28 July 2011
Dear comrades,
It is with great pleasure that the Communist Party of Ireland sends its warmest revolutionary greetings and best wishes for the celebration of the ninetieth anniversary of the founding of the South African Communist Party.
Your party was born in the tumultuous years following the Russian Revolution, a revolution that not only inspired millions of oppressed peoples in the imperialist countries but sent shock waves through the colonial empires, inspiring millions more to struggle against colonialism and imperialism.
In your ninety years of existence, generations of South African communists sacrificed and suffered great hardship, and many gave their all, in the struggle to end apartheid and to begin the process of building a new, democratic South Africa. You applied the ideas of Marx and Engels and of Lenin to the concrete conditions of Africa, adding greatly to and enriching the world revolutionary theory of the oppressed, the theory of Marxism-Leninism.
As the global system of monopoly capitalism reels under the strains of the deepening contradictions of the system, with each solution bringing forward newer and even deeper contradictions, we are certainly living on the threshold of a new departure for the peoples of this planet. The period of history we are living in is pregnant with potential change, but as yet the midwives who will deliver the new society remain unorganised. That is the challenge that all communists face today.
We know that the SACP will continue to make a great contribution to the mobilising of the masses not only in South Africa but throughout the African continent, the most oppressed continent on our planet.
Long live the South African Communist Party!
Long live anti-imperialist solidarity!
Eugene Mc Cartan
General Secretary