Was it a Happy May Day, after all!

Two days after the publication of the last edition of ANC TODAY, our workers joined their comrades throughout the world to celebrate May Day. Quite correctly, all the Alliance speakers in our country emphasised the important issues of the need to save jobs, against retrenchment, as well as the imperative to ensure that our economy creates more jobs to reduce the levels of unemployment and poverty.

In countless demonstrations and rallies elsewhere in the world, the workers raised similar questions, relating to workers' rights, unemployment, casualisation and deregulation, quality jobs, a living wage, outsourcing, the challenges of globalisation, and so on.

This emphasised the fact that workers throughout the world face similar challenges. It underlined the impact of the process of globalisation, which is integrating all countries into one international market. From as early as the 18th century, political economists pointed to the integration of the peoples of the world in one economic system.

In his famous book, "The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations", first published in 1775/76, Adam Smith presented a thesis that is worth reproducing at some length. He wrote:

"The discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind. Their consequences have already been very great: but, in the short period of between two and three centuries which have elapsed since these discoveries were made, it is impossible that the whole extent of their consequences can have been seen. What benefits, or what misfortunes to mankind may hereafter result from those great events, no human wisdom can foresee. By uniting, in some measure, the most distant parts of the world, by enabling them to relieve one another's wants, to increase one another's enjoyments, and to encourage one another's industry, their general tendency would seem to be beneficial. To the natives, however, both of the East and the West Indies, all the commercial benefits which can have resulted from those events have been sunk and lost in the dreadful misfortunes which they have occasioned. These misfortunes, however, seem to have arisen rather from accident than from any thing in the nature of those events themselves. At the particular time when these discoveries were made, the superiority of force happened to be so great on the side of the Europeans, that they were enabled to commit with impunity every sort of injustice in those remote countries. Hereafter, perhaps, the natives of those countries may grow stronger, or those of Europe may grow weaker, and the inhabitants of all the different quarters of the world may arrive at that equality of courage and force which, by inspiring mutual fear, can alone overawe the injustice of independent nations into some sort of respect for the rights of one another. But nothing seems more likely to establish this equality of force than that mutual communication of knowledge and of all sorts of improvements which an extensive commerce from all countries to all countries naturally, or rather necessarily, carries along with it. In the mean time one of the principal effects of those discoveries has been to raise the mercantile system to a degree of splendour and glory which it could never otherwise have attained to."

We have every right to expect that if Adam Smith was writing about the contemporary world situation, he would have said that the current process of globalisation is "one of the greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind".

He would have gone on to point out that this process has also had some negative consequences for "the natives" in the developing world, to whom "the commercial benefits which can have resulted from globalisation have been sunk and lost in the dreadful misfortunes which they have occasioned".

In this regard he would have drawn attention to "the superiority of force on the side of the developed countries, which has enabled them to commit with impunity every sort of injustice in those remote countries", and urged redress of this imbalance of power, to achieve "equality of courage and force...inspiring mutual fear".

About 75 years after the publication of Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations", Karl Marx and Frederick Engels issued the "Manifesto of the Communist Party" - popularly known as "The Communist Manifesto" - and returned to some of the themes raised by Adam Smith. They wrote:

"The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never known before, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development...

"The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country...In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations...

"The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e. to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image...

"Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way...(The bourgeoisie) has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up the single, unconscionable freedom - Free Trade...Workingmen of all countries, unite!"

Whereas Adam Smith wrote about an international market characterised by imbalance of power between nations, the North and the South, Marx and Engels spoke about an international market characterised by imbalance of power between a global bourgeoisie and the workers of the world.

Today, all commentators, from the United Nations and the World Bank downwards, speak in virtually one voice about an international market characterised by imbalance of power both between the countries of the North and the South, and between the trans-national corporations and financial capital, on one hand, and the poor of the world in both developed and developing countries, on the other.

The common message that issued from the May Day demonstrations internationally, communicated the message that substantial universal consensus exists about the challenge that faces all humanity, arising from the phenomenon of unequal power in the global economy and society.

In this context, Adam Smith prayed that the time would come when "the imperfections of the market" would be corrected by the organic achievement of "equality of courage and force" across the globe. On the other hand, Marx and Engels argued that these "imperfections" would only be addressed, and equality of force achieved, when the global proletariat responded to their call - workingmen of all countries unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!

In time, Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were appropriated by different and opposed ideological schools of thought. It may be that as a result, the possibility was destroyed for all humanity to understand the common basic message they sought to communicate about the functioning of the capitalist system, and the challenge it posed to all humanity, to recognise its enormous capacity to produce "the wealth of nations", while understanding the need to regulate its operation to ensure the equitable distribution of this wealth of nations.

Certainly, today, our workers, trade unions, and our people as a whole cannot plead that they do not understand the common message that Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels sought to convey. Nevertheless, all of us still have to answer the question whether we have responded adequately and correctly to the challenge posed by Adam Smith, to achieve "equality of courage and force...inspiring mutual fear", to address the "imperfections" of the global capitalist market.

In this regard it would be fair, and historically correct, to say that it does not seem likely that this "equality of courage and force" will be achieved by the "workingmen of all countries" uniting against a common class enemy, the international bourgeoisie.

Apart from anything else, the workingmen of all countries understand very well that the bourgeoisie has the possibility to move capital among the various countries of the world, and thus the possibility to "compel all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production".

This suggests that rather than uniting across the globe to respond to the pressure to adopt the bourgeois mode of production, the "workingmen of all countries" are more likely to respond to this pressure by organising themselves and taking action in each country as the only way to achieve "equality of force" and the improvement of their wages and working conditions.

Responding to this reality, a few years ago, organised labour and organised business in our country travelled together to Europe to study the response of some European countries to what Marx and Engels had described as the imposition on all countries of "the unconscionable freedom - Free Trade".

This had obliged all nations to compete against one another for a place in the sun that owes its existence to the fact that the bourgeoisie has "given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country".

One of the countries they visited was the Republic of Ireland, which seemed to have found a way of responding effectively to the challenges of globalisation, rather than merely lamenting its negative effects on "the natives", with all the passionate and elegant eloquence which is a gift of the Irish people, both in Gaelic and in English.

In a 2002 "Discussion Paper" published by the International Labour Organisation's autonomous International Institute for Labour Studies, entitled "What is dead and what is alive in the theory of corporatism", Lucio Baccaro wrote:

"After a decade (the 1970s) dominated by centralised pay agreements and a period of decentralised, free-for-all collective bargaining, Irish social partnership started again in 1987 with the Programme for National Recovery (PNR). Government debt and deficit were skyrocketing, investments were stagnant, and, undeterred by emigration, unemployment was on the rise. This perceived sense of crisis played an important role in the coming together of Ireland's major social partners.

"With the PNR, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) agreed to contain wage increases within limits negotiated at the national level. Also, the ICTU committed itself not to take industrial action that would result in additional cost increases for the employers. This latter clause signalled an important departure from the practice of two-tier bargaining that had characterised previous centralised agreements in the 1970s. In exchange, government agreed to increase take-home pay by reducing personal taxation. Government also agreed to maintain the real value of social welfare allowances...

"During the three years covered by the PNR (1988-90), the Irish economy performed very well. GNP grew strongly (3.6 percent per year) and led to improvements in virtually all other macroeconomic indicators. Interestingly enough, the combination of small nominal wage increases, low inflation, and tax reductions led to higher real disposable wages between 1988 and 1990. In the previous period of free-for-all collective bargaining between 1980 and 1987, real take-home pay had, instead, declined.

"After this encouraging beginning, social partnership became the backbone of Irish economic policy. Each three years, a new agreement was approved. These agreements contained both wage guidelines and a number of social and economic measures...

"From an economic point of view, the Irish social partnership has been a big success. In fact, it is held to have substantially contributed to the Irish economic miracle of the last few years by greatly increasing the competitiveness of the Irish exposed sectors in international markets, particularly in sectors dominated by multinational companies. So far, social partnership has proven remarkably resilient to changes in both business cycles and the political composition of governmental coalitions...

"The unions' role in the new social pacts is to participate in enhancing the competitiveness of the national economy. In exchange, the unions gain access to policy-making. This enables them to check the distributional consequences of policies and limit the impact on the weakest segments of society. Whether this is the best that labour can do at this point in time, given systemic constraints, is a question this paper cannot address, but one that unions and the left should seriously consider, as their future seems crucially dependent on it."

Responding to what they had learnt during their visit to Ireland and Europe, organised business and our trade union federations decided to establish the Millennium Labour Council.

Nevertheless, the rest of our people are still entitled to inquire whether this Council and NEDLAC, the body charged with the responsibility to produce our counterpart to the Irish Programme for National Recovery, such as the Programme of the Growth and Development Summit, have succeeded to do what the Irish social partners did, as reported by the International Institute for Labour Studies of the ILO.

It is clear that to achieve the unquestionably positive results realised by the Irish social partners, our own social partners have to accept that each one of them has a responsibility to contribute to our National Recovery or Growth and Development, for common and shared benefit. As part of this, our social partners have to understand that they have to pursue the objective to create the better life for all our people within the given context of the challenging global circumstances originally described by Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.

Practically to achieve the desired and necessary outcomes, resulting in pushing back the frontiers of poverty, our social partners will also have to achieve a shared understanding of "the state of the nation", beyond the messages each one of them has to convey and propagate to promote their particular, as opposed to the national interests.

In this regard, we will have to answer a number of questions together, and overcome the temptation and practice to corrupt the understanding of our national reality, seeking to promote our partisan interests. For instance:

What is the "real situation" in our country with regard to the labour market, including the issue of "flexibility" and "rigidity"? What is the "real situation" with regard to job creation and job losses? What lies behind the widespread process of casualisation of labour and the employment of "illegal migrants"? What is meant by the "official definition of unemployment"? What causes unemployment?

What is the "real situation" with regard to our human resource and research and development imperatives? What is the "real situation" with regard to the size of our economy and its rate of growth? What considerations should determine a correct macro-economic policy? What considerations should determine a correct micro-economic policy?

How accurate are the economic statistics issued by StatsSA, the Reserve Bank and the media? What is the difference between the "grey economy" and the informal sector, and how important are they? How organically competitive are the various sectors of our economy? Objectively, do we have "sunset" and "sunrise" economic sectors or sub-sectors? What is meant by a competitive exchange rate and how must we achieve it? What other questions should we ask and answer together?

In next week's "Letter from the President", I will comment on some of these questions, to contribute to what hopefully will be a frank public discussion of these and other issues, as well as the other fundamental considerations mentioned in this Letter. In the meantime I am honoured to reiterate my best wishes for a happy May Day to our working people, which I conveyed during the national May Day rally, convened by COSATU on 1 May in Thembisa, Ekurhuleni.

Women's emancipation

A just world is not possible while women are marginalised

It was not surprising that the first recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize for environmental activities, Kenyan professor Wangari Maathai, was a woman. Women are very conscious of and sensitive to those things that might undermine the very survival of the human race, whether it be the environment or a threat to peace, food insecurity, health or education.

Given the central role that women play in the survival of humanity one would have thought our societies, and humanity as a whole, would have given the first call to the resources of this world to women and children.

You would have thought that women would have been protected against domestic violence, the ravages of war, hunger and disease. You would also have thought they would have been given access to education and skills, health -especially reproductive health - and to food, as to be better equipped for their responsibilities.

You would have thought they would have been given the central place in decision-making structures of societies, be they political, cultural, legal, academic, religious or social, to ensure that those decisions do not impact negatively on humanity and its survival.

You would have thought that no government or country would be accepted as fully democratic unless women were fully integrated at all levels of government and in all structures of society. You would have thought that no government or country would be accepted as observing human rights unless women's rights, which are human rights, were fully observed. You would have thought that countries would be held responsible for discriminatory practices if they had gender discrimination.

You would have thought the whole world would guard against the marginalisation of women. You would have thought that any nation that wanted to reach its full potential in economic, social, cultural and political development would know that would be impossible if it continued to exclude more than half of its population.

We cannot talk of a just and equitable world while women are marginalised. It is for that reason that the ANC and its alliance partners, the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), even at the height of our liberation struggle, came to understand and accept that the struggle would not be complete and we would not be free unless women were equal participants in that struggle and were free.

It is for this reason then, when we first moved towards freedom, we ensured that our constitution, the highest law of the land, defined the society we continue to struggle for as a democratic, non-racial and non-sexist society.

It is for the same reason that at the centre of our foreign policy, which is the creation of a better world, our priorities are the fight against racism and gender discrimination and the elimination of poverty.

The preamble of the United Nations Charter, an expression of the determination of the peoples of the world, declares its objective to "reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small... to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom".

Despite these noble objectives, we are witnesses to the unprecedented feminisation of poverty, with 70% of the world's poor being women, and the general marginalisation of women in every human activity. They continue to be exposed to inhuman conditions; they are still victims of domestic violence and are at the receiving end of the violence of war and conflict and its consequences.

Women are still denied access to technology, education and health, and, of critical importance, are being denied access to political decision-making bodies. Ironically, despite the three world conferences on women, including the Beijing Platform for Action, women are yet to see the benefits of decisions taken at these meetings. There is no dignity in hunger, disease, homelessness, unemployment and ignorance, and there is no dignity in poverty.

To fight for the eradication of poverty will be part of restoring the dignity of the world. To fight against the spread of HIV and AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis and other infectious diseases would be to improve the health of women and children who are disproportionately affected by these scourges. If the world were to implement the Beijing Platform for Action, it would go a long way towards the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals.

How do we, as women, make sure we prioritise the struggle for the dignity of women, for women's emancipation, to place the struggle against poverty at the centre of every country's agenda? What are the comparative advantages that we might have to employ to fast track this process?

Numbers do count

The first advantage, and probably the most important, is our numbers. In democratic societies and institutions, numbers do count. If women were to be active in political parties in their own countries, they could change the thinking of those within political formations. In South Africa, women were not allowed to be full members of the ANC at its inception in 1912. They could not vote, nor could they be voted for. Women waged a sustained struggle against those positions both within the movement and in society at large.

It was only in the 1940s that the ANC allowed women to be full members. Only then did the ANC become a truly democratic mass movement. Women also participated in the struggle against apartheid, but at the same time, continued their relentless struggle within the movement itself.

As women we used this comparative advantage during the political negotiations prior to South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994 by forming the women's coalition, which cut across the racial divide, class and other artificial differences. The coalition was to draw up the women's charter, designed to influence the constitution making process.

During the elections we again used our numbers as an advantage within the ANC, thus ensuring that the ANC list had a 30% quota for women. We obviously knew that the ANC could not win the elections - no political party could win those elections - unless it had the support of the majority of the population. That is why we were able to advance from a handful of women in the apartheid parliament to more than a hundred women in the democratic parliament. Admittedly, this was not enough, but nevertheless a step in the right direction. Parity had become our lodestar.

When the first cabinet of the free South Africa was formed, there were only two women cabinet members. As women in the ANC, we complained to the then President Nelson Mandela, who promised to increase the number. True to his word, by the end of his five-year term as president he had doubled the number of women cabinet ministers to four.

When President Thabo Mbeki started his term, he appointed eight women ministers. At the beginning of his second term he appointed 12 women cabinet ministers out of 28 ministers and 10 deputy ministers out of 21. This has come about because of the activities of women within the ANC and in society at large, fused with the support of especially the top leadership of the ANC. There was admittedly a lot of resistance within other sectors of the ANC.

The increase in women's representation was not only in cabinet but also within government as a whole. This development is significant in that it gives women confidence to assert themselves in their different fields of activity. The real benefit has been that women in parliament do ensure that all legislation is not only gender sensitive, but is also able to advance the struggle for a non-sexist society.

The first major challenge to progress was the resistance within certain sections in our own movement. The second challenge was for women to demonstrate they were capable, hard working and focused. With the passage of time, society became accustomed to women in those responsibilities. It is therefore common to have women in leadership positions, though prejudice still obtains. The third challenge was posed by women themselves, as some of them were opposed to quotas, arguing that it was tokenism and not based on merit. Yet quotas have the effect of focusing people's minds on finding capable women rather than the tendency to focus only on men. In other words, what quotas do is to say to society - look for appropriately qualified women and you shall find them.

A world for women and men

The fourth challenge was that the environment and conditions in government institutions were designed primarily to serve men. For instance, prior to 1994 even women's bathrooms in parliament were in short supply and had to be increased. The apartheid parliament had been designed to serve men.

We also had to look at the non-availability of child-care facilities in parliament. Interestingly, at some stage in cabinet there was the expectation that the wives were to take care of children's transport to school and other activities until we had to point out that some of us did not have wives. Government had therefore to make alternative arrangements.

In dealing with these anomalies we had to guard against trying to make it as women in a men's world. What is of critical importance is to create a world in which both women and men are comfortable.

When I was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs, it was expected that the wife of a foreign minister had to undertake certain duties vis-à-vis the spouses of the diplomatic corps, the majority of whom are men. Alternative arrangements had to be made since I do not have a wife.

Our other comparative advantage is that women are very influential within families, especially in relation to young children. Women should, therefore, use that influence to bring up the next generation of youth as gender sensitive and, by definition, non-sexist.

In business, women are also making progress, though there is still a long way to go. A recent newspaper report, entitled 'Women CEOs still Few and Far Between' said:

"It is definitely still a man's world. However, although South Africa's working women are grossly under-represented as executive managers, this country is ahead of some First World countries when it comes to the proportion of women in the top echelons of business.

"This is according to the Businesswomen's Association (BWA) census, which was released yesterday. The census, which aims to track the trends of women in business in South Africa, found that although only 19.8% of local companies had women as executive managers, this figure was way ahead of those in the US, Canada and Australia, which respectively had 15.7%, 14% and 10.2% of these positions filled by women."

August the 9th is a national holiday dedicated to women in recognition of their contribution to the struggle for national liberation. The same month is also dedicated to profiling women's achievements and detailing their success stories. This helps in sensitising society and keeping women's struggle very much alive in the consciousness, psyche and soul of the nation.

The countries of the future are those that will take women into the 21st Century. Those who leave them behind will do so at their own peril. We all have a responsibility and an obligation to spare no effort or energy in changing the world for the better. Like the women before us we must dedicate ourselves to the non-sexist struggle so that, indeed, we can bequeath to future generations a better world than the one we ourselves found.

** Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma is an ANC National Executive Committee member. This is an edited version of a speech delivered at the Pan-African Center for Gender Peace and Development Conference in Dakar, Senegal on 1 May 2005.

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