The SACP and ANC are at loggerheads over the shape of South Africa’s new democracy, writes Hein Marais
IF political alliances were marriages, the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party (SACP) would be in counselling today, poring disconsolately over a new text that aches with unhappiness and disillusionment.
The text appears in the SACP’s journal, African Communist. And it reads like a flurry of left-hooks to the ANC’s chin. Written by SACP deputy chair Blade Nzimande and deputy secretary general Jeremy Cronin, it seems to ask “Is this really the same partner we betrothed four decades ago?”
Its target is an ANC discussion document released last year, The State and Social Transformation, which Nzimande and Cronin describe as a “radical and curious shift” from previous ANC thinking.
Slamming its “opportunism” and its “slide into a technocratic, `class-neutral’ approach to politics”, they accuse it of “abandoning transformation of existing power realities” and of promoting a “passive, regulatory pragmatism” which “can only serve to legitimise and entrench … inequalities”.
With dismay, they note that the ANC document “polemically exhorts workers not to be `economistic’, not to be `infantile’ or `subjectivist’ ” while “it hardly prescribes to capitalists at all”.
This is the sort of tiff that tends to have pundits eyeing an imminent split through the prism of drained beer mugs.
The ANC document sought to sweeten recent government policies like the Growth, Employment and Redistribution strategy (Gear) with a leftish gloss, arguing that the local and international balance of forces allowed no other option.
“I welcome its existence,” Cronin said this week, explaining that it was the “first attempt to theorise these unfolding realities.
“There’s nothing worse than dealing with an animal whose footprints you can see, but which itself remains invisible”.
But he insisted that his and Nzimande’s foray was aimed not at “some huge showdown” but “at a trend in the ANC, at a powerful tendency in it”.
Still, it’s a risky intervention, given the SACP’s post-1994 experience of tugging, covertly and somewhat forlornly, at the ANC’s apron-strings. All the more so, when one discovers that the ANC document was nominally penned by an aide to Mbeki. It’s safe to assume that it reflected Mbeki’s thinking, even if he did concur with criticisms levelled at it in a SACP central committee meeting last October.
So, it’s no surprise to discover that the essay’s stridency – and the chance that it could be construed as a personal assault on Mbeki – has triggered some anxiety in the SACP.
On the other hand, the ANC document – and its close correspondence to government policies and processes – has already thrown down the gauntlet to the SACP.
Either it tags along in the wake of policies and trends that contradict its vision of transformation. Or it tries to render less opaque the contesting agendas and interests that are uneasily submerged in a pool of makeshift harmony.
Nzimande and Cronin’s essay recognises this. Coming from within a party which has preferred to pursue its disagreements with the ANC behind closed doors, this is strong stuff.
So what does it all add up to? The pat reaction is that the alliance is fast approaching its expiry date. But there’s much more afoot here.
This doesn’t mean that one accepts the ANC’s sanguine response that the essay be seen merely “in the context of discussions on various policy positions between the ANC and SACP”.
In fact, it resonates at two levels – political drama (inducing reveries of strife and splits) and revitalised political analysis and strategy. Believe it or not, the real story lies with the latter.
The thinking arrayed by Nzimande and Cronin is an unexpectedly courageous and polemical outgrowth from a 1996 SACP strategy document, Let us not lose sight of our strategic priorities.
There, the party noted that the “national democratic forces represent complex, quite dynamic, shifting realities, which are liable to coalesce around two distinct versions of the national democratic project”.
The first would seek to advance the interests of the poor via an actively allied “developmental state” and “broad, popular movement”.
The second, paraded under the motto of “realism”, would orbit around themes of modernisation, normalisation, globalisation, social unity, and law and order.
Here the SACP detected “a potential, new ruling bloc in formation … including, in practice, both major fractions of the old [white] bourgeoisie and new, emergent capitalist fractions”. The latter, it warned, would “conceal their dependency on the `modernising’ white fraction of the bourgeoisie with a great deal of rhetoric about `the need for a patriotic bourgeoisie’ “.
What this analysis recognised was that the ANC’s ascent to political power coincided with an intensified struggle over which set of social, economic and political forces would constitute a new ruling bloc. The ongoing contest over economic policies, the labour market and the social bias of development initiatives are part and parcel of that battle.
One of the key propellants of the negotiations process was the realisation among sections of the old ruling bloc that the capitalist system in South Africa had to be “modernised” – in economic and political terms. We had to become a “normal” capitalist society. Despite its haphazard reform efforts of the 1980s, the National Party administration had proved manifestly unequal to that task.
The alternative was risky but not prohibitively so: it meant democratising the political system and gradually forging a new ruling bloc, with a severely circumscribed or even dismembered ANC eventually serving as its political axis.
The SACP might recoil from so crass an exposition, but its current thinking recognises that the ANC is, at once, an agent and subject in this process. Likewise, the organised, skilled working class which, through regressive changes to the labour market, might find itself perforce appended to a new ruling bloc.
Far from having dissolved into a fraternity of common purpose, tranquillised by the levelling language of nation-building, we are in the midst of an intense, renewed struggle. The outcome will determine which interests and ideals determine the course of the new South Africa.
What Nzimande and Cronin have risked is to point out that already ossifying within the ANC are trends that ally it to an agenda which conflicts fundamentally with the interests and aspirations of the majority of South Africans.
The neo-liberal features of the Gear macro- economic strategy, the elitist nature of many black economic empowerment ventures, and the supine postures struck before the demands of corporate South Africa are, in such a reading, not anomalies.
If left unchecked, the result will be a revised division of society, with the current order stabilised around, at best, 30% of the population. For the rest – overwhelmingly young, female and black – the best hope will be “some trickle-down from a `modernised’ and `normalised’ new South Africa”.
This raises not only moral but political problems. “The newly arrived”, the SACP warned, will increasingly view “the excluded 70% as a threat to newly acquired privilege and power” – which brings the danger of a new authoritarianism in response to social instability.
Politically, the aim of Nzimande and Cronin’s polemic is to galvanise the simmering disquiet in ANC and alliance ranks into progressive challenge, ahead of the ANC’s December national conference. But the intervention might snag on a few problems.
The decision to obliquely address Mbeki himself might backfire. Mbeki personifies the trend of technocratic realism railed against by Nzimande and Cronin. He is our version of Brazil’s President Henrique Cardoso, a manager of social compromises. The authors seem to hope that this approach has been wrought less by conviction than by circumstance.
But a government obsessed with sending the “right signals” to investors will find itself hard-pressed to confirm that it has steeled itself against attempts to push its policies in a more popular direction.
Within the ANC leadership there will be calls to shut the door on the SACP, by shielding policy-making even further from input by alliance partners (and even from key ANC structures themselves).
Moreover, like the ANC, the SACP is itself divided on these matters. Coursing through it are three broad currents.
Weaned on a diet of blunted political theory is a rump of largely unreconstructed “traditionalists” who are, in equal measure, angered and dumbfounded by the post-1994 drift of the ANC. Ascendant is a loose grouping of neo-Marxists (Cronin, Nzimande, SACP national organiser Langa Zita, and the National Union of Metal Workers’s Enoch Godongwana among them), who are keenly pursuing a strategic and organisational revival.
And there is a powerful array of “realists” (exemplified by Trade and Industry Minister Alec Erwin) who argue that global realities preclude an overtly popular path towards transformation, at least for now. Like the ebb and flow of the tides, it is not easy to discern where one ends and the other begins.
Complicating matters is a lack of unanimity over continuing the alliance in its current form. Provisionally, the consensus is to redefine the party “in the context of an ANC-led alliance”. But as the SACP’s 1996 document admitted, “there is a debate in our party about the wisdom of this”.
So, the challenges thrown to the ANC inevitably will also cause shudders within the SACP.
All of which is to the good. Not simply because, like regular exercise, “debate is healthy”. But because this intervention might help distil from the mush of enforced consensus and muted disquiet the rapidly crystallising pockets of interests and ideological difference within the ANC, particularly, and the alliance, broadly.
Exactly where it’s supposed to lead is unclear. A split is not on the cards, but the recasting of the terms of the alliance might well be. One attractive option would be a push to create platforms within the ANC, along the lines of Brazil’s Workers’ Party, in order to enable the clear expression and pursuit of divergent interests. For an organisation as ideologically elastic as the ANC this poses no threat of implosion. Rather it could place the organisation on a more genuinely democratic footing.
Whatever the outcome, Nzimande and Cronin have taken the plunge and said outright what many have long known: that corralling divergent interests under the canopy of coerced unity threatens South Africa’s transformation, and that, trite as it sounds, a struggle does continue.
Journalist and researcher Hein Marais’s book, South Africa: The Political-Economy of Transformation, is being published soon by Zed Books