YCL GAUTENG 2009 YEAR END STATEMENT & 2010 NEW YEAR MESSAGE
As the YCL in the Province of Gauteng we would like to wish all young people in the province a happy and prosperous new year, 2010. We would also like to take this opportunity to thank all young people with whom we worked together in 2009 to implement our programme and campaigns. Among others: We have taken up the Joe Slovo Right to Learn Campaign, visiting schools and forming part of the province’s responsible citizens committed to see education run smoothly. We brought to the attention of our provincial government the many challenges observed during school visits, and are satisfied that although some might take longer to completely resolve there’s a political will to make progress. We campaigned for the provision of free sanitary pads. As the YCL we remain convinced that this will go a long way in altering health, gender and economic relations of young women in working class communities and in many ways provide them equal opportunities with their male counterparts from within households. We campaigned for the provision of quality education, free to the first university degree. In this we also joined campaigns coordinated by SASCO. This included taking up struggles at two major universities in the province, Wits and Pretoria. The University of Pretoria remains intransigent in many ways to transformation, and it saddens that it continues to serve as some sort of a centre for the reproduction of apartheid social relations. As the YCL we remain fundamentally concerned about the racial segregation of student residences that is still very much alive in this university. We shall in this regard continue a protracted mass mobilisation as we also struggle for the transformation of the racially biased student governance system. Together with many other young people who are YCL’s supporters and volunteers, we successfully rolled out an electoral programme, and actively formed part of the forces that tirelessly campaigned to secure the 4th successive victory for our revolutionary alliance as led by the ANC. We would once more like to congratulate the many communists from our province who on their capacity and right as ANC members made it to the Gauteng Provincial Legislature, National Assembly, National Council of Provinces and the Cabinet. We call upon them to perform to the best of their capacities within the principles of collective leadership along with all other ANC deployees. In this regard we reiterate our pledge to support all ANC deployees and to guard against any form of sectarianism and deviation. We advanced struggles for the abolition labour brokers. Contrary to the claim that labour brokers create jobs, they not only advance super-exploitation and accumulation from workers’ wages, but are the modern slave traders established to cut and paste workers between jobs that already exist. We would like to thank the many young workers who came up to join this just campaign, including young workers under the brutality of labour brokers in Gauteng Provincial Government outsourced functions. We would also like to thank COSATU in the province for convening the PYA, SASCO and COSAS for remaining consistent in this campaign. As we march into 2010 we shall carry these and other campaigns forward as guided by the YCL programme and SACP policies. This shall include a radical programme to transform the colonial structure of our country’s economy with Gauteng as its centre, roll back its capitalist content and ensure that our mineral resources are not just extracted and exported as raw materials. This requires full-scale beneficiation and a skills revolution among others in the area of process and product development. As part of this we shall mobilise young people to enrol for education and training programmes in the field of mathematics, science and technology, and advance to the highest levels. We shall not fight for the doors of learning to open but only not to enter or to enter without successfully exiting. The overall thrust of our programme for economic transformation is best summarised by the vision to: * Transfer the ownership of the means and control of production, along with its surplus to the immediate producers, the working class; * Ensure that production is prioritised to meet human needs than the profit motive which does not care when the masses live in abject poverty and disease including HIV-AIDS, and other capitalist imposed miseries; and * Eliminate economic injustice and inequality. A plea to young people to take a stance on HIV-AIDS As the YCL we call on all young people in the province to support the government’s new HIV-AIDS policy. Among others this requires prioritising HIV-AIDS Voluntary Counselling and Testing (VCT) as the first step in caring for oneself and getting to care for others. In its 11th Plenary Session held from the 4th – 5th December 2009, the 2nd YCL Gauteng Congress Provincial Executive Committee (PEC) resolved to take up the organisation’s anti-HIV-AIDS campaign more rigorously and drive a VCT programme from within, starting with the leadership. In this regard we shall crisscross the province, mobilise all YCL members, branches and districts, form partnerships and do whatever is necessary to defend human society. An in-house threat to the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) The year 2009 has not only been the year of milestones. It has also been the year for the re-emergence of a tendency from within the ANC-led National Liberation Movement (NLM) to disrupt the unity of our revolutionary alliance. Those who are in the driving seat of this tendency shall be reminded of several basics, now and as the history of our revolutionary alliance unfolds. The ANC – ‘The Parliament of the People’ as Dr Nelson Mandela would call it, was founded basically to unite our people in pursuit of national liberation and the need to implement a thorough-going NDR. The basic aims of the NDR are stipulated in the Freedom Charter, adopted by our people in 1955. This was just five years after the Communist Party along with the YCL were banned by the apartheid regime under the Suppression of Communism Act, and just five years before the same regime also banned the ANC altogether with its associated formations. The recently renewed anti-communist and anti-trade unionist assault perpetrated via the media and other mediums such as public platforms is out of line and directly contradicts the purpose for which the ANC was founded. This assault is simultaneously anti-SACP and anti-COSATU. It is, in the final analysis, also anti-revolutionary alliance, anti-ANC’s character as a multi-class formation, orientation as a disciplined force of the left, and biasness towards the working class and the poor. Instead of unity, this anti-communist and anti-trade unionist assault is inevitably leading to divisions. It stands not only to disrupt the unity of the ANC-led NLM and within it that of the revolutionary alliance in particular. In actual fact, this assault also stands to disrupt the unity of the ANC itself. Historical trends sufficiently show that anti-communist and anti-trade unionist agendas are actually aimed at the working class and end up posing problems over the ANC. Not only was the banning of the Communist Party followed by intense brutality over the working class and later coupled with the banning of the ANC. Among others the political project that was partially dislodged in Polokwane also broke out openly by targeting communists and trade unionists first, unleashed a neoliberal onslaught against the working class and then turned into the ANC. Similarly, a factional battle for leadership positions as it became openly evident when we were completing 2009 will spare no harm over the ANC. From its inception this factional battle sought to legitimise itself by means of unfounded allegations, amongst them the rightist, populist mentality that communists and trade unionists want to hijack the ANC for socialism. Linked with this there seems to be a manoeuvre for the control of the ANC-led NLM. This can be embedded nowhere than in an effort to construct an empire for ascendancy into the state in order to pursue self-centred interests, mainly self-enrichment, patronage and corruption. This factional battle which goes hand in glove with the anti-communist and anti-trade unionist tendency actually represents an in-house threat to the NDR. As the YCL we shall spare no capability to dismantle this anarchy and thereby defend our movement. For more Information contact: Alex Mashilo – Provincial Secretary 082 9200 308 AND Phindile Kunene – Provincial Deputy Secretary 079 964 9262 -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. You don't have to put anything in the message part. All you have to do is to send an e-mail to this address (repeat): [email protected] .
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