The M&G’s guest writer Hein Marais visited the SACP’s headquarters and found a party still spinning as it tries to recreate its role
THERE’S not much here to bolster one’s preconceptions. The offices are not sandwiched into Shell House. They’re not festooned with posters of Karl and Vladimir or peppered with souvenirs from China and Cuba. There’s not even a pair of red socks in sight, though that’s probably because Secretary General Charles Nqkula is in KwaZulu-Natal today.
It’s just gone 9am at the South African Communist Party headquarters in Cosatu House, and Jeremy Cronin swings around a corner, beaming, the deputy minister of education at his shoulder. Perchance, they’ve just discovered some common ground: a people-driven campaign around education, with communities repairing derelict schools, and parents and students setting up democratic school committees.
It’s an idea the SACP floated two years ago as part of the Reconstruction and Development Programme. At the time it displayed all the aerodynamic qualities of a lead balloon.
Today’s encounter is the kind of tonic the party has learned to cherish. Small signs that the radical impulses that seemed manifest in the African National Congress only two years ago were maybe only hibernating and not snuffed out.
A colleague greets us quizzically, and Cronin obliges: “This is Hein, he’s doing a story for the Mail & Guardian on a day in the life of Ivan Denisovich.” Chuckles, a three-point handshake and a bemused “Hoezit?” Later, Cronin leads me down a long, desultory corridor to his office. There’s a bounce in his step.
“It’s strange that this discussion only happens now,” he goes. “But it’s symptomatic of the dispersal of energies, the lack of a political centre. You can’t technocratically create a culture of education and learning, and the government is starting to realise this. There’s a convergence of minds happening around campaigns like this.”
Beside the copier, the editor of the party’s monthly Umsebenzi is rolling her third cigarette of the morning. Jean Middleton’s one of 12 head office staff members labouring away for the cause; only she doesn’t draw a salary.
With funding drawn from membership fees, a debit order campaign (which “is going surprisingly well”), and tithes extracted from members in government, the party has to count its pennies. Rumours that it’s bankrolled by Beijing are denied. “We get small donations from other communist parties, but that’s for things like workshops and political education programmes,” says Cronin. There’s also the matter of “a small involvement in the commercial sector” – shares in a tourist agency, it seems, though he prefers “to stay vague about that”.
As a volunteer, Middleton’s in to check whether any of the pieces commissioned for the next issue have arrived. Once again, she’s drawn a blank. My questions betray that I haven’t been reading Umsebenzi for a while. “Why not?” Middleton asks in a wounded tone. “Time,” I lie, unconvincingly, deciding against arguing the respective merits of agitprop and James Ellroy novels.
How does she, as a communist of some 30 years’ vintage, feel about the transition? “It’s not exactly what we expected, is it? Empowerment, improving people’s lives. We’re too interested in global competitiveness … you’re always on a losing wicket there.”
Exactly what the party did expect is still a bit unclear. A decade ago, the fever of insurrectionism ran high, even as Nelson Mandela was clearing a path for negotiations from his prison cell. Today, those debates about dual power, the vagaries of bourgeois democracy, the need for an economy “controlled and directed by the state” exude whiffs of melancholy eccentricity. 1989 changed all that, and derailed a theoretical and strategic trajectory which, since the party’s creation in July 1921, had dutifully observed Stalinist ontology.
The past, as the saying goes, isn’t what it used to be. Joe Slovo’s 1989 Has socialism failed? paper was seen by many as overly cautious, half-hearted even. A few years later, his “sunset clause” proposals made possible a settlement grounded in realpolitik. The dogma took a back seat.
Since then, the party’s auto-critiques have grown bolder and more earnest. It’s a pity more of these documents aren’t made public. Not because they have the answers, but because they ask many of the right questions.
`You’re looking at a party that could have been put into a museum,” Cronin later tells me. “We had a choice: look good as an exhibit or reassess ourselves and what socialism means. The price we paid is that the party is spinning still, trying to rethink its role.”
That blend of certitude and doubt – of flux – seems to have done the SACP little harm in the 1990s. Not if membership figures are the yardstick.
Barricaded behind piles of invoices, reports and back issues I find Senzo Nkomo, somehow looking stressed and composed. At day, according to the sign at the door, he’s “publications, marketing and distribution manager”. He advises me not to mention the “manager” part – “it was a slip of the computer”. At night, he’s chair of the Johannesburg Central branch, an activist, one of the 75 000 members the SACP claimed in 1995. In February 1990, the figure was just 2 000.
What does it take to belong? I ask. “Commitment to our ideology and politics, discipline, and active, hard work,” is the snappy reply. No room for rebels without a cause here.
Can a member of the National Council of Trade Unions (Nactu) join? No problem: “Workers are the same, no matter their union affiliation.” And a member of the United Workers’ Union of South Africa (Uwusa)? There’s silence, like the cue for canned laughter was missed. Clearly, there are workers and there are workers. “That would be a special situation,” he mulls. “We’d have to refer that to the provincial leadership. Uwusa, as you know, is seen as being used by a certain political organisation for its end.”
Those applicants that do make the grade, though, belong to a party that seems to observe the laws not of Marxism-Leninism, but of quantum physics. It’s both discreet and manifest, careening along an orbit that is predictable but imprecise, mapped by probability rather than certainty. A photo of Werner Karl Heisenberg would not be out of place on the walls.
The upshot is an ambivalence that sometimes bewilders. Like the party’s initial glowing endorsement of Growth, Employment and Redistribution (Gear), the government’s macro-economic strategy which many members regard as “neo-liberal”.
Cronin’s just spent half an hour with New York leftists who dropped in for an update on what one unionist a few months back described as “our distorted revolution”. We have time for a chat before two new British diplomats arrive for an “orientation” meeting. They’re late, and this morning’s sprightliness has worn off. Whether it was the telephone consultation with Nqkula over the Free State crisis, the confab with a colleague, or the London rookies getting the feel for African time is anyone’s guess.
My inquiries do little to repair the mood. “Did you blush as you wrote that media release on Gear?” I ask.
He nods, slowly, the colour rising in his cheeks again: “It was a collective effort and it was mandated.”
Later, I’ll be told by a confidante that “they leaned hard on the SACP” – “they” presumably being the ANC leadership. When Cronin did get around to criticise Gear, he got an earful from Mandela and a visit from ANC top brass.
Which has me thinking back to those paranoid analyses that had the SACP wagging the ANC’s rump. I remember watching a huddle of journos at the ANC’s 1991 conference tallying the SACP members elected on to the national executive committee, bent on uncovering The Conspiracy through arithmetic. As the total rose, eyebrows were hoisted ever higher, knowing looks exchanged.
These days, the anatomical relationship seems rather orthodox, despite the prominence of SACP members in the ANC, and in all levels of government. How else to explain a strategy like Gear or the cosy relations with Indonesia?
Cronin doesn’t buy my vitriolic reading of Gear. In fact, he seems quite impressed by Thabo Mbeki’s recent attempt to locate it, as he puts it, “within a Marxist metaphysics”. A bit like marketing cigarettes as a cure for cancer, but I keep that thought to myself. Still, isn’t the party being dragged along paths that contradict its bid to “elaborate a working- class political economy in every sphere”, as national organiser Langa Zita phrases it?
Even among leftist critics of the SACP there is a recognition that the party is a kind of reservoir of progressive struggle. That, potentially, it can help lever the country out of a phase of nice-warm-feelings conciliation that more or less rearranges the deck chairs. But the stridency that would imply is not readily visible.
“Maybe we are being a little quiet,” says Cronin, “though I don’t think so. We have certain capacities that make us effective, but we can’t control campaigns all the way. I don’t think we should be trying to come up with an economic strategy document, for instance, and anyway we don’t have the capacity, remotely. That’s why we’re in an alliance.”
“Ultimately, the party is only as good as the ANC is – if it’s weak, we’re weak.”
Zita’s busy collating reading material for the upcoming party school when I collar him with the same line of inquiry.
“There is frustration from some comrades who’re not clear about what kind of organisation the ANC is,” he admits. “There’s irritation about the fact that it’s not a class organisation and about the way it operates. So, there will be tensions and inconsistency.
“We need patience and resilience,” he says. “We’re a party located in a mass movement. We’re not a substitute for it, we add to it. Our role is constant, systematic persuasion.”
So, for now, the party is not looking to call in its bets on the alliance – even though, as Cronin reminded earlier, “Our position was never that the alliance would go on forever.”
Still in his twenties, Zita has become one of the intellectual beacons in the party. He disappears to excavate an essay from the shambles on his desk.
I wander into the library, past shelves of Marxist canons, Monthly Review editions, even books by Eduardo Galeano, which pleases. But really I want something with pictures. My reward is a dusty coffee table extravanganza from North Korea – all smiling proletarians and the ubiquitous “Great Leader Kim Il-Sung giving on-the-spot guidance to the Pyongyang duck-farming co- operative” – which I lug back.
A while later, Zita returns, seething. He’s just found out that SACP members on a certain local council haven’t yet devised a strategy for local transformation.
“They’re sitting on billions of rands, and they still don’t have a plan! It’s unbelievable!”
Marshalling all the subtlety of a warthog, I ask him whether, when he observes some comrades in government, he ever wonders what binds them as communists.
He does. “Either some of those comrades are acting in terms of realpolitik” Or? “Or they may be formal members who are perhaps no longer comfortable with what it means to be a communist but haven’t yet acknowledged it in public.
“That first group should take us on board, say: `Comrades, circumstances force us to do this, these are the problems we’re facing, what do we do?'”
But that’s not happening? “Yes, that’s the problem,” he sighs.
It’s way past lunch and another storm has rolled across the skyline. Save for Zita, a lone visitor and I, the office is empty. Zita has two reports to write for meetings, and a university class to look forward to.
He dives into another pile of papers and rises, smiling, with a book, carefully held open at page 139.
“When was the last time you read this?” he demands. I cannot tell a lie. “Before the 1990 World Cup,” I admit.
“Ah, you see, we talk about the state, about popular movements, but how many of us have read this?” Not many, I suspect. He’s waving Norberto Bobbio’s landmark essay Gramsci and the Conception of Civil Society in the air.
“Come,” says Zita, “I’ll make you a copy.”
— Journalist and researcher Hein Marais is completing a book, The Political Economy of South Africa’s Transition