LEFT FIELD
Ebrahim Harvey
Long last have I read an article so contradictory and dishonest as that by Dale McKinley last week in Crossfire, “The cheerleaders of capitalism”. He was until recently a political economist of the South African Communist Party, which is, together with the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), in an alliance with the ruling African National Congress.
Cosatu and the SACP have had close relations for years and basically offer the same perspective on their defence of the ruling party and the raison d’tre of their alliance with it. McKinley conveniently forgets that in theoretical, political and strategic terms there are no fundamental differences between the SACP and Cosatu. The strong overlap in leadership confirms this. To crown it all, Cosatu considers the SACP to be the “vanguard party of the working class” and urges its members to join and strengthen it.
Yet nowhere does he mention the SACP. This is a deliberate, false and disingenuous omission. So conspicuous are the fundamental contradictions that both Cosatu and the SACP face in their alliance with the ANC that this ruse cannot hide or obscure the truth which is dragged out in public when these contradictions become combustible, as happened in last year’s public-sector wage strike and to a limited extent in the run-up to Cosatu’s recent strike against job losses.
The criticisms he makes against Cosatu apply in every respect to the SACP: seeking concessions from the ANC within a framework that waters down worker demands, soft- peddling on the ANC’s economic policies, radical rhetoric about “transformation” and a “developmental state” and particularly seeing the “national democratic revolution” (NDR) as the “only viable political/organisational vehicle to meet the needs of workers and the poor”. Cosatu in fact learnt about the NDR from the SACP, as the first stage of its rubbished two-stage revolution approach.
Why does he, while knocking Cosatu, hide himself and his party behind these facts? It is because as a SACP member he knows the consequences of strongly criticising it in public. But what is more important for McKinley? The truth that he knows but does not say or the reaction he will face from the party if he speaks this truth? If he is sincere about “class politics” then he should know the answer.
It is the SACP, more than Cosatu, that still pays lip service to a “developmental state”. Under the impact of market-driven economic policies and privatisation the prospects of such a state are fast receding and with it the basis for a worthy and necessary alliance with the ANC is being eroded. The cruel irony is that it is senior leaders of the SACP who are driving privatisation of state assets, which strengthens capitalist market forces and drastically weakens the state as a lever of development at a time when it is most needed for satisfying basic needs.
How can McKinley give a supposedly critical analysis of the worker’s movement, which he laments the left for not doing forthrightly, but fail to mention the “vanguard party” of this movement? The party’s own pragmatic orientation disposes it, perhaps more than Cosatu, to the danger of “becoming the cheerleaders of capitalism with a human face”. Besides, how has the “vanguard party” led Cosatu if it is in such danger?
But McKinley is determined to outdo his earlier nonsense. He fumbles along to claim that this situation leaves workers “in a state of political and organisational confusion about where their class interests lie”. Yet his party has been accused for years of being mainly responsible for this confusion. The role of a vanguard party is to dispel confusion among workers and not to create it. But for him it is Cosatu and the ANC causing this confusion and not the party.
As if this is not enough, he goes on to say that Cosatu’s opposition to government’s growth, employment and redistribution (Gear) strategy has been fragmented and selective. But this is exactly what the left outside the SACP has accused it of since Gear was introduced in 1996. In fact Cosatu has been more vocal in this regard than the SACP has been. Other than lame media statements that “Gear is not appropriate for our developmental needs” this “vanguard party” has not once initiated, led and sustained an anti-Gear mass campaign. McKinley knows this but pretends not to.
His “analysis” is instead a nuance of Stalinist left-wing opportunism. The party is more removed from the class politics he proposes than Cosatu is. As soon as the workers movement begins to regain some of its former militancy, not because of the efforts of the party but in spite of the lack thereof, this opportunism wants to sound in words more radical than the action of workers. Does he really not see a carbon copy of his party in his criticisms of Cosatu?
While there are many reasons for the party’s decline over the past few years, its failure to provide a clear, bold and fighting programme that relates to the needs and interests of workers at a time when they have been under severe attack is the biggest. Its poor leadership, tied to the apron strings of the ruling party and more accountable to it than the working class, is another.
The failure of the party to gain as little as 5% of Cosatu’s 1,8-million members, an accessible base, tells us unmistakably that something big is wrong with the party. McKinley’s own resignation from his post as a political economist a few months ago was just another tell-tale sign of loss of confidence and decline.
Will its strategy conference last week help to turn the party around?
Certainly not. Their latest compromises, contained in discussion documents for the conference, urges Cosatu to adopt wage restraint in the upcoming public sector wage negotiations and expresses doubt that it has feasible alternatives to Gear. This comes from the “revolutionary vanguard party of the working class”. No wonder workers have been leaving the party in droves.
Now is the time for the real left inside and outside the SACP to build a new revolutionary party that the SACP is not and has never been.