African Communist, 1st Quarter, 2021, Issue No. 204

In this Issue:

Editorial
CC political report	Dr Blade Nzimande
The struggle on two fronts	Jeremy Cronin
Key tasks of the Left	Joel Netshitenzhe
A Communist woman on the NDR	Jenny Schreiner

"Slack" in the economy? What planet is the South African central bank living on?

Root out state capture and general corruption, intensify the struggle against neoliberalism and its austerity agenda

Editorial

Speaking after the Monetary Policy Committee meeting on 19 May that announced no change in the prime lending rate, South African Reserve Bank governor Lesetja Kganyago told us: "The stance is accommodative because we believe that inflation is controlled, that there is slack in the economy and this economy could do with some support." (Business Day, 20 May 2021). "Slack" in the economy? The economy could do with "some" support? What planet is the SARB living on?

Our expanded unemployment rate is now well over 40 percent. 10 million South Africans are out of work. Our economy has been battered by the impact of Covid-19 on top of two decades of neo-liberal punishment. Half of our population live in chronic and persistent poverty and a further 11 percent are regarded as the "transient poor", living precariously in and out of poverty. And this is what the governor of the SARB complacently calls "slack".

The hungry, the unemployed, the precariously employed none of these are of particular concern to the SARB. As Kganyago’s statement above makes clear, the singular and myopic focus is inflation and the only supposed role for the SARB is to have a hovering foot over the money supply brake pedal.

Two months earlier, one of Kganyago’s slightly more socially aware deputy governors, Kuben Naidoo, complained that "competing interests" in society were hampering the attempt to implement "structural reforms" (code for neoliberal austerity) (Business Day, 2 March 2021). Naidoo attributed this problem to "extreme inequality in South Africa that persists even after apartheid ended". This meant, he said, that the "country does not have a large enough middle class to play a stabilising role in policy-making." As a result, he said, we have government departments with "policies with multiple objectives instead of primary goals, competing interests and a difficulty to compromise."

Naidoo is right of course to note the extreme inequalities in our society - world record levels of income and especially of wealth inequality. However, what he and the Business Day describe as a "stabilising middle class" is really, and could only be in our reality, an extensive waged and salaried working class, including millions of public sector professionals working in health, education, the broader care economy, and community safety.

But it is a major part of this broader working class that is now under sustained attack from Kganyago and Naidoo’s colleagues in Treasury in the name of the very "structural reforms" that the SARB demands. Treasury’s commitment to reducing the public sector wage bill by R303,4bn over the three years to 2023/4 can only be achieved through massive retrenchments in sectors with by far the largest numbers (educators, nurses, police-men and -women). This, in turn, will further collapse government revenue and the SARB and Treasury will then argue for more austerity in what economist Duma Gqubule describes as a never-ending cycle in which "the end game will be a failed state."

It is in this context that the SACP stands full-square behind the demands and current activism of the public sector unions and their federations against neo-liberal madness. South Africa does not have a "bloated public service", in fact, as the Covid-19 pandemic has illustrated, we have critical shortages in key sectors of the public service. We do, however, have an inappropriately structured public sector. The neo-liberal turn, unwisely embarked upon in the mid-1990s, came with its Thatcherite civil service reform paradigm, "the new public management" approach. This held that government should "steer not row", that key public functions should be outsourced, and that government departments should increasingly be turned into procurers not doers. Public interest professional skills were devalued and senior public sector managers were increasingly seen as generic managers (preferably with MBAs). As the Zondo commission has made dramatically apparent, these civil service reforms have made the tendering state with its increasingly "business ethos" vulnerable to endemic state capture. It is not a question of downsizing the public sector but of rebuilding a strong, public-interest, developmental culture across all of government, including in the state-owned enterprises.

But is all of this affordable? Globally the disaster of decades of neoliberalism orthodoxy are now more and more visible and increasingly conceded even within mainstream economic policy circles. This is less so here in South Africa where Treasury and the SARB doggedly cling to what their leading lights learnt during their "cadre development" stints at Goldman Sachs in the early 1990s.

However, encouragingly, there is now an increasing range of left and heterodox economic voices within our country. As the SACP we are actively interacting with and benefiting from these currents. Practical and eminently do-able proposals emanating from these policy discussions include interventions like the Reserve Bank directly funding government spending (which is being done in many developed capitalist economies); or the Reserve Bank covering the Eskom debt either at no cost or on favourable terms. The Government Employees Pension Fund (GEPF), with assets of around R1.61-trillion, is another major resource that could be used to address our economic crisis. Its current nonsensical 100 percent fully-funded requirement could comfortably be reduced to 50 percent and this could, for instance, through the PIC be used to write-off the SOE debt of some R722bn.

As contributions to this issue of the African Communist argue, we must not allow the absolutely necessary focus on rooting out endemic state capture and general corruption, to distract our attention from the equally necessary struggle against neoliberal austerity. Rather than being the necessary solution to state capture, as Treasury officials like to argue, austerity ("fiscal consolidation" as they call it) is resulting in deepening racialised, gendered and class inequalities. This in turn easily becomes the terrain on which a populist, pseudo-radical stratum mobilises popular frustration for its own parasitic purposes.

The conjunctural and vanguard role of the party in the face of counter-revolutionary forces - what is to be done?

This political report was presented to the SACP March 2021 Augmented Central Committee by the SACP General Secretary Dr Blade Nzimande

This meeting of the Augmented Central Committee takes place in our Centenary Year, in the month we commemorate International Working Women’s Day, in a period of the intensifying fourfold crisis of capitalism, and in a conjuncture fraught with subjective and objective factors that combine to create a particularly challenging moment for the SACP and our revolution.
Indeed, we have characterised the present conjuncture as one in which our revolution can perhaps be described as being at a crossroads - where the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has created serious challenges but also provides huge opportunities for decisive and radical interventions to lay a basis for the transformation of our economy to break the political economy of colonialism of a special type. At the same time, we are faced with the real prospects of the defeat of the National Democratic Revolution (NDR), through a combination of failing neoliberal interventions and intensified fight back by the state capture corruption networks. The combined impact of this reality also reinforces and emboldens those forces opposed to the NDR - including the forces of counter-revolution. Cde Sheila Barsel says one of the things the late Jack Simons said that remains permanently stuck in her mind was that "counter-revolution often surfaces in the least expected areas and forms".
There is a range of factors that combine to create a situation with the potential to embolden political and class forces that have no interest in the NDR and seek to undermine it, including forces within our own movement who no longer require the NDR but opportunities for self-enrichment, turning our movement, with the ANC as the chief target, into an instrument for personal wealth accumulation. In other words, behaviour that is akin to counterrevolution is emerging in the least expected area, from inside our own movement.
The current situation is as a result of a particular combination of both objective and subjective factors that pose a serious threat to the NDR. We have spent most of last year analysing both these objective and subjective factors but without a decisive breakthrough on how to overcome these challenges. Of course, COVID-19 has seriously constrained our capacity for any mass mobilisation of the working class, whilst the state capture networks are slowly gaining ground together with a push from inside the government for a neo-liberal path that is driving the country deep into austerity and towards its consequences.
Our analysis of the objective conditions facing our revolution has been premised on what we have characterised as a fourfold crisis facing capitalism globally and its reproduction in our own domestic terrain: the health pandemic, COVID-19; the deepening economic crisis on a global scale and domestically, the worsening structural crisis of poverty, inequality and unemployment; the multiple crises of social reproduction anchored around the difficult struggles by families or households to make ends meet and, in our case, the explosion of the social pandemic of gender-based violence, other forms of violence, and criminality; and climate change, closely linked to the ravaging of our environment through the greed of capitalist accumulation and patterns of consumption.
The struggle against COVID-19 is currently dominated by vaccine imperialism, and its domestic manifestation through tough conditionalities set by the big and multinational pharmaceutical corporations. This frustrates our attempts to acquire COVID-19 vaccines in a manner that is fair, suitable to our national conditions, and protects our democratic sovereignty, including our policy space. The big capitalist pharmaceutical companies seek to consolidate their dominance in South Africa’s pharmaceutical industry and healthcare sector, in pursuit of quick, and maximum, profits, whilst not taking any responsibility for anything that might go wrong as a result of their vaccines
The SACP needs to take up in earnest the struggle to build our own pharmaceutical industry with a strong role to be played by the state, as resolved by the ANC as well as the SACP and COSATU over the last 15 years or so. It is also important that we insist on diversifying sources for our vaccines to break out of the chain of vaccine imperialism.
The SACP must intensify pressure on scientific co-operation inside BRICS and with Cuba to deepen scientific relations. A BRICS vaccine centre will be built in South Africa - and our Party must take this up actively. The Jack Simons Party School should have ongoing discussion on vaccination and science - empower our own cadres regarding class struggles over vaccines acquisition and vaccination. The world is entering an era of more or frequent pandemics. So we need state capacity to develop vaccines locally, and by also partnering with Cuba, China, Russia, and India.
Vaccine imperialism and its reproduction in the domestic terrain reflects what we argued is a key feature of contemporary global realities. The SACP has long argued that it is not accurate to simply characterise the so-called "developing countries" as being marginalised in the imperialist global order. Instead, these countries, including South Africa, are simultaneously marginalised and integrated in contemporary imperialism. It is through the particular integration of South Africa by the imperialist dominated global pharmaceutical industry that leads to its marginalisation and exposure to exploitation in vaccine acquisition. South Africa is largely dependent on global pharmaceutical companies from imperialist metropoles for its daily pharmaceutical needs. It is therefore not by accident that our contemporary acquisition of vaccines is oriented towards the US and Europe, and not BRICS countries and Cuba, despite the fact that the latter group of countries have enormous potential.
The economic situation is dire. According to Statistics South Africa’s Quarterly Labour Force Survey for the fourth quarter of 2020, our unemployment rate by the narrow or official definition, that excludes discouraged or demoralised work-seekers, is 32.5%. Using the expanded definition, it is 42.6%. In real figures these percentages mean that we have a population of 7.2 million work-seekers who are unemployed, according to the narrow definition of unemployment, while our total unemployed population comprises approximately 11.2 million active and demoralised work-seekers.
It is important to underline that South Africa’s unemployed population by both definitions is greater than the total populations of many countries. The foundation of this monumental unemployment crisis is the exploitative capitalist system. In our situation the system was rooted in the political economy of colonial capitalist expansion from Europe, with British colonialism and imperialism playing a defining role. This was reinforced by colonialism of a special type intensified by apartheid. Staring in the late years of apartheid, and post-1994, the exploitative capitalist system was reinforced by neoliberal globalisation and its domestication. Post-1994, the "Growth, Employment and Redistribution" economic policy deepened the neoliberal path.
There is a direct relationship between the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the state of our economy. COVID-19 has exposed the nature and scale of economic inequalities in our society, and the economic realities pose severe constraints in our ability to confront COVID-19 - from inability to physically distance due to overcrowded informal settlements to inability to acquire vaccines under conditions suiting our own realities.
A statistically authoritative and up to date report on poverty, considering the adverse impact of COVID-19, is yet to emerge. However, before the advent of COVID-19 South Africa already had a poverty headcount of 56.8%, with that of females at 58.6%, worse than that of males, which is at 54.9%.
The Gini coefficient, which is used as a measure of the distribution of income or wealth Africa is much higher than the Gini coefficient of income inequality, and significantly higher than the Gini coefficient of global wealth inequality. Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, in 2015, the Gini coefficient of wealth inequality in South Africa was approximately 1, at 0.94, while that of income, which was also high, was approximately 0.7, at 0.67. Gini coefficient values range from 0 to 1, with 0 representing perfect equality and 1 representing perfect inequality. That means wealth inequality in South Africa approximate perfect inequality.
COVID-19 has worsened the levels of unemployment, poverty, and inequality that it found already at crisis-high levels in South Africa. Retrenchment by capitalist bosses, in the main, and by certain public entities, contributed in no small measure to the problem.
It is important to underline, in line with South Africa’s persisting colonial, apartheid and patriarchal capitalist exploitation legacy, that working class women, more so black women, and black men, as well as the black youth, are the worst affected by unemployment, poverty and inequality. In terms of inequality, within all race groups a tiny minority has become richer, respectively. In terms of geography, rural areas remain the worst.
The way Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) (including Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment) is articulated both in terms of its dominant politics and economic policy is completely inadequate to the imperative of resolving gender, race, and geographically articulated class inequalities in South Africa. We have long pointed out that the current model of BEE is not contributing to building an inclusive economy. Instead, it has in many respects been captured by the very same dominant capitalist forces, including through fronting. Also, even this modest BEE effort is almost completely absent in those areas of the private capitalist economy that have no direct relationship with the state. A different articulation of empowerment, with socialisation at its centre, is therefore critical.
The above brings us to a key question. The ANC’s latest economic transformation paper talks about "a mixed economy", which it says must be characterised by "a significant private sector" as the goal of ANC economic policy. This path has serious strategic and practical economic implications. The current phase of our democratic dispensation is dominated - in economic system terms - by the relations of capitalist production. As the SACP, we are guided by a different articulation epitomised by our programmatic slogan, "Socialism is the future: Build it now". We defined our strategic task in the here and now to be that of building the elements of, capacity for, and momentum towards socialism.
In other words, from our standpoint, the NDR can only be propelled forward if our approach to the idea of a "mixed economy" is underpinned by building the elements of socialism, with socialist oriented measures and interventions. It is important for the SACP to translate this strategic perspective into a concrete programme of action and activities on the ground and in every key site of the struggle. For example, the DA is rapidly moving forward with the privatisation of electricity provision in the Western Cape, through its programme called the "Municipal Energy Resilience". After Cape Town, this project is being extended to six municipalities - Drakenstein, Mosel Bay, Overstrand, Saldana Bay, Stellenbosch and Swartlands. We may as well ask where is the SACP and COSATU in closely monitoring and engaging with these moves by the DA? Whilst they may appear to be part of the national programme, the DA has other intentions.
It is therefore not enough to just be fixated on the truism of a "mixed economy" (by the way, most countries under capitalism are "mixed economies": the key question is the extent of public/state ownership, which in certain countries is higher than in others. In our NDR, we must thoroughly interrogate the character and nature of that "mix". In the current period, the state sector of our economy constitutes a mere 30% of our economy, a not insignificant size, but it is a sector that is severely weakened by macroeconomic framework choices, state capture and corruption. On the other hand, the key levers for transforming our economy are in the hands of the private capitalist class, for example, the financial sector. The resources controlled by the private commercial interests that enjoy monopoly of our financial sector are the (potential) engine for structural economic transformation and development. The state itself is also unwilling and lacks capacity to discipline and direct "private capital" in ways that are likely to promote inclusive growth and development that are sorely needed in our country
The state sector of the economy - principally the state-owned entities (SOEs) - has been further weakened by either the absence or further weakening of the organisational presence of the progressive trade union movement in these entities. In fact, the weakening of COSATU’s industrial unions in the capitalist dominated private sector has also been mirrored by the decline of trade union organisation in the SOEs. This is a matter that we have possibly not paid enough attention to, whose pinnacle was the massive state capture despite trade union organisations in such entities. This is another reminder that we do need to revitalise and strengthen our Trade Union Commission, strengthen relations with COSATU and its affiliates, and reach out to the broader trade union movement as part of fostering wider unity in action by organised workers.
Another weakness in the ANC paper on the economy is that it does not focus on the imperative to drive transformation of the banking and broader financial sector. Key strategic sectors in our economy, such as the financial sector, are under private sector monopoly and dominated by a handful of private oligopolies, a trend that has been deepening since the adoption of the economic policy called "Growth, Employment and Redistribution" (GEAR) in 1996. This is one reality that the notion of advancing a "mixed economy" with a "significant private sector" does not appreciate. It is this reality that has recently manifested itself in the systemic failure of private banks to administer the COVID-19 R200 billion state guaranteed loan scheme for small and medium-sized enterprises to achieve its intended objectives. Only R70 billion or a little more has been used. As if that were not enough, most of the R79 billion used has gone to white-owned private businesses. On this score, we need a practical campaign and focus to emphasise and support co-operatives and small and medium-sized enterprises, and in a way that supports our national transformation and development imperatives.
The trajectory that has dominated the government’s economic policy direction in the post-1994 reality (more so since the imposition of GEAR in 1996) is that the role of the state is primarily to facilitate and create conditions for ‘business to do business’, whilst at the same time withdrawing the involvement of the state in parts of the productive economy. It is this neoliberal policy direction and state capture through corruption that make two sides of the same coin, in that they both weaken the state and embolden the role of private capital, albeit different sections of private capital. Both types of accumulation paths also reinforce, and are reinforced, by compradorism.
The paper introduced by the National Treasury in August 2019 as the "blueprint" of South Africa’s economic strategy is deepening the same trajectory. At the centre of the document are neoliberal structural reforms pushed from Paris by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) through its publications titled "Going for Growth" and from Washington DC by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The neoliberal structural reforms are destined to introduce the capitalist accumulation of capital and related competition for profit maximisation in network industries or infrastructures hitherto belonging to SOEs. The privatisation, the auctioning off the broadband spectrum - which the National Treasury paper explicitly states that whatever left to the state must be minimal - very obviously pushes the same trajectory.
That is a reason as the SACP we have asserted that we are neither for neoliberalism nor state capture looting, but for radical structural transformation of our country’s economy and the pursuit of a developmental growth path. It is also for the same reason that it is no longer enough to fight privatisation and struggle to defend SOEs, but also to focus on what the role of those publicly owned entities must be.
The state capture networks have proven beyond any doubt that state ownership can be used for looting and not for developmental and progressive purposes. In our approach, state ownership must be for the benefit of the working class, lifting the poor out of poverty and articulating a progressive world outlook. Our "Strategic Perspectives" document adopted at our 9th National Congress in April 1995 refers to the imperative to advance a predominant and varied public sector with enterprises owned and managed by the national, provincial, and municipal governments, and which are subject to various forms of democratic control, including the scrutiny of workers, democratically elected bodies and the public.
The SACP "Strategic Perspectives" document correctly refers to the centrality of socialisation as "an essential condition for the achievement of thoroughgoing democracy, substantial equality and the expansion of freedom". Socialisation emphasises the real empowerment of working people, expands workers’ real ability to impact on workplace decisions, and increases worker-control over the social powers of economic ownership, workers’ power over decisions around the allocation of social surplus investment policies, workers’ voice in national budgetary priorities, and so on.
One of our key policy positions is that of prescribed investments which we must take up in earnest in all our Alliance and broader engagements.
These and our other perspectives towards structural economic and broader social transformation must find expression in the districts of the SACP, through concrete local economic development campaigns through, amongst others, building popular development forums, bringing together a variety of progressive formations to realise the radical structural transformation of our economy. Out of this Augmented Central Committee we must assist each district to translate our perspectives into concrete campaigns for local development.
The key question this Augmented Central Committee plenary faces is how we should advance the struggle to achieve these and related economic policy perspectives through concrete campaigning beyond just analysis. Unless we build working class power on the ground, we are not going to win these policy positions. Strengthening our relationship with COSATU, reaching out to the broader trade union movement and building a Left popular front are all critical measures in the struggle for economic transformation.
On the crisis of social reproduction - our Red October campaign and local government elections: One of the most important theoretical formulations from inside our Party is that of a return to but enriching the Marxist concept of social reproduction. It is a concept that best captures the realities produced by the stubborn persistence of a colonial type economy in our country, and now by the impact of COVID-19 on both the economy and the social fabric of South Africa’s poor and working class communities.
The desperate situation of household food insecurity in our country - as one basic measure of the crisis of social reproduction - is reflected by the fact that the cost of a basic food basket for a family of seven is more than the national minimum wage. The impending increase in fuel and oil prices will impact heavily on the price of food and other basic commodities like water and electricity.
In the light of the realities, we reflect on above, our Red October Campaign on HHH+Water has never been so relevant. In fact, we propose to this Augmented Central Committee that our principal platform for our local government programme and election campaigning must be based on taking forward the themes of the Red October Campaign 2020-2021, also as part of a district focus on local economic development. It is important that we drive the campaign as our local government election programme.
It is also based on the Red October Campaign 2020-2021 that we must also seek to build broad district development forums. The Party must also continue to push for a minimum income guarantee to every unemployed adult in our society. This does not have to take the form only of a social reproductive or universal basic income grant but can also be articulated through other types of economic interventions like mass employment programmes and support for productive initiatives.
The SACP’s approach to the forthcoming local government elections: The SACP’s approach to the forthcoming local government elections must be guided by our Party Programme, The South African Road to Socialism (SARS), that of seeking to build working class influence and hegemony in all key sites of power. It is important to anchor ourselves in this way so that we do not slide into narrow electoralism. In addition, our participation in the forthcoming elections must also be guided by our 14th National Congress (July 2017) resolution on state power and the additional resolutions from our 4th Special National Congress (December 2019).
Much more critically we must also be guided by an analysis of the current conjuncture within which the elections will be taking place. Apart from the fourfold crisis of capitalism we are talking about, it is important that our political guide adopted at our 14th National Congress be adhered to, that of strategic consistency, analytical alertness, and tactical flexibility. This requires, amongst other things, a concrete analysis of our concrete conditions.
The Six Theses from our 14th National Congress discussion document on these matters provided useful observations that are still relevant.
1. Thesis 1: State power is critical, but electoral power is not an end in itself
2. Thesis 2: Electoral victories are important, but they are also not ends in themselves.
3. Thesis 3: While electoral success is ONE means to achieving SOME influence and leverage over state power, electoral success (whether as a majority governing party standing on its own, or as part of a coalition, or alliance) does not guarantee effective exercise of state power. Many other factors are at play, these include - the institutional culture, capacity and strategic coherence across the range of state and parastatal institutions and powerful external forces.
4. Thesis 4: The question of state power must not be isolated from the question of popular power both inside and outside of the state. It is not only capitalist forces outside of the state that have actual or potential leverage and influence over state power. Organised and mobilised popular power outside the state but also inside it (for instance, by way of progressive public sector unions) can be decisive in supporting or undermining a progressive governing party ’s capacity to govern. At the same time, we need to recognise that popular power is not necessarily progressive - fundamentalist, xenophobic, and right-wing fascist forces have also been capable of undermining or hijacking democratic dispensations by mobilising broad popular strata. This is an important thesis and links to issue of strength of public sector unions and transformation of the state. Also, popular power is not inherently progressive. Hitler’s rise to power was on the back of popular power.
5. Thesis 5: Correct approach for a progressive party to adopt in regard to electoral politics is not a timeless and decontextualised matter that can be deduced abstractly and remain valid for all times.
6. Thesis 6: Multi-party elections in societies dominated by monopoly capital present serious electoral campaign challenges for principled progressive parties (and especially for a Communist/Marxist-Leninist party).
Against the background of these theses the Party must also consider the NDZ report to the ANC on the last local government elections. This document was never made public and properly discussed in the ANC and more so in the Alliance. The problems pointed out in that report include factionalism and the imposition of unpopular candidates on communities. The SACP cannot participate in such campaigning without these matters being seriously addressed. In addition, we are faced with the realities of huge corruption at local government level in many municipalities, unprincipled and sometimes factionalist retrenchment of workers. This report must be shared with Alliance leadership and then carefully analysed by the SACP.
As the SACP, starting at this Augmented Central Committee, we need to thoroughly and frankly analyse our Metsimaholo electoral experiences; the NUMSA electoral experiment; the relationship between the SACP and some independent candidates, including in areas like Inchanga; and a broader reflection on electoral experiences of some of the communist parties in places like India and Cyprus.
The SACP also needs to flesh outs its approach to the District Development Model, within the context of the challenges outlined above on taking forward our Red October Campaign.
We also have to clarify our position on the deployment of communists in the local government sphere, and how to address the many contradictions that normally arise out of this issue.
Most importantly we must discuss how we implement our Special National Congress resolution that where factionalist conduct prevails and unpopular candidates are imposed, we may consider contesting as the SACP within the framework of our 14th National Congress guided by local realities in the respective wards and municipalities.
The December 2019 Central Committee decided that we need to openly and frankly share our perspectives and approaches with our allies on all these matters, especially with the ANC and COSATU.
The Changing Electoral Terrain: There are a number of factors that point to a vastly changed electoral terrain as we approach the 2021 local government elections and beyond. Changes in the South African electoral terrain that we must be aware of, including the following:
1. The passage and implementation of the Political Party Funding Act (PPFA) and its implications for both the ANC and more so the SACP. All political parties are unhappy with some aspects of the Act, including the R15 million limit it placed as a cap on fundraising by political parties. Disclosure of party funding by donors may dissuade the not-so-many-donors that we have as the SACP. The PPFA will not provide any funding to the SACP as the funds are only provided to political parties that win seats in elections. But the fact that donors who donate R100 000 or more will be publicly named, may well reduce the readiness to donate to the SACP.
2. The electoral terrain in South Africa may have entered into an era of coalitions in many local government situations, thus posing very difficult questions and challenges for the SACP, and the conditions under which we participate in the elections. Maybe the issue of red broad fronts has become more important.
We also need to debate and discuss now the localities which are likely to experience huge challenges in the run up to local government elections and how we deal with these, for example, Maluti-a-Phofong, or Tshwane.
The subjective factor, the State of our movement and the vanguard role of the SACP: If our preceding analysis is principally about the objective realities facing the national democratic revolution, we need to seriously discuss the organisational challenges facing our movement and what is to be done. This matter is even more relevant in an Augmented Central Committee that is attended by our district leadership and organisers.
Moving now to the state of the movement, we can safely say that there is some kind of stalemate inside our movement. The ANC, for example, is doggedly faced by two factional blocs that seem to believe that the precondition for the existence of one is the destruction of the other. This Augmented Central Committee must seriously reflect on the state of our movement not through lamentations but through an analysis that leads us to what is to be done
The latest developments in the ANC need to be looked at very closely. There now is a faction openly describing itself as the RET, openly mobilising as if it were a separate entity. The SACP should also be concerned that the leadership of the MKMVA also associates itself with this factionalist tendency in a manner that is likely to destroy the heroic legacy of the MK, which had never in its days acted as a faction inside the movement and also showing disrespect to some very senior leaders of the ANC.
The "Tea Party" phenomenon emerging out of some visits to eNkandla must not be taken lightly and needs a proper analysis and understanding. What we are seeing with this "Tea Party" phenomenon is a regrouping of what we had a described as a New Tendency in our movement. This New Tendency, that was deeply anti-communist - fractionated in the past and gave birth to EFF. Clearly now there is a newfound reason for this regrouping basically aimed at removing the Ramaphosa leadership in the ANC. This regrouping is also based on sections of ANC groupings that have nothing to lose as some are facing very serious charges and exposure at the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture. It is also not surprising that the section of the New Tendency that split from the ANC has adopted a similar stance against the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture. Some of the actions in this regrouping are about undermining some of our constitutional structures and in the process emboldening a counter-revolution seeking to undermine our democratic gains. The SACP and the working class need to be more vocal but most importantly take action against these developments. These developments seek to undermine the second and more radical phase of our democratic revolution. And what is to be done?
These developments are somehow not dissimilar to the Tea Party in the US, which emerged as a distinct right-wing platform inside the Republican Party. It can be argued that it was this Tea Party phenomenon that led to the emergence of Trump in the US.
The question of the state of the ANC must also be discussed together with the challenge of attaining our goal of a reconfigured alliance. It seems to us that the issues of the reconfiguration of the alliance - much as it has been agreed to at the level of the Alliance Political Council nationally - is not finding traction on the ground. Let us reflect on this with a view of saying what is to be done.
It is also important that we use this Augmented Central Committee to reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of the SACP, and what is to be done about them. In previous Central Committee meetings, and especially in the wake of our 14th National Congress, we have come to the conclusion that much as the SACP has grown to over 300000 members, it is very thin in cadres, hence our increasing emphasis on the need to build a cadre based SACP.
Analysis of programmatic coherence, unity, and discipline inside Party is also important. We should reflect on the dynamics in the Central Committee and Party Building Commission meetings over the past nine months. How should this be characterised? What leadership is required to address these? A correct perspective must be put into practice to place upfront in this Augmented Central Committee the issue of the necessity to foster greater programmatic, ideological and organisational coherence and discipline inside the Party. We have to deal with the flashes of potential disunity in the Party at all levels, especially in some of our provinces.
Another subjective factor in the movement is the fragmentation and weakening of the progressive trade union movement. Weakened industrial and services sector unions, fragmentation, increased casualisation and informalisation of the working class, with labour brokerage and other forms of temporary employment relationships undermining the existing labour laws, are matters that require the serious attention of our Party and the progressive trade union movement. It can also be argued that the government’s decision not to honour the final year wage agreement with the public sector trade unions poses a serious threat and danger to the hard-fought collective bargaining system in our country. COSATU is increasingly reporting similar arrogance from private capitalist employers. The increase of workers who are outside the progressive labour dispensation as a result of weakened trade union organisation, poses a serious threat to the gains made by the trade union movement over the last three decades.
But all these changing labour conditions in our country pose serious challenges to the trade union movement on developing new forms of organising workers and necessity for joint organised worker actions across different unions and federations. The Party, as we have started to do in the Jack Simons Party School, must open up debate about forms of trade union organising, such as organising along value chains, organising informal own account workers, and about the risks of business unionism, etcetera.
The SACP also needs to reflect on the state of the broader democratic movement, including factionalism in the civic and student movements. We also need to pay close attention to progressive mass formations that are emerging outside of the fold of the congress movement.
The DA as the official opposition has adopted a posture that it has to retreat into its white cocoon, driving essentially an agenda to protect the economic interests of its white core constituency. This has been heightened by a drift from some of its constituency into the Freedom Front Plus. The liberal opposition notion of narrowing the role of parliament to that of "holding the executive to account" has somehow gained currency in that others within our movement in Parliament also sees its role not as that of a revolutionary parliament that seeks to advance the interests of the NDR and within this framework ensure accountability of the executive and other state establishments. The liberal (for example, DA version of the) discourse of privileging "holding the executive to account" is premised on its agenda to weaken the ANC as government. The SACP needs to open a debate on this matter within the ranks of our movement.
The EFF seems to be reaching its ceiling. This could have been one reason the tea-party toenadering.
The international front: The SACP needs to deepen its internationalist work on many fronts. One of the most immediate sites of struggle is that of reaching out to the platform of the International Communist and Workers Parties to help build a network of struggle against vaccine imperialism. But it is also going to be important for the SACP, especially together with COSATU, to reach out to other progressive forces internationally as part of building a broader front against vaccine imperialism.
However, this report wants to draw particular attention to the current challenges facing the Cuban revolution. We are particularly concerned with the heightened imperialist aggression against Cuba and the Cuban people. We need to intensify our solidarity action in support of the Cuban people. The Trump administration’s imperialist strategy against Cuba over the past four years aimed to completely and unilaterally derail the process towards the normalisation of bilateral relations that had the support of both countries and the international community during the Obama administration.
The Biden administration, while indicating that they will review policy towards Cuba, has done nothing to ameliorate the impact of the economic blockade and the 249 economic actions and measures that Donald Trump imposed on Cuba, contrary to the provisions of United Nations General Assembly resolution 74/7 and many previous ones. The ongoing economic blockade combined with the impact of the Covid-19 crisis has resulted in one of the most difficult situations against the Cubans. Shifting policy on Cuba is clearly not a priority of the Biden administration, and therefore sustained and worldwide international solidarity is required to change this approach.
The Augmented Central Committee must develop a programme of international solidarity that mobilises globally against the continued blockade of Cuba, and in solidarity with the Cuban people. It is also imperative that members of the Party understand the details of the US actions against Cuba in order to inform our internationalism.
The Cuban Revolution remains a shining light to an alternative and more humane society. The Cuban revolution remains a beacon that indeed another world is possible. A defence of the Cuban revolution is precisely to keep this hope alive for the overwhelming majority of the peoples of the world.

The struggle on two fronts - against state capture and against neoliberal austerity

Jeremy Cronin

For the present conjuncture the SACP has advanced the strategic perspective of a struggle on two fronts - the struggle against state capture and the struggle against neo-liberal austerity. This strategic positioning seeks to identify the key tasks of the SACP and left forces in South Africa in the face of a capitalist-driven economic, social, environmental and political crisis in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic.

However, the characterisation of a two-front struggle is sometimes over-simplified and even vulgarised in our ranks. In some quarters this two-front struggle is reduced to little more than a struggle against "two factions" in the ANC - the state capture, self-styled RET faction on the one hand, and a "New Dawn" grouping on the other. This quickly leads to an overly subjective personification of the struggle, leaving the SACP with a supposed choice between a Zuma or a Ramaphosa, between a Magashule or a Mboweni. And this in turn, in some quarters, then leads to an attitude of "a curse on both their houses" and the view that the Party must "go it alone".

These simplifications contain SOME grains of truth, but in vulgarising the challenges we are confronting we run the risk of seriously weakening the Party’s ability to act effectively and coherently. The Party must certainly avoid cults of the personality (whether to hero-worship or demonise this or that leading figure). Instead, the SACP has a responsibility to effectively analyse the key objective factors at play within our broad movement, and more widely, nationally and globally. This does not mean, of course, that we should neglect the way in which these objective factors impact on and interact with subjective inclinations, on the assumptions and attitudes of leadership collectives, for instance. But we must avoid a naïve psychologising of our reality - "X is a nice guy, so we can work with him", "Y less so", etc.

It would also be a serious mistake for the Party to adopt a "go it alone" stance. The Party must guard its independence, and its relative unity. The Party must retain its ability to determine its own line of march. But that doesn’t mean marching alone!

What follows, in order to take these perspectives further, are four theses:

Thesis One: State-capture and neo-liberal austerity are not simple opposites, the one is not the simple negation of the other - However, this is precisely how key protagonists from within these two tendencies are inclined to present themselves.

Leading RET personalities hypocritically present their parasitic, self-enriching agenda as "a struggle against neo-liberal austerity". When their crimes and other misdemeanours are exposed, they portray themselves as "victims of white monopoly capital" and its "political surrogates".
For their part, leading personalities within national Treasury often present their agenda of "fiscal consolidation" (an alibi for what is, in effect, an anti-people, crippling austerity approach) as the cutting edge of "a moral crusade against state capture and corruption". In much of the business-aligned media this latter perspective is continuously amplified.

This placing of an equal sign between state capture and neoliberal austerity and simply adding a minus sign ("neo-liberal austerity = the negation of state capture", or the other way around) is flawed in many ways. State capture and neo-liberal austerity are not of the same order, they do not have equal weight and complexity.

While there are family resemblances elsewhere, the phenomenon we refer to as state capture in South Africa is essentially a home-grown reality. True, the leading Gupta characters were recent arrivals in our country (with dodgy and fast-tracked South African citizenship), but it was here that they worked their evil magic and amassed their ill-gotten fortunes. State capture had its head-office in Saxonwold, its major subsidiary in Nkandla, and an external mission in Doha.

The local punitive neo-liberal austerity is obviously of a quite different order in scope and character. Its leading agencies are elsewhere, in the Washington-based IMF, in the New York-based ratings agencies, in the bourses of New York, London and Frankfurt. From the side of Treasury we are often told that unless heavy-handed austerity measures are applied by government, the IMF will step in and apply worse austerity. In effect this is an admission that they are doing someone else’s bidding for them.

Quite different, then, is the local phenomenon of state capture. It has involved a specific alignment of local forces. It was a partially successful coup d’etat with, at its apex, a Gupta family network capturing an incumbent (and willing) state president and repurposing key state institutions to siphon off billions of Rands of public money while keeping the president out of jail. At its height, this state capture project incorporated, and orchestrated, formally and informally, a wide web of networks operating within national, provincial and local spheres. It involved state institutions, state-owned enterprises, regulatory authorities, the ANC, other non-state structures, the public broadcaster and parts of the commercial media, plus private corporations, including major multi-nationals. It is important to note that, even at its high-point, there was never a complete capture of the state, and there was opposition, of varying intensity, to the state-capture agenda across all of these locations, including (and this is important to understand) from monopoly capital itself.

Individual capitalist enterprises (or parts thereof), ranging from a local Bosasa through pillars of the global capitalist order like KPMG to Chinese state-owned rail companies engaged with, facilitated and benefited from the state-capture project. But capital in general opposed it. To some degree this was because for every bribed-for, winning corporate bid in a multi-billion contract with, say, a captured Eskom or Transnet, there were three or four disappointed losers, and perhaps even some disappointed Eskom or Transnet senior managers who had been sponsored by the losers. Sooner or later these disappointments would become one of the sources for leaks, whistle-blowing and opposition.

But, more importantly, while in these corrupted deals there would typically be corporate winners and losers, capital in general needs a functioning electricity supply, a working logistics system, and a predictable regulatory regime. State capture seriously compromised all of these. South Africans as a whole, especially the working class, the poor and the great majority of middle strata in our country have been serious victims of state capture, but capital in general has also been negatively impacted.

This is why it has been possible (and necessary) to forge broad fronts that include big business in defence of democracy, the rule of law, constitutionality, the Zondo commission, etc. The SACP has aligned itself with, and at times played a leading role in, these anti-state capture broad fronts. Mostly recently the SACP has correctly supported the Defend our Democracy initiative, even though some of the leading convenors are hardly progressive, anti-neoliberals.

In short, in the struggle against state capture networks and the struggle against neo-liberal austerity, we need to recognise that these are not two inverted mirror images of each other, where the only option we have is to side with one or the other. The struggle against state capture and the struggle against neoliberal austerity must be conducted simultaneously, but the strategy, tactics and the potential alignment of forces will be considerably different in both cases. However, unless the SACP and the progressive left more generally are actively involved in both fronts of struggle and, as much as possible, actually provide strategic leadership to these struggles, then the NDR will be defeated.

Thesis Two - State Capture is the most immediate threat to the NDR, while neoliberalism (i.e. the global capitalist assault on the working class and broad popular strata) is the principal strategic enemy over the long-haul. This does not mean that the struggle against neo-liberal austerity must be temporarily set aside or abandoned, but the state capture project is an aggressive and objectively counter-revolutionary project and it weakens rather than strengthens the anti-neoliberal struggle. State capture has gravely compromised the emancipatory capacity of our national liberation movement, undermined the democratic sovereignty of our state, and given ideological ammunition to those who call for the privatisation of strategic state-owned enterprises. Yet, our movement, our democratic state and our strategic SOEs are precisely the key potential assets to advance national democracy in the face of the neoliberal agenda of globalised monopoly capital.

Over the past three years, the state capture agenda has certainly been weakened and partially disrupted, especially with the forced resignation of Zuma as state president and the flight to Dubai of the now fugitive Guptas (along with a Zuma son and a Magashule son). But precisely because the net is beginning to close around some of the leading personalities, the levels of desperation and the preparedness to undertake reckless moves must not be discounted. The state capture networks still control substantial war chests. These networks possess reach (however diminishing) into the media (see the blatant and scurrilous positioning taken by Iqbal Surve’s Independent media publications), and parts of the criminal justice system. But it is particularly from within the ANC, its Leagues and the renegade MKVA that the fight-back is being waged and resourced with ill-gotten loot.

The ANC is currently the preferred theatre of operation for the state capture forces. Their post-Nasrec conference control over the critical secretary general’s office (itself the result of a disputed and dubious election at that conference) has been a major asset. At the same time the broader opposition to these forces within the ANC is often much less coherently organised. This is partly because they are a less cohesive group, or at least lacking the desperado unity, the back-to-the-wall venom of those facing long prison terms. And partly because (with some individual exceptions) they are less inclined to (or less capable of) the hyped-up demagogic populist mobilisation characteristic of the state capture network and of their EFF friends for the day.

Recently progressive forces from within the ANC, among them cde Zamani Saul (in an important intervention "The ANC’s RET grouping is a precursor to a new party", https://ewn.co.za/2021/04/07), have argued that the RET faction is seeking to launch a break-away party, in particular pointing to some of the extremely factional behaviour of Carl Niehaus and associates. While a breakaway might well be Plan B, it is a mistake to assume that this is now the major intention of these forces. The RET faction’s main strategic ambition remains the "winning back" of the ANC, using their well-rehearsed practice of buying up branches, excluding progressive comrades through gate-keeping, inflating membership numbers, building on key foot-holds in certain provinces and regions. They have been quite open about this. And, indeed, from their point of view this makes sense. Hiving off into a breakaway with little prospect of major electoral success will not give them the high road into key positions in the state which, in turn, is what they desperately need to pervert justice, to stay out of jail, and to continue pillaging public resources.

We should not underestimate their capacity to subvert the ANC or large parts of it, and we should not mistake their recent failure to mobilise massive destabilising actions on the ground as an indication of weakness within the structures of the ANC. Their strength does not lie in the streets, but rather in their ability to capture key parts of the ANC and use this to entrench themselves back in executive power. Their main terrain of struggle is within the ANC.

All of this places a special responsibility on the SACP and its 320,000 members in the battles being waged, and the battles still to come, within the ANC-led movement. In the run-up to the ANC’s Nasrec conference, provincial and district-level SACP and YCL structures were often the only organised formations able to pierce the no-go barriers erected against the Ramaphosa CR17 campaign by mercenary Zuma supporters. On the ground in many localities this remains a reality.

This special responsibility placed on the SACP extends to the complex question of how the SACP positions itself in the forthcoming (but possibly delayed) local government elections. This is a tactical question with strategic implications. How do we prevent state-capture forces from dominating ANC electoral lists? If the SACP contests some local government elections in its own right, how will this impact on the internal ANC battles? Will state-capture forces use this to drive a wedge within the ANC between SACP and non-SACP ANC members, and in this way strengthen their own malignant hold over the ANC? There are no simple answers to these questions and it is not the purpose of this intervention to pronounce one way or another. It is, however, absolutely critical that the SACP’s tactical positioning in the forthcoming local government elections is not abstracted from the decisive battle of this conjuncture - the defeat of the state capture, counter-revolutionary agenda.

Thesis Three - the "New Dawn" project is not a simple repeat of the 1996 GEAR class project

The SACP characterised the neo-liberal rupture with the ANC’s historical strategic perspectives as the "1996 class project". This neo-liberal turn was engineered under the leadership of Thabo Mbeki, then deputy president of the country. The rupture was marked most dramatically by the 1996 GEAR macro-economic policy package.

An important reality to bear in mind when assessing the impact of neoliberal thinking within the ANC is to note that it has never been full-blooded neoliberalism. It would be wrong to portray Mbeki or Manuel as simply right-wing Thatcher or Reagan clones, for instance. Quite apart from whatever their personal convictions were, both Mbeki and Manuel were reliant on the ANC’s mass-based electoral support. Even at the height of the GEAR macro-economic strangle-hold there were major "social wage" advances, supported across the spectrum within the ANC-led alliance.

Without these the ANC would not have won and sustained overwhelming electoral support.

This local and important deviation from full-blooded neoliberalism was (and still is) especially evident in the continued (if threatened) massive roll-out of social security measures, including child support grants. Key ANC figures under the sway of neoliberal ideas have argued that it was their macro-economic stabilisation of the economy that created the space for this major (and relatively unprecedented in the developing South) social security roll-out. However, the GEAR policy package failed to address the real social crisis in our country, world record levels of unemployment and wealth inequality.

Rather, it was the commodity boom, propelled by China and to some extent India, that created the resource base for South Africa’s post-apartheid social security expansion - and NOT neoliberal macro policy. When this commodity boom slowed and then crashed, following the 2008 global financial crisis, pressure mounted on these social wage issues. The Covid-19 pandemic has now worsened this reality as evidenced by the current budget failing even to provide for inflation linked social security increases.

There is obviously a significant continuity between that earlier period and the present in macro-economic policy and in the key institutional space. It is most notably personified in the current minister of finance and his SA Reserve Bank (SARB) governor counterpart. Minister of Finance, Tito Mboweni was moved to the SARB as an understudy to the SARB governor Chris Stals in 1998. Stals, by the way, was the last apartheid-era SARB governor and stayed on in that post until 1999 when Mboweni took over. As governor and at the height of the 1996 class project agenda, Mboweni introduced our current neo-liberal inflation targeting fixation. For his part, the current Reserve Bank governor, Letsetja Kganyago, was a senior official in the Treasury through most of the 1996 class project period. He was promoted to DG in the Treasury in 2005 and served in that position until 2011 (that is, spanning both the Mbeki and parts of the Zuma presidency). Both Mboweni and Kganyago, by the way, also did stints in New York with the notorious Goldman Sachs global investment banking house. (Goldman Sachs was once famously described, in a line often repeated in both academic and mainstream media, as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells of money").

Mboweni and Kganyago are the most obvious neoliberal, hard-line, true-believers, in the state. But, once again, we must guard against over-personalisation. It is not just this or that personality, but the institutional culture of both Treasury and the SARB that remains steeped in neoliberal hyper-orthodoxy (ironically at a time when in much of the developed world more heterodox ideas are making some inroads). Moreover, the fact that there are clearly tensions within cabinet over austerity measures and, at times, between perspectives developed by, for instance, the Presidency’s economic advisors and Treasury, does not exempt cabinet or the Presidency.

When Ramaphosa publicly states that Mboweni has his "full backing", whether this is said from deep-seated conviction or simply to reassure the markets is perhaps, at the end of the day, neither entirely here nor there. However, tactically we should continue to endeavour to drive a wedge between neoliberal true-believers and the institutional cultures within which these are housed, and those (probably the majority of cabinet) who, without being true believers, probably think reluctantly that there are no alternatives to austerity.

However, a key reason for asserting that the "New Dawn" project is not a simple repeat of the 1996 class project (Thesis Three) lies elsewhere - it lies on the terrain of the political. The Mbeki project had a great deal of coherence, at least on paper. It was driven actively and with determination. Mbeki sought to convert the ANC from a movement into a Third Way "social democratic-lite" electoral party, implementing neoliberalism with a "social conscience". To carry through this project he needed to liquidate, or at the very least, marginalise the SACP and expunge the Party’s influence and presence within the ANC. COSATU also needed to be de-fanged and converted into a "normal" trade union movement, narrowly representing formally-employed workers and their work-place interests, while not straying too far into the domain of politics. Moreover, just as the apartheid regime in its declining years desperately sought to promote a buffer black middle-class between it and the ANC, so Mbeki through BEE set about actively creating what was assumed to be a stand-alone "black capitalist class", that would be the new key motive force within the ANC and further dilute left influence within the movement.

The inappropriateness of this overall strategy to the South African post-apartheid reality and the project’s unleashing of dozens of combustible contradictions led to Mbeki’s ultimate ouster as ANC president in 2007 and his early recall as state president a year later. Whatever the subjective differences in attitude to the SACP among the core New Dawn leadership compared to Mbeki’s inner leadership core (and there are good reasons to believe that there are real differences), OBJECTIVELY, as argued above, the Ramaphosa leadership core needs the SACP and COSATU, not least in an existential struggle over who controls the ANC-led movement.

"Ah…", the cynics will say, "but didn’t Zuma also need the SACP and COSATU back in 2007? And look where that ended - nine wasted years in which the SACP and COSATU, tailing behind Zuma, were taken for a ride."

Thesis Four - the "nine wasted years" narrative must be challenged. There should be no doubt whatsoever that the Zuma presidency years ended with the massive draining of public resources into private pockets and the crippling of key state and parastatal institutions. But the "nine wasted years" narrative too easily becomes a self-serving story-line for those who imagine that all we need to do is to get back to the "good years" before 2009. In fact, the "nine wasted years" narrative fits neatly with the line of argument noted above under Thesis One - namely that neoliberal austerity is in the front-line of struggle against state capture.

The nine years of Zuma’s presidency can, somewhat schematically, be divided into two. For most of his first term (2009-14), Zuma’s priority was to stay out of jail. His focus was on suborning the key criminal justice system, the intelligence services and SARS. Once this objective was partially achieved, the full-on pillaging through the Gupta corporate network of state-owned enterprises, in particular, got underway.

Emerging victorious from the ANC’s Polokwane 2007, Zuma had sought to advance his own project from within the ANC and the state on the basis of an unstable unity of at least three different currents within the alliance - a populist right-wing represented by the ANCYL and strongholds in certain provinces; the left axis around the SACP and Cosatu; and a core of Mbeki-ite centrists who remained on within the ANC’s NEC. The first two of these currents were sometimes portrayed, or even thought of themselves as, the "walking wounded", victims of the Mbeki 1996 class project.

On the right-wing (although already advancing a rhetorically "left radical" populism) were the aspirant and parasitic bourgeois strata who felt they had been excluded from Mbeki’s (and established capital’s) inner circle of BEE beneficiaries. This included prominent forces within the ANCYL (including Malema). There were also those who had been bottom-feeders in the so-called "secondary contracts" of the arms deal, like Tony Yengeni who went to jail as a useful distraction from the larger corruption that went unpunished. (Zuma was also a relatively minor player in the arms deal). Then, critically, there were various provincial rent-seeking empires and an ANC provincial "premier" league that now sought to move more substantially onto the national stage.

On the left, the SACP-Cosatu axis that had been marginalised under Mbeki, saw the Zuma presidency as an opportunity to advance a more effective anti-neoliberal agenda, with a particular focus on ending privatisation and advancing state-led industrialisation, a major state-led infrastructure programme, and introducing more effective state planning. Ending the near-genocidal AIDS denialism under Mbeki was also a key objective, certainly from the left, in supporting Zuma, or, at the very least, dumping Mbeki.

In the beginning, Zuma did not tamper unduly with Treasury or with macro-economic policy. Those Mbeki-ites who did not walk away were given key cabinet positions, including Trevor Manuel who lost the finance ministry but was deployed to head the newly established national planning commission. This deployment was a typically canny, divide-and-rule move by Zuma. On paper, the left got a planning commission, but it was headed by a centrist with neoliberal credentials and the wider commission was largely composed of academics and business people - a far cry from the envisaged state planning capacity promoted by the left.

This unstable balance of forces upon which Zuma attempted to build his project fairly quickly began to unravel. The first lurch was marked by growing tensions between the left and elements from within the right-populist grouping (the Party labelled this grouping the "new tendency", although it was not really new at all). Zuma tried to hold the different parts together, playing the centrists off against both left and right. But when the antics of the right-populists, particularly Malema, began to seriously destabilise the ANC and provoke the concern of the centrists, the latter came off their perch and condemned the right and this resulted in Malema’s belated disciplining and, eventually, to the EFF split.

Despite this instability, there were important progressive advances during the first Zuma administration. In particular, there was a sharp reversal of AIDS denialism and the largest roll-out of ARV’s in the world. There was a very rapid increase in life-expectancy as a result. There were other gains as well. A massive infrastructure build programme under the discipline of a newly created Presidential Infrastructure Coordinating Council, while plagued by problems, at least acted as a major contra-cyclical state-led investment injection into the economy. Progress was made on industrial policy and there was a large expansion of higher education student numbers, of TVET colleges, and the introduction of NSFAS. During Zuma’s presidency South Africa also sustained and expanded one of the largest public employment programmes in the world.

It is for these reasons that it is important to challenge a simplistic "nine wasted years" narrative. For the same reason, since SACP leaders in government and the SACP collectively were often at the centre of these advances, it is simply wrong to present the Party as a passive and ultimately duped passenger during the Zuma presidency years.

However, challenging the "nine wasted years" narrative must not be misunderstood to suggest that the positives of the Zuma administration outweighed the negatives. The Zuma years were a grave setback. Most of the progressive interventions were themselves curtailed by the factional checks and balances deliberately deployed by Zuma - the industrialisation and public employment programmes never met their full potential, owing to persisting neo-liberal macro-economic constraints. Many positive perspectives developed within the National Development Plan were, likewise, compromised by the macro-economic scaffolding within which they were encased. The SOEs were key to driving the infrastructure-build programme. As Eskom and Transnet, in particular, were increasingly plundered and destabilised, so the PICC-led programme lost momentum.

Nonetheless, a blanket "nine wasted years" narrative, deliberately or otherwise, pre-empts an effective understanding of what has gone terribly wrong and, above all, what needs to be done.

We need a massive, state-led infrastructure programme, even Biden is rolling out one.
We need effective, well-governed, dynamic SOEs, not privatisation.
Instead of government, egged on by the IMF and the local commentariat, going to war against public sector unions, we need to ensure that we have productive, public-service oriented health-care workers, teachers, policemen and police-woman. Instead of what we will now become bitter annual (and even half-yearly) public sector wage negotiations, perhaps we need to consider having automatic, inflation-indexed, public sector wage increases. We do not have a bloated public service, but we do have inappropriate structures with professional skills underrated where they are most required.
We need state-led (re-)industrialisation that is green, job-creating, inclusive and builds beyond our national borders.
Instead of cutting the real value of pensions and child support grants, we need to expand them and move to the implementation of a basic income grant.
We need to massively expand public employment programmes and advance the goal of a "right of all to work".

Above all, what we don’t need is simply hitting the re-wind button to take us back to the mythical pre-2009 "good years". Failure to push back austerity will create a breeding ground on which parasitic, self-styled RET forces will mobilise popular discontent. Failure to uproot state capture forces will weaken our ability to reverse crippling austerity measures. A determined and intelligent struggle on two fronts is the key watch-word for our present conjuncture.

Cde Cronin is an SACP Central Committee and Politburo member, and a former SACP Deputy General Secretary, ANC NEC member, political prisoner and Deputy Minister

Towards working more effectively together

State of the Revolution and the Movement: What are the key tasks for the left to advance the Revolution??

Joel Netshitenzhe*

This article seeks to identify key tasks for the Left in advancing the National Democratic Revolution (NDR). In doing so, it proceeds from an assessment of the balance of forces over the past two-and-half decades, and where we are today.

The article is based on the SACP Jack Simons Party School lecture of the same title . The content is partly informed by the Strategy and Tactics document of the African National Congress (ANC) adopted at the 2017 National Conference, Discussion Documents for the 2021 National General Council (NGC), as well as the 2020 Mapungubwe Annual Lecture.

A few words on Professor Jack Simons are in order, to acknowledge his role as an eminent academic and revolutionary activist - the consummate teacher who cleared our cobwebs as we, in the June 16 Detachment , at the time eclectically consumed revolutionary literature attaining so much information but little knowledge.

Jack Simons helped systematise the process of studying Marxism-Leninism and its application to our situation. One anecdote on interactions with Jack Simons is appropriate, in the context of this article. This was when the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) under Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s introduced perestroika and glasnost (restructuring and openness). Many of us enthusiastically embraced the new approach, though the ideological basis for it was not very clear.

What do you think of these reforms, Jack had asked! And one’s response, having been to the party school in the then Soviet Union a few years earlier, was that these were necessary to ensure greater democracy within the socialist system and to manage market dynamics under socialism - as the political system was constricted and economic practice had become a break on the development of productive forces.

Jack Simons did not argue against that. But his next question was: but why didn’t you say so earlier, comrade! This illustrates the critical point that we should always be true to a scientific, objective and honest analysis of circumstances in which we find ourselves, and critically interrogate prevailing wisdom even if not to follow the herd is not always a pleasant experience.

Indeed, in the context of the so-called "ten wasted years", all of us should ask ourselves why we didn’t speak out earlier. This is not about an ideological inquisition within the Left; but more a lesson for the future.

All of us are concerned that the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) is in peril, which reminds us of VI Lenin’s work, The impending catastrophe and how to combat it. But as Lenin taught then, in periods of crisis, the frame of mind should be how to advance to new and higher levels of progressive discourse and action.

Evolution of domestic balance of forces post-1994

As we all know, in the early years after the attainment of democracy in 1994, it became necessary to contain various forces which were bent on frustrating and even reversing the democratisation process.

The democratic government started introducing far-reaching programmes of social transformation. But fundamental to the balance of forces is that we inherited an economy dominated by a few white-owned conglomerates owning virtually all the critical economic sectors.

There were macroeconomic difficulties, which led to the introduction of the Growth Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) macroeconomic strategy to manage these systemic challenges. All this slowed down thorough-going transformation.

But beyond the transition, the liberation movement had strengthened its grip on the state machinery; and it could speed up the programme of change.

What is clear, though, is that, in the decade of the 2000s, the democratic state could have used its legitimacy and the massive electoral endorsement (which was at 70% nationally in 2004) to push for speedier implementation of programmes of social transformation. The objective balance of forces allowed for faster change.

However, the liberation movement was gripped by negative subjective factors. Efforts that were initiated in the build-up to the 2005 NGC fell on the wayside because of factional dynamics within the ANC; and the movement avoided introducing radical organisational re-engineering. And so, frailties within the ANC combined with a modest reading of the balance of forces, let opportunities slip through our fingers.

The abiding lesson from this is that, when the movement is gripped by factionalism, when its focus is on side-issues, we miss critical opportunities to take the cause of social transformation to a higher level.

Domestic balance of forces during the last decade and post-NASREC

What about the domestic balance of forces during the last decade and post-NASREC?

There was a recognition after 2009 that faster social transformation was needed. It is precisely this "sixth sense" that impelled the ANC in 2012 to call for a second phase of transition to a National Democratic Society.

Regrettably, it is exactly at that moment of opportunity to forge a social compact towards Vision 2030, that the ANC and its Alliance partners, as well as the government it leads, were weakened through systemic corruption and state capture.

The capacity of the state was severely undermined.

By the second half of the decade, the ANC was facing declining fortunes, with internal squabbles, money politics, corruption and poor performance in government all conspiring to undermine its legitimacy in the eyes of the broader public.

The level of working-class organisation had declined; and the progressive trade union movement had been weakened. The sense of hope in broader society was dissipating.

Broader sectors of society, including the SACP, the veterans and other forces mobilised for change, to protect the democratic state and the constitutional dispensation.

It is a combination of these factors that helped inspire the NASREC outcome - both in terms of content and leadership. The balance, in terms of commitment to organisational and societal renewal, may not have been ideal; but it presented an important stepping-stone to save and advance the NDR.

There is broad consensus within the liberation movement that the 2019 election outcome was a clarion call against corruption and for faster transformation. The question is whether we are able to meet the people’s expectations: whether we can achieve renewal of the ANC and society and at the same time forge unqualified unity within the ANC! This is a fundamental question dealt with later in this article.

We are fortunate that, while we are facing internal organisational and political challenges as the ANC, the other major parties are also dealing with their own demons.

The Democratic Alliance (DA) is facing its own existential challenge: losing support to a right-wing party, it has decided to hold onto the bird in hand in terms of electoral support, rather than pursue two in the bush!

The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) has been celebrating its 2019 electoral gains. But it desperately wants to become ‘a party of government’ in some form; and its failure to achieve coalitions, especially in Gauteng, has generated internal strategic concern. As its hope of massive expansion dwindles, and as the threat of criminal prosecution increases, the EFF is bound to become more desperate and more disruptive. We need to understand this strategy, both in the legislatures and outside, and creatively pre-empt and combat it.

Overall, there has been some progress since 2018 in terms of changes in government personnel, revitalisation of law-enforcement agencies and attempts at social compacting; but the impact has been minimal. Since 2018, economic growth has remained pedestrian. Per capita growth has been declining since 2011 and has been negative since 2016.

Why did the post-NASREC efforts to revive the economy not bear fruit, that is, before Covid-19? Perhaps it is because it takes time to turn around an economy. But one of the biggest factors is that the social compacting initiatives such as the Jobs and Investment Summits have been characterised by focus on detail - with a long list of actions - rather than basic principles: referred to later as coalescence around essence.

Some insights from current global dynamics

How would we characterise the global environment in which we have to defend and advance the NDR?

Like other countries, we have to navigate changing global power balances and ensuing geopolitical tensions. A rising China is seen in Western capitals as a strategic rival; huge tensions are emerging from NATO encroachment closer to Russia; and tensions in the Middle East are not assisted by the brazen support for right-wing Israeli policies.

While recent changes in leadership in the United States may moderate the tone of global engagement, most analysts believe that the essence of the US’ default position will remain, over the coming period.

Overall, the global market system is in poly-crisis, with multiple challenges of slow economic growth, growing inequality, narrow identity politics, declining legitimacy of the polities and environmental degradation.

One of the major deficits in the global political economy is the allocation of research resources to collective threats facing humanity, as distinct from those that generate the highest returns. And it is in this context that many have challenged the characterisation of Covid-19 as an extremely rare ‘black swan’ event. Rather, they argue, it is "a gray rhino" occurrence which, according to Wucker (2016) is a highly probable, high impact yet neglected threat… [as] gray rhinos are not random surprises, but occur after a series of warnings and visible evidence.
The Covid-19 pandemic has worsened the crisis of the global political economy, reflected, among others, in:

the global economic contraction of about 4.3% in 2020 (IMF: 2021);
developing countries experiencing a devastating slump including crippling debt and, in the projected two-speed recovery, they are expected to lag far behind;
progress in reducing poverty being reversed by at least three years (Financial Times: 2020);
32 of the world’s largest companies seeingtheir profit jump by about US$100 billion more in 2020 (Oxfam: 2020); and
the net worth of billionairesskyrocketing, with one billionaire added every 17 hours in 2020 and the ratio of CEO pay to employee pay at Standard & Poor (or S&P) 500 companies shooting up from 182 to 227 (Financial Times: 2021).

The poly-crisis had already started to generate some self-reflection among business leaders such as Lynn Forester de Rothschild (2014), concerned about the near maniacal focus of the markets on short-term financial results, tolerance of disparities of opportunity, and an apparent disregard for the common good.

In 2019, more than 180 CEOs of large US corporations jointly called for an approach based not only on shareholder value; but one that includes delivering value to… customers, investing in… employees, dealing fairly and ethically with… suppliers and supporting communities. Berg and Ostry (2011) of the IMF argue that sustained growth in any economy is robustly associated with more equality in income distribution.

So concerned is the global capitalist establishment that, besides the current large state interventions in the economy (some of which of course benefit the rich in stock markets), there may be a new Washington Consensus (as colloquially used) in the making. The IMF is arguing that, in the current situation, government budget deficits should not be the main focus of macroeconomic policy - as much resources as possible should be injected to encourage economic growth, and the US is leading in this regard. Further, the IMF in April 2021 called for wealth and windfall taxes, for the rich to pay for the recovery efforts.

This may be a quirk of the current moment - it may not last. But the fundamental question is: where is the Left in this discourse! It seems to be languishing in ‘identity politics’ and ‘cancel culture’ and not giving leadership to the global discourse on the fundamental questions of political economy. Of course, issues of identity are important; but when they become the sole focus, they undermine efforts towards working class unity; and they are the precise platform on which the right-wing excels - as shown for instance in Brexit, Trumpism and current dynamics in France.

Impact of Covid-19 on domestic balance of forces

The devastation caused by the pandemic on our political economy is reflected among others in the 7% contraction of the economy in 2020; an unemployment rate of 32% with many discouraged workers and the number of unemployed having grown to an unprecedented 7.2-million; as well as growth in poverty and hunger.

Government’s interventions to ameliorate the impact of the pandemic include efforts to minimise job losses, support specific sectors and micro-enterprises, as well as the ineffective loan guarantee scheme and monetary policy interventions by the Reserve Bank.

In actual practice, the interventions were smaller than in comparable countries, precisely because the pandemic found us at our weakest in terms of the state of the fiscus. But there is debate about whether we have been too risk averse.

An additional consideration on Covid-19 - which is critical to the defence and advancement of the revolution - is the fundamental lesson of social psychology. This is that success in managing a crisis of this magnitude depends on two critical factors: firstly, the extent to which the state and broader societal leadership enjoy the confidence of the population and, secondly, the capacity of the state to implement its decisions.

In the early days of the pandemic, the President and government enjoyed unprecedented confidence among the population. Most South Africans were confident that the government was effectively addressing the threat posed by the virus.

However, as the socio-economic impact of the pandemic deepened, as communities grew weary of the restrictions, as incidents of brutality by security forces were publicised, and as corruption in the awarding of some of the tenders was exposed, the trust in government started to fray. The sense of cohesion and mutual solidarity was negatively affected.

However, the state - working with social partners - seems to have managed the situation well enough to prevent a social conflagration. Communication, reassurance, acknowledgement of weaknesses and a risk-adjusted strategy have largely contained the most negative social dynamics.

But we still face the threat of a Third Wave, with possibilities of helplessness, irrational beliefs, heightened political opportunism, social unrest and so on.

In brief, South Africa is on a classical burning platform; and in order to defend and advance the NDR, we need decisive strategies and actions to place the economy on a higher growth and development path.

Towards reconstruction and recovery

This then raises the question whether the Reconstruction and Recovery Plan announced by government will have the desired effect. The following observations on some elements of the plan should help us answer this question:

On the infrastructure programme, what requires emphasis is that, besides removing binding constraints and improving social welfare, one great advantage of these programmes is in supplier industries. From locomotives to signalling and braking systems in the railway sector; to bitumen and cement and steel and aluminium in roads and housing, there are major opportunities that need to be exploited. Allocation of spectrum belongs in this category; and the continual missing of deadlines is rather inexplicable.

On energy generation, the recovery plan and the December 2020 ESKOM compact signed by the partners at NEDLAC do outline the measures required to deal with the challenges. The financing mechanisms for ESKOM need to be finetuned for urgent implementation; and COSATU’s proposal on the Public Investment Corporation (PIC) acquiring equity in ESKOM and possibly with government guaranteeing a return of say, inflation+1% using the current planned subsidies does make a lot of sense.

On jobs for workers we have, the plan takes a leaf from the scenario methodology in the National Development Plan (NDP), that we need to set a target for the number of jobs that should be created, to reach an unemployment rate of about 6% by 2030. The approach is that, as normal employment and self-employment opportunities are inadequate, we should fill the gap through mass public employment schemes. In addition, to meet the needs of the unemployed workers we have, who are largely unskilled or semi-skilled, South Africa needs to identify subsectors in low-end manufacturing that we can take advantage of and massify these through the Special Economic Zones and Industrial Parks.

On industrial policy, more can be done and, as Trade and Industrial Policy Strategies (TIPS) argues, this should include competitive upstream prices in relation, to feedstock such as iron and steel, polymers for plastics, maize and soya. This requires a combination of incentives and disincentives. In mining, for instance, upstream supplier industries present a critical opportunity for South Africa to benefit from its endowments. South Africa ranks among the best globally with regard to mining equipment and specialist services; and mining can again serve as a critical platform for a new industrialisation drive.

On opportunities in Africa, we should proceed from the understanding that Africa’s growth trend is bound to resume, including massive infrastructure programmes. The African Continental Free Trade Area agreement presents major opportunities. We should be thinking about concrete division of labour at least in sub-Saharan Africa to provide supplies for infrastructure projects, for instance, on which close to US$200-billion a year was to be spent by 2025 (Engineering News: 2014).

On new technologies, the recovery plan correctly refers to Information and Communications Technologies, the 4th Industrial Revolution and modernising manufacturing. This is important. But we have not done enough to pursue technologies on which we have huge comparative advantages, such as the hydrogen economy and fuel cell technology which require Platinum Group Metals (PGM), an endowment we have in abundance. We can speed up the setting up PGM Special Economic Zones and promoting the platinum corridors.

On informal businesses, we should be allocating more resources to these businesses, taking advantage of the registration processes that took place during higher levels of the Covid-19 lockdowns - and these businesses are owned mostly by women with daring and initiative.

On the labour market, the plan specifically refers to reviewing labour market policies relating to issues such as retrenchments and wages. In this regard, we need to go back to the issues raised in the NDP about the market’s stability and responsiveness, life-long career advancement, compliance by employers, and a developmental pact with public sector unions.

Besides these issues, there is the difficult matter of financing for the plan and the broad fiscal and monetary stances required. Further, there are some who argue that more resources could be deployed, and monetary policy could be even more accommodative.

The plan includes creative ideas about how to partner with the private sector in implementing infrastructure projects. What seems not to feature are the creative ideas in the ANC draft document about such issues as the role of Development Finance Institutions and the Reserve Bank in stabilising the finances of State-Owned Enterprises. Further, the World Inequality Lab (2021) argues that a moderate and properly targeted wealth tax in South Africa can raise more than R160-billion in one year. The pros and cons of this require serious debate. Overall, the principle in terms of debt-to-GDP ratio should be to add steroids to the denominator (GDP), and thus reduce the ratio: a different approach can result in self-strangulation.

These are important matters of detail.

What needs to be injected into the debate on reconstruction and recovery are strategic questions on how we promote coalescence around essence. What does this mean?

Coalescence around essence

There are three elements of essence that require emphasis.

The first one is about the character of the social system: We need to agree on a conceptual underpinning to the social compact we seek to build: how we can re-engineer an economic structure inherited from colonialism. A combination of a developmental state that leads all of society in pursuing consistently high rates of growth, and social democracy underpinned by comprehensive redistributive measures seems to be the most appropriate strategic approach.

The second element of essence is about the core objective of socio-economic policy: The NDP refers to a minimum standard of living below which no South African should sink. Elements of a decent standard of living include: nutrition; basic social services; employment; and a clean environment. There should be serious dialogue on this concept of a decent standard of living as a national objective.

The third element of the essence is about the leadership role of the state: Besides its overall capacity, and its responsibility to lead in crafting a vision and to mobilise society in its implementation, there will be moments when consensus eludes the social partners, and a democratic state has to make the difficult choices. Pursuit of absolute consensus can only result in the lowest common denominator and minimal progress.

Is the Left adequately engaging these fundamental issues? Not really! Currently, we seem to be dedicating most of our energy to internal organisational dynamics and are not raising the core strategic issues.

State of the movement

Now, do the ANC and the broader Tripartite Alliance, have sufficient capacity and will for a step-change, to defend and advance the revolution?
Correctly, the ANC emerged from 54th National Conference calling for unity and renewal; and we saw the results of the 2019 elections as a clarion call against corruption and for faster transformation.

However, we are still beset by a multitude of internal squabbles.

As we implement the NASREC resolution to act firmly against corruption and state capture, some of our members and even leaders face the spectre of swapping three-piece suits or ANC leatherjackets for orange overalls; and they will do everything to muddy the waters and escape from the reach of the law.

Claiming they are being targeted because they stand for radical economic transformation (RET), some of them have now trained their fury on law-enforcement agencies and the judiciary. They use the infrastructure of the movement to set up an organisation within an organisation. Elements have started acts of disruption and possibly even sabotage. Experience from other post-colonial societies is that the RET refrain is a case of a revolutionary slogan being used to defeat the revolution.

One of our challenges is the fact that construction of national democracy also entails the creation of a new cohort of the capitalist class; and capitalist class formation is often a brutal, heartless and sometimes violent process of competition and elimination. A parasitic state-dependent bureaucratic bourgeoisie and comprador capitalists, dependent on the established elite, also emerge in this context. So do middle strata who rely on positions and influence in the movement to pursue and sustain opulent lifestyles.

All this creates a fundamental binding constraint to organisational renewal. As the NGC Discussion document on the balance of forces argues, lumpen or criminal elements infiltrate the movement: so, it’s not merely a case of revolutionaries who go bad; but bad people who join and pollute our organisations. These lumpen elements are found in the economic, political, bureaucratic, civil society and other centres - and they are driven by greed.

Are we steeled enough to deal with these challenges and to face down these reactionary tendencies? As a vanguard of the process of change, have we mobilised society to join us in this difficult campaign to deal with the instability that will come with the fight-back campaign against societal and organisational renewal, with the mobilisation by scoundrels to collapse the whole temple and perish with everyone?

These are the key organisational tasks that the Left should address today.

Along with this, the Left must also consciously avoid actions that, on the surface, appear militant; but that may end up sabotaging the renewal project. A good example of this is the recent debate on the restructuring of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), where the facilitators of state capture cleverly and carelessly extended populist benefits which cannot be sustained. Yet some of us on the Left perpetuate a notion that those benefits should be retained irrespective of the damage they are inflicting. One can extend this to many other areas, including the public sector as a whole.

Of course, there also have to be sacrifices that come from other social partners. A good example in this regard is how we take up the issue of Covid-19 "winners" such as ICT providers and pharmaceutical companies contributing some form of windfall tax and of the rich being levied a form of wealth tax. As indicated earlier, even the IMF says this should be considered.

Implementing practical organisational measures

Some of the practical organisational interventions that are proposed in the NGC discussion document on reviewing Through the Eye of the Needle include consideration of a form of "organisational state of emergency", with the following measures, among others:

As we introduce the new digital membership system, we should ask every ANC member to re-apply for membership.
Our vetting mechanism should include a police clearance certificate for every member.
We must strengthen the Integrity Committee and urgently set up the Electoral Commission whose tasks include pre-conference "integrity checks" for all candidates.
We should conduct lifestyle audits, starting with national and provincial leaders, and later regional and branch leaders.
And we must not retreat from swift and decisive action against wrongdoers.

These are some of the measures required to ensure a fundamental clean-up of the ANC. In this regard, the SACP’s own systems of recruitment and probation also need to be interrogated. Indeed, if we do not clean out our organisational stables, it will not be possible to defend and advance the NDR.

And so, coming back to Lenin’s "impending catastrophe and how to avert it" the broad framework should be:

Firstly, to take advantage of the green shoots of progressive thinking even in the mainstream of global economic discourse in the context of Covid-19.

Secondly, to use the positive domestic impulses towards social compacting to implement the Reconstruction and Recovery Plan, while at the same time addressing the fundamental issues around the colonial political economy that we have inherited - coalescence around essence - rather than merely focussing on the welter of detail.

Thirdly, to be firm as the Alliance in implementing a thorough organisational clean-up and also as the state in dealing with emergent counter-revolutionary attempts by desperate individuals to try and collapse the temple with all of us inside.

At the centre of all this, should be a frame of mind towards advancing to new and higher levels of progressive discourse and action - rather than adopting a defensive posture.

In that way, shall victory be certain!

* Cde Netshitenzhe is the Executive Director of the Mapungubwe Institute (MISTRA) and member of the ANC National Executive Committee.

REFERENCES

African National Congress (ANC). Umrabulo NGC 2020 Special Edition, 2020 UMRABULO SPECIAL EDITION.pdf (anc1912.org.za)
ANC. Reconstruction, Growth and Transformation: Building A New, Inclusive Economy
A Discussion Document prepared by the ANC’s Economic Transformation Committee. July 2020.
ANC. Statement of the African National Congress on the results of the 2019 national and provincial elections, Saturday, 11 May 2019
ANC. Enhancing organisational integrity and intensifying action towards a National Democratic Society, Strategy and Tactics of the ANC as adopted by the 54th National Conference 2017
Berg, A. and Ostry, J. 2011. IMF Staff Discussion Note. Inequality and Unsustainable Growth: Two Sides of the Same Coin?
Business Day. Bhekezela Phakathi. Academics back tax on wealthiest 1%. 20 January 2021
de Rothschild, L F. 2014. Capitalism thrives by looking past the bottom line. Financial Times, 21 May 2014
Engineering News. IVenter, I. Sub-Saharan infrastructure spend to reach $180bn by 2025 - PwC. 2 December 2014
Financial Times. Hook, L. The next pandemic: where is it coming from and how do we stop it? 29 October 2020
Financial Times. Wheatley, J. Why the developing world needs a bigger pandemic response. 19 October 2020.
Financial Times. Giles, C. IMF proposes ‘solidarity tax on pandemic winners and wealthy. 4 April 2021
Financial Times. Masters B. For all their fine words, CEOs aren’t sharing the pain. 21 April 2021
International Monetary Fund. World Economic Outlook. April 2021
Lenin, V.I. The impending catastrophe and how to combat it. October 1917 https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/ichtci/index.htm
MacLellan, L. August 19, 2019. Quartz at Work. Nearly 200 CEOs just agreed on an updated definition of "the purpose of a corporation". https://qz.com/work/1690439/new-business-roundtable-statement-on-the-purpose-of-companies/
Netshitenzhe J. Can South Africa’s civilisation of national democracy sustain itself? Mapungubwe Annual Lecture. 2 December 2020, https://mistra.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/lecture20201202jkn.pdf
Oxfam. 2020. Cashing in on the coronavirus crisis. https://www.oxfam.org/en/cashing-coronavirus-crisis-5-ways-which-corporations-are-exacerbating-inequality
Statistics South Africa. More people participate in the South African labour market in the 4th quarter of 2020. 25 February 2021. www.statssa.gov.za
Taleb N. 2007. Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Random House Publishing Group
The Presidency (South Africa). 2019. Towards a 25 Year Review. www.gov.za
The Presidency (South Africa). 2012. National Development Plan 2030. Our future - make it work. www.gov.za
TIPS Policy Brief 15/2020. Towards a reconstruction programme. July 2020.
Wucker, M. 2016. The Gray Rhino: How to Recognize and Act on the Obvious Dangers We Ignore. London: Macmillan

Lecture presented by the author on 25 April 2021

June 16 Detachment of Umkhonto we Sizwe whose members were given political instruction by Jack Simons in the camps in the People’s Republic of Angola

NASREC: National Recreation Centre, venue of the 2017 ANC National Conference.

NATO: North Atlantic Treaty Organisation military alliance

NEDLAC: National Economic Development and Labour Council which is platform for formal interaction between representatives of government, business, labour and the community sector

A Communist Woman’s Observations on South African National Democratic Revolution

Jenny Schreiner

This was a presentation to the Communist Party of Britain’s Women at Forefront of Struggle - against imperialism, colonialism, racism and sexism and for justice, equality and peace conference recently

I am inspired by the activism by South African Communist women in a century of communist struggle around the rights of women and particularly women workers.

South Africa was formed both through intra-colonial struggle, (British versus Dutch Afrikaners), and a struggle between these two colonial powers and their settlers against the indigenous people of this region of Africa. This ultimately led to a fascist and violent apartheid state, with forms of oppression and repression that made women particularly vulnerable. We saw this in the pass laws that kept women trapped into underdeveloped rural areas; in arrests and detention with physical and sexual violence, highlighted in evidence to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Sixty years ago, we took up arms against this regime. Having played a role in the 1980s in the underground Umkhonto we Sizwe, and come out of a couple of years of incarceration, the battle in the Constitutional Assembly to establish the principles that guide our security services was a significant achievement. We adopted the doctrine of human security as a central tenet of national security.

For the principle to live free from fear to become a reality, we needed to transform the intelligence service from means of repression to one of protection and development; to eradicate the black-lives-don’t-matter mindset of the apartheid police to an ethos of community policing; to put the prisons system onto a rehabilitation path to a correctional service; and to create a defence force deployed in the national interest and national service.

In the last decade, we saw a doctrinal shift back to state security with the abuse of security apparatus for factional and looting purposes. We now face the refocusing and rebuilding of state security services, and gender equality and gender transformation must be central to this. Two decades ago, I researched rape is a human security issue . The scourge of gender based violence and femicide in our country today reflects how far short the state and society have fallen in realising human security for women. To this end, the SACP-Cosatu-Joe Slovo Foundation White Ribbon Campaign remains a priority area of struggle.

A revolution must deliver a sustainable livelihood for all, and for black working class and rural women in particular. Communist women in the 1940s and 50s organised women workers to join and lead trade unions and established the Federation of South African Women which adopted the Women’s Charter as a basic set of demands from South Africa women.

Researching this history, being active in the United Women’s Organisation and involved in uniting mass women’s organisations across South Africa in the 1980s taught us the importance of struggles focused on the most basic needs of working class women - housing, creches, cost of living, and support of striking workers. We incorrectly assumed in 1991 that women of the mass democratic movement would locate themselves in the re-formed ANC Women’s League. This resulted in relatively de-mobilising working class women, and in the rolling back of many of the gains made.

The covid19 pandemic has floodlit the gross inequality that still pervades SA, where more half of our population live in poverty. The SACP Red October Campaign around hunger, healthcare, human settlements and water seeks to address the manner in which this inequality and poverty impacts disproportionately on women.

We have fought to sustain the covid19 Social Distress Relief Grant, as we campaign for a guarantee of a minimum income to every adult. A victory in this will give every woman financial independence, thereby profoundly shifting the patriarchal relations between man and wife, between women and their male family members. Economic equality remains elusive in the face of neoliberal economic policy, the relative weakening of the labour movement over the past decade, and the exclusion of workers in the informal economy from the social protection and from the labour movement.

Equal access to the state and its services is fundamental to women’s emancipation in a developing country. In 1994, we faced the challenge of integrating administrations and transforming the state. Government imbibed elements of neo-liberal Thatcherism, such as privatisation through outsourcing services, and opted for a regulatory framework for black economic empowerment. While the black glass ceiling has been smashed, the gender glass ceiling has only been cracked to allow a few women through, and even this small gain is easily eroded.

Gender mainstreaming has been a zig-zag process. Sate capacity has been further eroded by corporate capture of the state by those hell-bent on primitive capital accumulation through looting and corruption. Resources that should have changed black working class women’s lives have instead gone into the pockets of elements of the political elite, and amongst them women! Yet there are gains. For example, the opening up of democracy and freedom of identity has also brought to the fore struggles for equality for people across the gender spectrum.

The right to vote and be voted for are demands in our 1954 Women’s Charter. Ours is a history of exclusion from the vote, based variously on gender, race and educational qualification. For this, in part, we can point to the colonial powers! In 1974, reaching voting age, faced with an all-white election, I cast my vote in handwriting for Nelson Mandela, then still on Robben Island. In 1994, I cast my vote for the second time, again for Nelson Mandela, with an X against the icon of the African National Congress. The principle of non-racialism, rooted in family values and actions over generations, has been championed by the SACP from our beginnings in 1921.

The democratic breakthrough in 1994, sent us, so recently out of the proverbial trenches, into Parliament, albeit it in my case only for 3 years, again to join an institution and struggle for its transformation at the same time. Thanks largely to the proportional representation system and the ANC’s gender equity policy, there is a strong women’s presence in Parliament.

But experience also highlights that having women in leadership does not automatically translate into change in the lives of black working class women. The ideological outlook of those women and the nature of institutions can both limit its impact. The resource intensive parliamentary system of fulltime MPs, combined with the policy shifts to neo-liberalism and new public management, is not the best vehicle for economic, social and political empowerment of black working class and rural women.

As we gear up for local government elections in October 2021, the SACP is faced with tactical issues on the modality of contesting elections. We have so far contested under the banner of the ANC, except in one municipality where the community rejected the ANC based on its track record in that area. We are clear that we must stand firm against any imposition of unethical and unpopular candidates on communities. Our local government system combines constituency-based ward councillors and a proportional representation system. We have moved from 19% women councillors in 1995 to 41% in 2016, but significantly only 33% of ward councillors were women in 2016 election results. The challenge is to find the women candidates to successfully contest the ward seats.

In conclusion, our fight against colonialism and imperialism is a fight against patriarchy, racism and capitalism. We still struggle against the impact of colonialism of a special type on black and working class women, particularly the way in which black peasant and working class women were locked into social reproduction of capitalism, excluded and contained in ways significantly different from their menfolk, with colonial powers distorting culture and imposing further patriarchal practice on these women.

Our focus now is the second more radical, and gender mainstreamed, phase of socio-economic transformation, with heightened struggles to eradicate the twin threats of corruption and neo-liberalism. Our focus in our Centenary year is to put people, and women in particular, before profits in our struggle against the fourfold crisis of capitalism, its economic, social reproduction, health pandemic and environmental dimensions.
This requires the SACP as a vanguard party to pay specific attention to the organisational tasks of gender equality, of women cadre development, of a gender transformative Party programme, and the mass mobilisation of the working class and its allies behind that socialist programme. The SACP is committed in our second century, to fight against patriarchy through changing the structural social relations that embed patriarchy and sexism, alongside and intertwined with racism and capitalism, as we build our socialist future

s198 of SA Constitution Act 108 of 1996: National security must reflect the resolve of South Africans, as individuals and as a nation, to live as equals, to live in peace and harmony, to be free from fear and want and to seek a better life.

Masters in Security Studies, University of Pretoria

Cde Schreiner is an SACP Politburo member and a former MP, Director General, MK combatant and political prisoner.

Editor-in-chief

Blade Nzimande

Deputy editors-in-chief

Solly Mapaila
Chris Matlhako

Co-editors

Yunus Carrim
Jeremy Cronin

Deputy editors

Buti Manamela
Jenny Schreiner

Design & production

Tony Sutton
Sub-editors
David Niddrie
Mark Waller

Other board members

Joyce Moloi
Celiwe Madlopha
Reneva Fourie
Alex Mashilo
Malesela Maleka
Tinyiko Ntini

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South African Communist Party

African Communist, 1st Quarter, 2021, Issue No. 204