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News > South Africa

South Africa: NUMSA on Why to Launch an Anti-Capitalist Party

  • NUMSA workers during a 2013 strike.

    NUMSA workers during a 2013 strike. | Photo: EFE

Published 22 November 2018
Opinion

"we can't achieve genuine equality and freedom when we compromise with capital," a spokesperson for NUMSA told teleSUR.

The National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa (NUMSA), the country's largest union with over 330,000 members launched its own party earlier this Month. Phakamile Hlubi-Majola, NUMSA spokesperson spoke to teleSUR Thursday to explain the need for a workers' party with an anti-capitalist program. 

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The union announced its decision to launch the Socialist Revolutionary Workers' Party after it declared itself in open opposition to the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party in 2013, over what they call anti-worker "World Bank, and (International Monetary Fund) IMF type of economic policies."  

"NUMSA was integral to the national liberation movement to defeat apartheid, they fought side by side, together with the ANC... However, in South Africa, more than two decades after that system has been overthrown, the working class majority continues to live in the same conditions that existed during apartheid. More than half the population languishes in poverty... South Africa is one of the most unequal countries of the world, with the wealth of the country owned by three white billionaires," she denounced.

Phakamile explained NUMSA will continue to be a trade union but it will also "drive the process for the establishment of a Socialist Revolutionary Workers' Party (because) we recognize like any other Marxists that the only way to end these conditions is for the Capitalist system to be completely destroyed and replaced with a Socialist system."

NUMSA's spokesperson also drew distance with other Leftist parties in the country, including the Communist Party and Economic Freedom Fighters arguing they have made compromises with capital. 

"We have learned it is impossible for the working class to achieve genuine equality and freedom when they make compromises with capital... Our alliance with the ANC was, in fact, a compromise with capital" she concluded. 

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