Quality Council for Trades and Occupations

Training on right path with quality council

Blade Nzimande, Business Day, Johannesburg, 26 February 2010

IF SKILLS development and training hold the answers for so many of our social and economic problems, why don’t we just do it? The reason is poor-quality training can prove just as deadly as no training, and could be the difference between unemployment and decent work.

SACP Central Committee Statement

  

SACP Press Statement 28 February 2010

Central Committee Statement

The South African Communist Party Central Committee held its first regular meeting for 2010 over the weekend of 26th – 27th February.

The CC agreed that the SACP’s call to our membership, to our alliance partners, and to South Africans in general is straight-forward: Let us all remain focused on the key problems confronting our country – unemployment, poverty and inequality. Let us close ranks and unite around addressing these key challenges. Let us make a clear distinction between: 

• differences and debates based on bona fide policy challenges, on the one hand; and
• battles requiring an absolutely uncompromising stance on the other. 

The State

The State

In “Bourgeois and Proletarians”, the first section of the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx wrote: “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” In other words: The State is the executive committee of the ruling bourgeois class, of which there is, and cannot be, any other such ruling executive committee or totalising authority.

Meetings

Meetings

We have looked at Trade Unionism (mass organisations of the working class, Constitutions (enabling democracy) and Negotiation (which is what unions do vis-a-vis employers). All of these things are essential means of organisation, which every cadre needs to know in order to fulfill the duty of educating, organising, and mobilising.

Another of these essential components, is a good knowledge of the rules of procedure of meetings and debate. There is no single authority for these rules, which are used in legislatures, companies, churches and all kinds of organisations. Below is a short version of a good communist book on the subject. [The picture is of the late, great Rusty Bernstein, who is supposed to have said of the CPSA/SACP, that it did not teach the ANC politics, but it did teach the ANC how to organise].

Commodities

To supplement “Value, Price and Profit”, here is a shortened (by removing one part) version of Chapter 1 of Karl Marx’s greatest work, “Capital”, Volume 1. This is a text that has been the material for many a political school. It begins with this great definition of commodities:

Value, Price and Profit

  

Value, Price and Profit

By 1865 Karl Marx (pictured) had solved the theoretical problems of his work, “Capital”, on Surplus Value, and in that year he gave the well-known address to a gathering of workers that afterwards became a popular publication under the name “Value, Price and Profit”, also sometimes called “Wages, Price and Profit”. The first volume of “Capital” was published two years later.

SADTU Eight Political Schools

Foundation for eight political schools for Trade Unionists

SADTU and the SACP are preparing a series of eight political schools.

A provisional study programme for these schools is given below. There is no guarantee that the eight political schools will follow this scheme closely, or at all, but a provisional plan is better than no plan.

Texts have been selected so as to assist participants to do some systematic preparatory reading. Links are given to downloadable files, and to web pages.

Rob Davies' IPAP2 Statement to National Assembly

National Assembly Statement on IPAP2 by Dr Rob Davies,

Minister of Trade and Industry: February 18 2010

Speaker,

Members of the Cabinet,

Honourable Members of this House

Today we are tabling before Parliament and also making public, the 2010/11 - 2012/13 Industrial Policy Action Plan (IPAP). [see link below]

IPAP2, as it has become known, builds on the National Industrial Policy Framework (NIPF) and the 2007/8 IPAP. It represents a significant step forward in scaling up our efforts to promote long term industrialisation and industrial diversification beyond our current reliance on traditional commodities and non-tradable services. Its purpose is to expand production in value-added sectors with high employment and growth multipliers that compete in export markets as well as compete in the domestic market against imports. In so doing, the Action Plan also places emphasis on more labour absorbing production and services sectors, the increased participation of historically disadvantaged people and regions in our economy and will facilitate, in the medium term, SA's contribution to industrial development in the African region.

Global Fight for NHI (= "Single Payer")

The Corporate Hijacking of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial

Russell Mokhiber, Counterpunch, 17 February 2010

Barack Obama we knew about.

If you are disappointed in Obama, shame on you.

He was right up front.

He told us from the beginning he was the corporations’ man.

During the campaign, he promised opposition to single payer health care for all.

Promise fulfilled.

Revolutionary legacy of Nelson Mandela

Umsebenzi Online, Volume 9, No. 4, 17 February 2010

In this Issue:

• Celebrate the legacy of Nelson Mandela: Intensify the class struggles on all fronts!

Red Alert

Celebrate the legacy of Nelson Mandela: Intensify the class struggles on all fronts!

           

Blade Nzimande, General Secretary

Over the last two weeks, South Africa, especially the progressive forces, celebrated two very important events. On 2nd 2010 February we celebrated 20 years of the unbanning of the ANC, SACP and other components of the national liberation movement, and on the 11th February the release of Nelson Mandela from the apartheid prisons. The celebration of the unbanning of our organizations and Nelson Mandela was not a tribute to the 'generosity' of the apartheid regime, but honouring the massive sacrifices of millions of South Africans in their selfless struggles against the apartheid regime. The release of Mandela marked a high point in the determined struggles of our people dislodge the apartheid regime as an important step towards the creation of a democratic South Africa.

Negotiation

Negotiation

We proceed from an understanding of the vanguard relationship between the communists, and the mass of the working class, who are organised in trade unions for self-defence, and not for revolutionary purposes.

We included the Rules of Debate that are applied within those and other mass organisations. We now come to the practical means by which trade unions do their business: Negotiation.

School cook takes home E500 after "firewood" deduction

Makhungutsha cook gets ‘raw’ deal

Njabulo Dlamini, Swazi Observer, 12 February 2010

A cook at Makhungutsha Primary School in the Manzini Region is being paid E300 less every month for ‘firewood collection’ as she cannot go into the forest.

She ends up taking home E500 after the firewood collection deduction of E300.

In terms of the gazette, school cooks ought to be paid E925 per month.