The entire country is still in shock after the horrific murders of a ten year old girl and two twelve year old boys in Clarke Estate early in September.  Another grade 6 learner was also killed in a drive-by shooting outside her primary school in Johannesburg. Once again, like hundreds before them, their mothers must now bury their young children! These atrocities follow shortly after the countrywide mass demonstrations against increasing gender based violence and child abuse. At these protests, outrage was also expressed against the rape of women and children. Sadly, these vile crimes happened whilst the government implemented their costly and ineffective strategy of deploying the South African National Defence Force on the Cape Flats and releasing its anti-gang unit to stem violent crime! Needless to say, this has not stopped the violence against our working class communities. In fact, recent statistics revealed that violent crimes increased! Our women and children are still raped and killed! Our mothers and fathers are still robbed on their way to work! Our youth are still brazenly murdered in gang violence and suffer the devastating effects of substance abuse! Our communities are still crammed like sardines into apartheid styled housing projects that breed crime and violence. Bitter experience taught us that these politicians cannot be trusted.

We, as the working class, need to take back the power we gave to the ruling class and their bourgeois bosses in the 1994 political compromise. Our problems of gender based violence, crime and poverty do not happen in a vacuum. It is the direct result of a failed socio-economic system known as capitalism. The only place for the working class in this system is to enrich the bourgeoisie and its cronies. This system caters only for the rich and their luxurious lifestyles. It is this system that causes unemployment, inadequate housing, a disintegrating public health  and education system and a dismally failing social welfare system. It is capitalism that caused us to have the highest income gap between rich and poor in the world!  It is through capitalism that our people are dehumanized, prone to desperate acts of survival and cruelly suffer the social ills that hardly affect the rich in this country. Government’s response is to police the problem and NOT to create the conditions to prevent crime from happening in the first place. More prisons, police officers and mortuaries will not shelter the poor, feed the hungry, provide employment or address other social ills. But this is expected, as government’s main purpose has always been to serve their bourgeois masters for scraps from their table. Their police and army must first and foremost protect PRIVATE PROPERTY! This is enshrined in their much lauded constitution. After all, the main aim of Capitalism is to generate super profits for the bosses. It is not in their interest to invest in social development projects for the poor. This proves too costly and does not generate profits for them. Instead billions of Rands are currently wasted on bankrupt State owned enterprises like SAA, ESKOM and costly commissions of inquiry. Not to mention the billions  of Rands simply written off as wasteful and fruitless expenditure, while the poor are imprisoned for far less serious crimes committed to stay alive.

APDUSA says that unless the working class takes control of the economy and decides their own fate, the poor will not know safety and security. We need to organize ourselves in our communities and our places of work against all forms of human rights abuses. The working class must unite under a common and principled programme of transitional demands that would qualitatively take us closer to a new social order free of the current social ills. In organizing itself, the working class determines its own socio-economic priorities that would address the dire need for meaningful employment, free quality housing, free quality education, free quality healthcare and better social security.  Only socialism can make this possible!