Faced with ISO's attempt to win the leadership
of the ZCTU of Zimbabwe

The position of the WIL Revolutionary Socialists

The ISO (International Socialist Organization, the English SWP party in Zimbabwe) intends to take over the leadership of the ZCTU trade union center in Zimbabwe. Are they doing it to lead the fight to re-found the labor movement to fight and conquer its demands, or to exchange one bureaucracy for another?
At the head of the ZCTU there is a collaborationist leadership with the regime and the governments of the day. It’s enough to see the situation of hunger and misery to which the working class of Zimbabwe was led, with its millions of unemployed, to seriously consider ending the bureaucracy of the ZCTU and its perfidious policy of class collaboration.

The fight that is being raised in Zimbabwe, to set up a combative and fierce leadership of the working class to confront the capitalists and their government, is the immediate struggle to conquer a Congress of occupied and unemployed workers at the national level. A Congress that declares the immediate struggle to expel the IMF and imperialism from Zimbabwe, for the crisis will be paid by the capitalists and those above. A National Workers Congress with delegates from the base with a mandate that calls for the organization of a plan of struggle to prepare the General Strike for the most immediate demands of the workers, which are the minimum wage, vital and mobile according to the cost of the family basket and reduction of the working day so that all the unemployed earn their bread for their homes with a decent job.

If the ISO really wants to conquer a socialist leadership of the ZCTU, it must be consistent with these tasks and immediate needs of the working class and call, together with the entire fighting vanguard of the country, to hold base assemblies in all the workplaces and set up the unemployed committees to recover the unions and all the workers' organizations nationwide.
The ZCTU must be reorganized from the bottom up in every city in Zimbabwe and at the national level, with one delegate for every 100 workers, voted on by the rank and file.

The ISO and all the currents that claim from the working class must promote this process of recovering the unions and organizing the majority of the hungry who have been separated from them by the union bureaucracies and their policy of class collaboration.

A National Congress of workers that makes those below to weigh in the national political life, fighting to expel imperialism from Zimbabwe to end the looting of the bankers and the transnationals.
This will be accomplished by nationalizing without compensation that handful of expropriators of the people, to recover the rich land of Zimbabwe and impose a national agrarian plan that in the hands of the people, the workers' organizations and the poor peasants will put cheap bread and food in the table of all the exploited of the nation.

That National Worker Congress is the one that must vote a Council that represents all the workers of Zimbabwe. A Workers' Council that breaks every pact and agreement that the leadership of the ZCTU had established with the government and the bosses against the workers' rank and file.

To carry on any serious and decisive struggle of the workers, it becomes more necessary than ever that the workers' bases recover the ZCTU fighting from below and set up self-defense committees to stop and defeat the repression with which the government has attacked any struggle and mass action by the workers.

In South Africa, Zimbabwe and all of Southern Africa: the same class, the same struggle, the same enemy!

In South Africa, NUMSA and its struggle, together with the uprising for the bread of the hungry, have paved the way for the General Strike. That is the example to be followed in Zimbabwe!

We must organize the struggle with all the workers in Southern Africa.
It’s time to fight together against imperialism and its new rich black governments that rule on the shoulders of millions of outcasts.

Hundreds of our people migrate and work in South Africa. Others try to reach Europe. Many die in the Mediterranean.
It’s time to unite black workers across the African continent!
It’s time to fight alongside our brothers and sisters in the US who rise up to the shout of "Black Lives Matter"!

At the end of the pandemic, it has been already clear that it’s the workers who paid for the crisis...
It’s time for the crisis to be paid by those at the top: the capitalists and their government.
Open the way for those who fight!
Unity of the workers! We must organize the General Strike!
Against the brutal repression of the government and state of Zimbabwe, we must set up pickets and self-defense committees of the ZCTU and all unions!
For a revolutionary and internationalist leadership in the ZCTU, based on worker democracy and the workers' struggle!

If the ISO really wants to fight for a socialist and internationalist leadership of the unions, it will count, on the basis of the program that we present here, with our support. From now on, we call on them to a common struggle.
But first, we socialist workers have the obligation to make it clear to the working class that we have no ties with the exploiters and that the ISO in particular will publicly break with all bosses' political parties such as the MDC and the government servant of imperialism.

We call on the ISO to hold a national plenary of workers' fighters and organizations to start this process of struggle and organization of the workers of Zimbabwe.
We call on you to draw up a common declaration of support for the general strike in South Africa, calling on the workers of our country to prepare and organize it together with our South African class brothers.

WIL - Zimbabwe
FLTI member