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Record Fuel Price Increase: A Crisis for the Poor Official statistics show that 14% of households have inadequate access to food and 8.2% have severely inadequate access to food. Almost one in four South African children under five are stunted. The social devastation has plunged millions of people into deep suffering, and robbed millions, especially young people, of any hope for a viable future. We cannot continue like this. Yet in this crisis a corrupt and morally depraved political elite, now organised across a number of political parties, continues to loot public funds. At the same time a deeply cynical business elite continues to make enormous profits from the labour and consumption of poor and working-class people. Supermarkets make massive profits while people go hungry. Executives earn millions while workers struggle to feed their families. Food has become a commodity from which large companies make profit while millions of people cannot afford enough to eat. This is simply immoral and it must be stopped. The first thing that needs to be done is to stop cutting public spending to please business. Austerity must be immediately stopped and public money must be used for the public good. Social grants must be increased to protect people from hunger. Wages must be increased to give people enough to live on. Public transport must be safe and affordable. The social value of land must be put before its commercial value and land must be made available for housing, food production and recreation. There can be no food security in a country where wealth and land are so unequally distributed. Hunger is not caused by a lack of food. It is caused by impoverishment, unemployment and inequality, and by a food system in which land, production and distribution are controlled for profit. We need a massive project to build food sovereignty. Poor people cannot remain dependent on a food system controlled by a small number of large supermarket chains and food corporations. Urban land reform must make land available for people to grow food close to where they live. Municipalities must support community gardens, small farmers, street traders and local food producers, and establish public and community markets where healthy food can be sold directly and affordably. It is critical that we break the control of the large supermarkets over the food system and build a food system organised around public need rather than private profit. Food cannot continue to be treated as a commodity in a country where millions go hungry. Access to healthy food must be treated as a right. In a social crisis of this extent the corrupt political elite, the state and capital have lost all moral and political credibility and we cannot continue to accept their authority while millions go hungry and millions of young people have no future. Land must be occupied and put to democratically managed social purposes while we build the democratic power of the poor and the working class to put land, wealth and power in the hands of the people. Thapelo Mohapi 084 576 5117 Snenhlanhla Mncanyana 073 832 3331 Lindo Motha 066 129 4815 https://abahlali.org/ Back |
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France: a decisive week – with echoes of May ’68 Towards a new May ‘68? Anyone familiar with the history of May ’68 cannot fail to be struck by the similarities in the sequence of events up to this point. In early May 1968, a mobilisation of the students was fiercely suppressed by the CRS, the French riot police. The police brutality during the ‘night of the barricades’ on 10 May sparked such a powerful wave of outrage that the trade union leaders were forced to organise a 24-hour general strike in protest, on 13 May. This proved to be a huge success – and marked the beginning of a revolutionary crisis (much to the chagrin of the trade union leaders). Then, as now, the newspaper Le Monde, fearing social unrest, called on the government to tone down the crackdown and change its strategy. Then, as now, the head of state’s authority had been completely eroded. In power since 1 June 1958, De Gaulle was lambasted by the demonstrators, who chanted: ‘ten years is enough!’ Give or take a few months, this slogan is perfectly suited to the current movement and to the feelings of hatred that Macron arouses in large sections of the population. These similarities are no coincidence: they are characteristic of the onset of a pre-revolutionary crisis. This does not necessarily mean that the country will, in the coming days, embark on a movement on the scale of the great general strike of May and June 1968. But it is clearly a possibility, against the backdrop of soaring fuel prices, an austerity budget and social unrest that has been evident since the beginning of September – as demonstrated by the enormous success of the calls for a mass popular mobilisation on 17 October. As in May ’68, the leaders of the trade union confederations are doing nothing to fan the flames of revolt. On the contrary, they are seeking to control the movement. They are turning to the government and asking it to ‘calm things down’. In May ’68, this strategy failed: the movement completely slipped out of the trade union leaders’ control. Mobilise to defend the students! We cannot predict what will happen in the coming days and weeks. However, we can outline what, in our view, the strategy and programme of the most militant political and trade union activists should be. Let us start with the obvious: no ‘day of action’, however massive, will make the government of the rich back down by so much as a centimetre. It has only one thing in mind: imposing an austerity budget to attempt to contain the public debt crisis, which is worsening by the day. If high school pupils and students find themselves alone on the frontline in the wake of 6 October, the government will endeavour to break the movement by combining police repression, empty promises and symbolic ‘concessions’. Only a massive and sustained mobilisation of the working class will make it possible to thwart this scenario. It is true that a ‘general strike cannot be decreed’, as trade union leaders constantly remind us. Yet they offer no alternative. It cannot be ‘decreed’, but we can endeavour to organise it. A broad campaign of agitation, based on an offensive programme, must be launched across all sectors of the economy. This is the only way to gauge the fighting spirit of the various sections of the working class – and, consequently, to draw up a concrete battle plan. The most militant sections of the working class, those most prepared for struggle, must be mobilised right now – on 6 October and in the days that follow – alongside school pupils and students, if only to protect them from police violence. If hundreds of thousands of workers lead by example in the days following 6 October, they will send a powerful message to our entire class. Down with the government of the rich! The movement’s programme for the struggle is a central part of the equation. Young people are demanding decent conditions for their studies, but also an end to police violence and harassment, state racism, the Parcoursup admissions system, unemployment and the precarious jobs to which they are condemned. After a hellish summer, they are also demanding radical measures to tackle the environmental crisis. In short, they are demanding a future worthy of the name. No ‘concessions’ from the government of the rich will seriously address these demands. Only a government of workers could pursue economic and social policies in line with the fundamental aspirations of young people. In other words, all the immediate demands of the mobilised youth – massive investment in the national education system, the repeal of Parcoursup and Mon Master, the rejection of Lecornu’s austerity budget, etc. – must be linked with the objective of overthrowing the current government. This same objective must be linked to immediate demands, which affect all workers: a significant increase in wages and their indexation to inflation, the repeal of all the counter-reforms of the last ten years, the nationalisation – under workers’ control – of energy monopolies like TotalEnergies, etc. We are well aware that this is neither the programme nor the strategy of the official leadership of the labour movement. This morning, for example, Sophie Binet (CGT) called on the government to “send a signal to high school pupils” to calm things down. But this government will ‘send’ the pupils nothing but symbolic ‘concessions’, empty promises and, above all, riot police, armed to the teeth. Sophie Binet knows this full well, but like the official leaders of the labour movement in May ’68, she fears nothing more than a social upheaval spiralling out of her control. Consequently, instead of doing everything in her power to intensify the struggle, she implores the government to ‘send a signal’ – just as others pray to Heaven for a miracle. The ball is in the court of the left wing of the trade union movement, but also of La France Insoumise. Whilst exerting maximum pressure on the leaders of the trade union confederations to organise the struggle properly, the most militant activists must take all the necessary initiatives to protect and support the mobilisation of high school and university students. At the same time, they must draw up a battle plan aimed at paralysing the economy, overthrowing the government and creating the conditions for a decisive victory for our class. https://marxist.com/france-a-decisive-week-with-echoes-of-may-68.htm Back |
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