Come and hear NUMSA’s General Secretary, Irvin Jim, on:
“New Working Class Leadership and Prospects for Socialist Politics in South Africa.”

7PM, Thursday, March 6, 2014
Steelworkers’ Hall, 25 Cecil Street, Toronto

The dramatic upsurge of popular grassroots protest in South Africa’s townships and rural areas in recent years has been well-termed as marking a virtual “rebellion of the poor” in that country. The working class itself has also been assertive there, prompting the African National Congress (ANC)-led state’s orchestration of an horrific massacre of dissident mine-workers at Marikana in 2012. Until recently, however, leading trade unions have themselves been cribbed and confined within the tri-partite governing coalition of the ANC, the South African Communist Party and COSATU, the country’s largest trade union central body. Now NUMSA — the country’s National Union of Metalworkers with over 340,000 members — has begun to break that mould, under the leadership of its General Secretary, Irvin Jim, a longstanding socialist militant in the union. At its Special National Congress in December it heralded a new socialist political direction for South Africa.

As Irvin Jim put it in a recent speech:

Our people are protesting because they have no water — that most basic of necessities. And the State… that very same state which failed to supply them with water… kills them for their protest. Underneath all of this is a harsh material fact. The South African economy has not fundamentally changed. The structure remains the same as it was under apartheid… the same dependence on exporting raw minerals, the same enslavement to the Minerals Energy Finance complex. Far from an increase in the manufacturing sector — the sector which can really produce jobs — we have a rapid process of deindustrialization. We are not gaining jobs, we are losing them. In 2004 there were 3.7 million unemployed people in our country. Last year that had risen to 4.1 million. More unemployed, not less.This will not stop until we fundamentally change direction. We, as a union, have understood that the ANC and SACP will not lead that change.

sponsored by:

Greater Toronto Workers’ Assembly,
Centre for Social Justice,
Socialist Project, and
BASICSnews.ca