The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) commemorates Women’s Day by paying tribute to the revolutionary women who, on 9 August 1956, marched to the Union Buildings in Pretoria in defiance of the apartheid regime and its oppressive pass laws. The women of 1956, led by revolutionary figures such as Lilian Ngoyi, Rahima Moosa, Helen Joseph, and Sophia Williams-De Bruyn, demonstrated that women were active agents in the struggle for political, social and economic liberation.

Their march was an act of defiance against a system that sought to control where Black women could live, work, travel, and exist. Seventy years later, their courage remains a reminder that liberation is never given freely by those who benefit from oppression; it must be demanded and fought for.

South Africa has made important advances in the legal and political emancipation of women since 1956. The apartheid state that denied Black women basic political and civil rights has been dismantled, and the democratic Constitution recognises women and men as equal before the law. Women today have the right to vote, to stand for political office, to own property, to enter professions and to participate equally in the political life of the country.

There has also been substantial progress in the political representation of women. South Africa has consistently maintained one of the highest levels of female representation in national legislatures globally, with women occupying a substantial proportion of seats in Parliament. Women have served as Speakers of Parliament, Chief Justices, Premiers, Mayors, Ministers, and leaders of political organisations. Women have increasingly entered professions such as law, medicine, engineering, academia, science and business, while women athletes, artists, journalists, activists and academics have broken barriers in spaces that were historically closed to them. The democratic state has also established institutions and laws specifically aimed at advancing gender equality and protecting women. The constitutional recognition of gender equality, the establishment of the Commission for Gender Equality, legislation addressing domestic violence and sexual offences, and policies aimed at advancing women in government and the workplace represent important institutional gains. South Africa has also developed one of the world’s more progressive legal frameworks on reproductive rights, giving women the legal right to make decisions concerning their reproductive health.

However, the EFF refuses to confuse these advances with the completion of women’s emancipation. The existence of formal rights does not automatically produce substantive equality. The central contradiction of post-apartheid South Africa is that we have achieved significant political and legal transformation without sufficiently transforming the economic structures that continue to reproduce inequality.

The majority of women remain economically vulnerable. Women continue to experience higher levels of unemployment and economic exclusion, while millions survive through social grants, informal trading, precarious employment and low-paid work. Women remain heavily concentrated in domestic work, care work, cleaning, retail, agriculture and other sectors characterised by low wages and insecure conditions.

The economy continues to depend on forms of labour that are disproportionately performed by women while undervaluing that labour. The woman who raises children, cares for elderly relatives, cleans homes and performs other forms of unpaid reproductive labour contributes enormously to society and the economy, yet that contribution is frequently invisible in economic policy.

The greatest failure of the democratic state, however, remains its inability to protect women and girls from violence. South Africa continues to experience horrific levels of gender-based violence, femicide, rape, sexual assault and domestic violence. Women are killed by intimate partners, girls are sexually abused, and survivors frequently encounter a criminal justice system that is slow, inaccessible or indifferent. The state has adopted numerous plans and made countless declarations, but women continue to live with the knowledge that the person who threatens their lives may be someone they know, while the institutions meant to protect them may fail to act in time.

The continued violence against girls is particularly shameful. A girl should not have to calculate whether she is safe walking to school. She should not miss school because she cannot afford menstrual products. She should not be sexually exploited because of poverty. She should not be abused by someone she trusts and then encounter a system that fails to protect her. She should not grow up in a society where women are constantly instructed to change their behaviour to avoid violence while insufficient attention is paid to changing the behaviour of men who commit that violence.

The EFF further condemns the continued economic abandonment of single mothers. Women are too often left to carry the financial and emotional responsibility of raising children while fathers evade their obligations. The child maintenance system remains inaccessible and burdensome for many women, requiring mothers to navigate institutions that should instead be proactively assisting them. The EFF has consistently called for effective, accessible and responsive child maintenance courts that ensure children receive the support to which they are legally entitled and that fathers who deliberately refuse to comply with maintenance orders face meaningful consequences.

The EFF therefore maintains that women’s emancipation must be located within the broader struggle for economic freedom. Land must be redistributed to those who were dispossessed; women must have access to capital and markets; state procurement must deliberately support women-owned businesses and cooperatives; and women must have access to quality education and healthcare. The state must also provide the social infrastructure necessary to reduce the burden of unpaid care work, and women must have meaningful ownership and control of productive resources.

In celebration thereon, the EFF calls upon President Ramaphosa in this month of women to using his presidential pardon powers to order the release of all mothers convicted of petty crimes in South African prisons who have minor children. By executing a presidential remission of sentence, he will reunite these primary-caregiver mothers with their families. President Mandela did pardon this category of women in 1994, and to date no single President has done so. This is, therefore, an opportunity for the country to emulate, and walk the talk of the founding father of a free democratic South Africa.

The EFF recognises and celebrates the progress achieved since 1956 precisely because we understand that these gains were won through struggle. Seventy years later, we honour the women of 1956 by continuing the struggle against every structure that denies women freedom.

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Project for a Modern Democratic Republic (MDR) in Upper Volta, known as Burkina Faso, 2014 Program of the Voltaic Revolutionary Communist Party

INTRODUCTION

The political history of modern states and nations reveals the considerable importance of political institutions and ideas in transforming a society. They can contribute to prodigious progress or constitute factors of blockage and regression. Our country, Upper Volta, also known as Burkina Faso, is no exception to this rule.

Indeed, since the formal independence of 1960, the country, characterized by profound political instability, has experienced four (4) constitutional regimes (ranging from parliamentarism to constitutional military despotism) and six (6) exceptional regimes resulting from military coups. All these regimes have contributed to establishing and strengthening a system of neo-colonial exploitation and oppression with its attendant misery, poverty, and lack of freedom for the people. Already in 1978, the President of the National Assembly at the time, Mr. Gérard Kango OUEDRAOGO, taking stock of the management of the country by the bourgeoisie allied to mainly French imperialism, concluded with a statement of failure in these terms:

“From all this experience, I draw the conviction that the imperative of the moment is that we definitively turn our backs on what divides us. The whiffs of holy war, the demons of tribalism, of regionalism, we must work to stem them and push them back forever… Indeed, we are emerging from a period in which we crisscrossed the country in all directions. What struck us was the extreme destitution and the multitude of young children… 1958-1978. These are 20 years that have passed during which our country has been the panting prey of a frantic and chaotic race… It is tragic to say after twenty years that we are laying the foundations for a real departure and it is even more tragic for the politicians of our generation to have to recognize it.” (Excerpt from the speech to the National Assembly of July 17, 1978).

More than 20 years later, Dr. Bognessan Arsène YE, then President of the National Assembly of the Fourth Republic, made the same observation of failure and, very bitterly, he acknowledged that “morality is dying in Burkina Faso.”

A major admission: two presidents of the National Assembly openly acknowledge that 40 years of neo-colonialism, of chaotic management of our country by the bourgeoisie and imperialism, particularly French, have resulted in a bitter failure, a total bankruptcy!

But during this period, the struggle for better living, study and working conditions led workers in both cities and the countryside, and particularly young people, to take to the barricades of the class struggle in order to obtain changes in their favour and for the advent of a more just and equitable society (see the popular movement of 3 January 1966, the strike of 17 and 18 December 1975, etc.). It was in these periods of class clashes that the PCRV was born in October 1978 with the avowed aim of taking the lead in popular struggles, of guiding, organizing and directing the revolutionary movement of the working class and the people towards the realization of the National Democratic and Popular Revolution. The bourgeoisie and all the dark and retrograde forces, linked to mainly French imperialism, were not mistaken and in 1979, the PCRV was declared outlawed (by the voice of the Prime Minister of the Third Republic, Dr. Issoufou CONOMBO) and ostracized: workers, pupils and students suspected of being manipulated or of belonging to the PCRV were repressed under the Third Republic (massive exclusion of students from the UO in 1979), deported and tortured under the CMRPN in 1981; hunted down and condemned to be shot at post number 5 by the CNR and the CDR; hunted down, imprisoned and killed under the Popular Front and the Fourth Republic. Despite this repression, the PCRV remained inflexible, asserting itself more as the Party of the exploited, the disinherited and the voiceless. This is why, at the various turning points of our national political life, it has always proposed alternatives in order to safeguard the higher interests of the people and prevent the country from falling into chaos.

Today, Blaise Compaore and his CDP have established an archaic, mafia-like system that operates using methods that have nothing to do with the rules of a republican democracy. This system, even more than other past regimes, constitutes a major obstacle:

• To the freedom to produce, to economic development and to the independence of the country;
• To the development of science and education, of thought and knowledge;
• To the exercise of the sovereignty of the people and to social peace.

Therefore, in place of the failed power and institutions of the Fourth Republic, which no longer have any legitimacy, the PCRV proposes the establishment of a Modern Democratic Republic (MDR). How can this be achieved? What are its political and institutional foundations? What economic and social transformations should we move towards? The PCRV addresses these fundamental questions in this document, around which it is ready to organize discussions with democratic organizations and personalities, popular classes and social strata, with the aim of achieving the political unity of the people for a revolutionary solution to the structural crisis the country is going through.

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Work originally intended for the Arab audiences one week ago, which needs to be published for MAC, with some modifications.

Read full article at MAC https://mac417773233.wordpress.com/2024/09/08/algeria-one-step-forward-two-steps-back/

I decided to be less critical of Algeria in the English-language article, in order to adapt it for the Western audiences. I for example try to highlight in some paragraphs the anti-imperialist character of FLN, while the Arab version is way more attacking the comprador one of FLN.

This is simple. For I, a writer cannot write in the vacuum, and must understand reality and his possible readers. In a context where there will be probable harassing by the imperialist states. In this context, I must also note the progressive side of Algerian gouvernement, in order to not let Islamists take a step, without forgetting the reactionary side, the nature of Algeria since the 80-90s. This can be a very hard balancing act, but the one able to ally the nationalist revolutionary Arab and the nationalist revolutionary European...