, outside of the opportunist confines of the ANC-SACP-COSATO stranglehold, that channels the really revolutionary energy and aspirations of the workers towards achieving their still fervently held desire to achieve a socialist system that brings peace, prosperity, education, culture and civilization to all.
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