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Volume 14, No. 24, 16 July 2015 |
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Red Alert SACP growing at an unprecedented rate! But being a communist is not only about embarking on a lifelong study, it is about changing the world! |
By Ian Beddowes
The 3rd Special National Congress of the South African Communist Party (SACP) was convened in order to deal with rapidly changing conditions both within the Party and within South Africa.
Since the 12th National Congress in 2007, the Party has had an unprecedented growth in membership - from 50 000 in 2007, membership grew to 150 000 by the 13th National Congress in 2012 - and now in 2015 that has increased to 230 000. This extraordinary growth is the result of the recognition that there can no longer be any significant advance in the living standards of the South African people under the system of financialised capitalism by class-conscious elements of the working-class which have recognised the vanguard role of the SACP and have decided to join.
Nevertheless, most new members do not understand that a Communist Party built on the principles laid down by V.I. Lenin is a different kind of party to mass parties like the African National Congress (ANC) and in fact to all other parties in South Africa. Joining a Communist Party anywhere in the world is not based simply on a general agreement with its philosophy and political direction. Joining a Communist Party means a commitment to learn and understand the basic ideology laid down by Marx, Engels and Lenin and its development by the world's Communist Parties in the concrete conditions of struggle. In South Africa we must know the history of the Party and its intimate connection with the national liberation movement led by the ANC. To know where we are going to, we must know where we have come from.
Membership of a Communist Party is not only about embarking on a course of lifelong study, it is about committing one's life to what Soviet writer Nikolai Ostrovsky described as "...the finest cause in all the world - the fight for the Liberation of Mankind." Thus one of the greatest tasks of the SACP Special Congress was to develop the mechanisms whereby new members are transformed into active and disciplined Party cadres and communists par excellence.
Since about 1980, there has been a transformation in the world capitalist system which has made it even more destructive than ever before; the old capitalist system during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, through ruthless exploitation of the world's resources, proletarianisation of the peasantry and exploitation of the working class nevertheless increased production faster than at any time during the world's history.
The new capitalism, in which money has become more important than production, began with the accession of Ronald Reagan as United States President and Margaret Thatcher as British Prime Minister. Under them, banks became deregulated leading to the enrichment of a tiny minority and the destruction of industry and the livelihoods of millions. This process spread to most of the world, including South Africa.
When apartheid was abolished in 1994 and the ANC took power by ascending to government leadership, it was against a backdrop of the temporary triumph of capitalism over socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The unfortunate, but on the whole necessary, compromise of 1990s negotiated settlement nevertheless led to an improvement of the lives of most South Africans. But the reactionary Class Project of 1996 led to an uncontrolled form of capitalism in some ways worse than under apartheid. The effects of this were not always visible immediately, but we are now seeing the results very clearly.
While the Special Congress was on, President Jacob Zuma was attending a meeting of the BRICS countries in Moscow which was finalising the establishment of the New Development Bank which will have its African regional branch in Johannesburg. This moving away from or providing an alternative to the US controlled Bretton Woods Institutions, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. This signals possibilities of a shift away from the use of the US dollar as the main trading currency and from the control of western monopoly capitalism and is one of the reasons for the unprecedented personal attacks on President Zuma and attempts to divide COSATU and the Alliance. It is one of the reasons of the attacks on Russia and Brazil.
As a result of the growing lawlessness of the banking sector, at the forefront of the campaign for "a second, more radical phase of the transition" is the financial sector campaign. This will not take place merely through polite meetings in committee rooms.
As the Special Congress Declaration states:
"An anti-monopoly capital struggle is not an abstract slogan. It is about the struggle against the daily dispossession of homes by the major banks. Inflicted by cartels linking property developers, banking staff and corrupt officials in magistrate's courts. This massive modern wave of dispossession affects hundreds of thousands of families each year in our country. It is a new, financialised version of apartheid-era forced removals."
A further resolution coming from the Special Congress was for transformation of the judiciary. The necessity of this has been shown most publicly and dramatically in part by the use of the courts to curb the power of government - for instance to insist on the right of the DA to circulate messages calling the President "a thief" and the right of the EFF to disrupt Parliament with impunity.
The same courts ruled that a R240m capital control exit levy on multi-billionaire Mark Shuttleworth's expatriation of two billion rand to an overseas tax haven was illegal. Fortunately this was overturned by the Constitutional Court.
But on the question of evictions, the working class and the poor are at the mercy of courts which continually rule in favour of property developers in contravention of the laws and Constitution of South Africa. In practice, as opposed to theory, the Constitution is mainly for those who have large enough sums of money to take their cases there. Poor people, the working class included, do not afford the astronomical fees charged for taking cases up there. They have virtually been shut out of access to justice.
Perhaps the most shocking case recently was the case of Comrade Nombeko Monoalibe. Nombeko lives in a flat owned by her sister under sectional title in Johannesburg. When Nombeko dared to argue with the unpopular administrator of the block of flats she was arrested and sentenced to 30 days imprisonment without trial by a High Court judge, just last month, not during apartheid. Fortunately the efforts of the local SACP (she is a popular branch chairperson) secured her release after 9 days. We believe that there are others without
Nombeko's support network who have been less fortunate.
Apartheid is still alive and well in the South African legal system and is based on class discrimination and class divisions, its essential character.
Finally, the question of the media.
The South African media is predominantly anti-government, anti-Zuma, anti-ANC, anti-COSATU and most certainly anti-SACP. This not only includes the print media but also most of the electronic media - including the national broadcaster, the SABC, which is now effectively under the control of Multi-Choice. By and large the press is a source of disinformation and is under the control of monopoly capital. Interestingly, during the Special National Congress the news content was relatively better and the journalists must be commended in their capacity as workers, the Party's National Spokesperson Comrade Alex Mashilo said.
However, negativity remained concentrated in the editorials and opinion pieces sections reflecting the formal positions of newspapers and the views they both align and mobilise to give coverage. Democratisation of the media and the dissemination of correct and balanced information is a very important part of achieving the second more radical phase of South Africa's transition. Those sections must not be left out of discussion in the media transformation conference that the SACP has called for. The right of reply with equal prominence on those very sections must be a rule and we are to achieve balance and give those who are being criticised space to state their site of the story.
The SACP 3rd Special Congress was characterised by robust debate tempered with revolutionary discipline. It was highly self-critical, as the Party's National Spokesperson said before the Congress: "The criticisms from the outside are far less sharp than the criticisms coming from the inside and which will be discussed at this Congress." The Party has to maintain a leading edge in terms of constructive criticism and self-criticism. This was made clear during the presentation of the Party's organisational review discussion document by the 2nd Deputy General Secretary Comrade Solly Mapaila.
In this report we have by no means covered all the topics debated and decided by the Congress; merely the central issues. But the Party in South Africa is growing in size and influence as are other Communist Parties in the world as capitalism sinks more and more into complete degeneracy.
* Ian Beddowes is the Spokesperson of Housing Class Action and General Secretary of the Zimbabwe Communist League living in South Africa.
South African communists reassess the state of the country's national democratic revolution
By Mark Waller
The South African Communist Party's Special National Congress, held 7-11 July in Soweto, Johannesburg, took stock of a range of problems besetting South Africa's young democracy and efforts to tackle the legacies of the colonial and Apartheid past. Nearly 800 delegates took part in the congress, together with representatives of fraternal parties.
The SACP is a tripartite Alliance partner of the governing African National Congress (ANC) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu). The Alliance held a summit just before the SACP congress in part to examine the impacts of a range of problems involving the ANC and Cosatu.
The latter has been involved in bitter internal divisions, in part rooted in the onslaught against the union movement by capital, that led to the expulsions of member union, the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa and its General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi - a highly damaging process that has severely weakened Cosatu.
The declaration of the SACP congress noted, "In our present reality, the SACP is the most stable and ideologically coherent formation within the Alliance. This is a time when the ANC is acknowledging many challenges related to incumbency and the influence of money on internal democracy... [and]... the unrelenting capitalist offensive against Cosatu coincides with serious challenges to its unity and strength."
The strength of the SACP is evident in its mushrooming membership numbers of 35 000 a year in the last two years to its current high of 230 000, making it the second largest political formation in terms of audited membership after the ANC. But, as its General Secretary Comrade Blade Nzimande pointed out in his political report to the Congress, the party "is itself not immune to the dangers of factionalism, incumbency, careerism and money politics."
The main aim of the congress was to address this situation in terms of other crosscutting developments. Mainly, these are the more aggressive stance of monopoly capital in South Africa and internationally, and the impact it has on South Africa's National Democratic Revolution (NDR) – the overarching transformative strategy of the ANC and its allies.
"It is no secret that we are confronting a very challenging period in our national democratic revolution with risks, threats but also important opportunities and responsibilities," said Nzimande. The Central Committee Political Report he presented to the Congress detailed the vast problems confronting South Africa in the face not only of a global economy under increasingly desperate imperialist hegemony but of more intense attacks in South Africa on the left by right wing and populist semi-fascist formations.
In one area, the mainstream media, there has been a robust offensive by the Naspers media group, resulting in the brutal and well-funded corporate capture of the public broadcaster, the SABC, and its transformation from a vehicle serving all South Africans into one for the middle class and rich. Naspers is also using its vast resources to destroy the country's independent local newspaper operators. This is all part of an offensive designed to set the course of political and social developments in the country and keep it safe for corporate domination.
The performance of the ANC government and its Alliance partners has, by their own account been uneven, and is in need of improvements. In his address to the congress, the Deputy President of the country and of the ANC, Cyril Ramaphosa, stressed this point:
"The SACP has long been distinguished by its capacity for honest reflection and self-criticism. In the preparations for this Special Congress - and indeed during the deliberations here - we have witnessed a frank engagement about the strengths and weaknesses of the Party, the ANC and the Alliance. We welcome the opportunity that this Congress provides for a critical assessment of our collective achievements and shortcomings."
The main business of the Congress was to formulate resolutions in five main areas: party building, economic transformation, the workplace, the battle of ideas, and the upcoming 2016 local government elections. The work resulted in a hefty register of resolutions that will be taken to the party's provinces, districts and branches to be carried out.
But much of the discussion of the congress focused on reassessment and self-criticism concerning the direction of the transformation attempted since 1994. This needs some explanation.
Toward the end of last year the SACP published a discussion document, Going to the Root, which aims to open up debate in the party, the broader Alliance movement and the wider public on the heavy problems that persist in the country despite just over 20 years of democratic reconstruction.
The main problem the Party identifies is the deepening of the triple crises that have long afflicted the majority of South Africans – unemployment, poverty and inequality, all of which are heavily racialised according to the raw legacies of the long colonial and apartheid period. The question Going to the Root seeks to answer is why, despite massive redistribution programmes over the past 20 years, are these three disastrous trends so dominant and tenacious.
For those of us on the receiving end of the sketchy mainstream media coverage of events in South Africa, the news is unremittingly bad: striking mine workers shot down by cops at Marikana, all-pervasive corruption government, protests in poor areas against lack of service delivery, upheavals in parliament instigated by new ‘radicals' fed up with government cronyism, and violent xenophobia directed at migrants from other parts of Africa.
And, in the midst of all this, plummeting ratings issued by various international agencies, covering everything from South Africa's deteriorating economic viability due to bad labour relations, hopeless education performance, lack of transparency and accountability and general bad governance.
This mainstream, largely Western, narrative has been so powerful as to convince many, even progressives of various hues, that there is nothing else going on in South Africa. As a result, few people outside the country – and a good many inside it – have any idea of the achievements made by the ANC in government since 1994.
Some of these post-Apartheid successes easily eclipse those of progressive left governments in South America, and yet South Africa is never characterised in the same terms as those governments. One reason is that, if it were, it would challenge the dominant Western corporate and government conventional wisdom of South Africa as the focal point of Western interests in Africa. And it is this conventional wisdom, a fairly coherent neo-liberal offensive, which we find replicated in the ways South Africa is viewed and gets depicted.
As it is, nothing is reported about the creation of a welfare programme providing monthly state allowances for 16 million people, and including benefits for housing, disability and sickness, child support and income support. When the democratic government took office in 1994 there were just 3 million South Africans receiving rudimentary welfare grants.
Nothing gets reported about the 3.3 million free houses built for people in the poorest areas, and benefitting some 16 million people. What does get reported is that some of this government housing has been substandard due to corrupt cost cutting by private building contractors benefitting from local government tenders. But then again what doesn't get reported is that government is now ensuring that all substandard free housing is replaced or renovated.
Nothing gets reported about the electrification programme providing 7 million household electricity connections since 1996. Contrast this to the achievement of all the Apartheid administrations put together, which in half a century electrified just 5 million households, and just a few in poor areas.
Nothing gets reported about the vast overhaul of the education system, which for the black majority has meant the replacement of crude rote learning, sufficient only for unskilled employment, by multidiscipline curricula leading to university level. What's more, 9 million pupils in 20 000 schools across the country now benefit from free school meals.
And nothing gets reported about the free distribution and installation of solar water heaters to poor households, allowing people to generate their own hot water.
All these programmes are works in progress and are continuing apace. They are, as the SACP, notes in its Going to the Root discussion paper, "all part of the ‘good news story'...the most important factor in the continued overwhelming majority electoral support achieved by out movement."
But, the SACP points out, "since we are dealing with a real life process and not an abstract theory, this massive redistributive process underway since 1994 has often been uneven." This means that targets have been missed, the quality of delivery has been poor, and maintenance of new infrastructure gets neglected.
Another deeper problem is that the scale of demand overwhelms the scope for delivery to provide poor communities with services and amenities. And with crisis levels of poverty, unemployment and inequality not diminishing but worsening, the demand for services is only increasing.
The compounded problems the situation generates makes the ANC government an easy target of neo-liberal attacks to, as the SACP puts it, "sow popular demoralisation and a lack of belief in the capacity of popular forces and the democratic state to advance development."
In other words, by telling just one half of the story, the negative one, the opponents of progressive change in South Africa are able to cast the ANC government, and its alliance partners – the SACP and Cosatu – in a completely unfavourable light. While these adversaries are all too keen to spotlight public sector corruption they are silent about the intense fight-back against corruption or about the staggering scale of private sector corruption.
But the SACP goes further, and places the country's current problems in the context of insufficient structural transformation, particularly of the productive economy, since 1994. The ANC took this self-critical approach at its last National Conference, held in 2012, and called for a "second radical phase of the national democratic revolution" – the first being the fundamental break with the past that culminated in the 1994 democratic elections.
The thinking behind the "second phase" is that while the negotiations led to the democratic breakthrough of 1994, this advance did not create a bridgehead for a radical social-economic transformation agenda. While the redistribution of surplus, largely through the fiscus, has clocked up successes, it has been conceptualised as a top-down state delivery process, and is generated from an unchanged productive economy and growth path fixated on GDP.
The result is an essentially neo-liberal, trickle-down development notion, whereby the "cake" must get bigger for everyone – particularly the working class and the poor – to have a share of it. This course of development has essentially left monopoly capital unchallenged and in the lead.
From this position it has had a free hand in aggressively restructuring production – including, as we see with Naspers, information – shifting investments from manufacturing to speculative and non-productive activities like financial services and real estate and in the process fragmenting organised labour through casualization, informalisation, labour brokering and retrenchments. To make matters worse it has presided over massive capital flight out of the country and tax evasion.
In this situation, the SACP argues, the state's redistributive successes have been muted by turning the mass popular base of the ANC and the Alliance into recipients, beneficiaries and clients of services that are "delivered". Instead of being protagonists of transformation, the mass base has been pushed into passivity, which tends to rebound against government when it fails to "deliver".
The ANC government, which includes strong input from the Alliance partners at national and local level, has moved swiftly since the 2012 National Conference to create the bases for a new growth and development path through a range of policies and programmes.
They include the New Growth Path strategy for expanding jobs and development drivers in 13 key sites of production, the Industrial Policy Action Plan for state-led reindustrialisation, the National Infrastructure Plan and various smaller programmes, including the development of cooperatives and SMMEs. Abundant information on all of these macro policy plans is easily available from South African government websites.
The key point made by the SACP at its Special National Congress is that despite the positive bases for change created by these policies, they will only succeed to change the social and economic landscape in South Africa if they are carried through by more mobilised and politically engaged urban and rural poor communities.
This is the decisive task confronting the party and the Alliance as they wrestle self-critically with the ever-pertiment question "What is to be done?"
The document "Going to the Root" and some of the discussion on its strengths and weaknesses has been published in the last three issues of the SACP journal African Communist. See www.sacp.org.za
* Cde Mark Waller is a member of the Communist Party of Finland living in South Africa, and writes in personal capacity.
This is an edited version of the same piece first published by the Communist Party of Finland and in the United States by the Communist Party of the USA's People's World earlier this week.
