Letter of Solidarity
To the Rank and File Soldiers of South Africa
August 30, 2009
From Humanists for Revolutionary Socialism (HRS)
To our oppressed soldier brothers, workers in uniform under state attack in South Africa, in care of the Workers International Vanguard League (WIVL)
We denounce the South African state for its unconscionable behavior towards you and its illegal actions against you and your brothers. It is important for soldiers to know that there is worker opposition here in the “belly of the beast” to their ultimate bosses, our own main enemy, the U.S. capitalist class. We demand all U.S. imperialist forces (overt and covert) out of Africa now! Their only purpose on your continent is to further the exploitation of your people and the appropriation of your resources.
We stand opposed to them and all their plans to put you in harm’s way and keep you hungry. We stand opposed to the obscene fat Boer and English generals who live off your sweat and to all the sadist and martinet junior officers that make your life hell. We denounce all the bourgeois authorities and the way their police “support the troops” with tear gas and gunfire. We denounce them and phony union leaders who stand with them when they deny your basic democratic rights to protest and to struggle for living wages and conditions. We know “leaders” like these. We call them class traitors.
The soldiers’ fate, as rank-and-file soldiers, is tied up to ours as workers in ways that cannot be dissolved, as the history of all modern revolutions shows. The political forces of the yes men for American and British imperialism, together with the Stalinists of the South African Communist party, have stalled out and sold out your proletarian revolution, and with it your national liberation. They move you around the African map in support of every imperialist scheme to rob one locality after another. These political forces of yes men are the ones who want to prosecute you now. It is they who are denying you the pay you need to feed and clothe your families!
Brothers! You are living under conditions of the slave-owners’ tyranny. The South African bourgeoisie wants you to do their imperialist masters’ dirty work on YOUR continent. They want you to do this for the kind of chicken feed pay they paid the non-white colonial levies (draftees) they led to slaughter in the past! They want you to do all the dying, defending their class and the rule of the laws of their class’s dictatorship. They want you to die for them like a Gunga Din, fighting his own oppressed people when they rise up in righteous revolt.
You have organized! You are our Union Brothers now, no matter what our top COSATU and AFL-CIO misleaders say! You declare you will never surrender. That is a tremendous source of strength for us! We in the HRS and your champions, the WIVL, will go every mile of the way with you! For you will come to find that for you, as for us, the Socialist Revolution will be the only road out of the crisis of human survival and development!
We stand behind all your demands in the Proposed Agreement and demand the dropping of all charges against the jailed Brothers! For 30% raises NOW covering all 12 months of 2009! For immediate new Collective Bargaining talks to begin as soon as this Trade Agreement is in effect! For an across-the-board 5% raise increment on April 1, 2010! For a 1% check off for all those in uniform payable to THE UNION, etc. We support your demands in detail! And we demand the reinstatement without prejudice of any kind to their records for all the Brothers who were discharged or dismissed!
We stand behind all the demands raised by the WIVL on your behalf. Your situation is part of and not something different than a generalized South African crisis within a world crisis of capitalism and imperialism. Understood this way we know an injury to one of you is an injury to us all. To advance the struggle the following additional demands are endorsed and recommended for adoption by the soldiers and their supporters:
1. Down with the Praetorian layer of officers of the army of DeBeers, Anglo-American and the bourgeoisie of the ANC.
2. Down with the assassin layer of officers that oppresses and massacres the nations of Southern Africa at the command of American and British imperialism.
3. For the election and for the right of recall and substitution of the chiefs of the armed forces by Committees of the Rank-And-File Service Members to assure the military acts only in the interests of the working class, the oppressed and poor peasants.
4. For Committees of Soldiers, Armed Workers and Peasants.
5. For the Socialist United States of Southern Africa!