Communists in South Africa have started a passionate debate with religious leaders, writes Vishwas Satgar
‘ALL things solid melt into thin air.” Applying this Marxist nomenclature to the South African Communist Party (SACP) reveals a political organisation grappling with the oldest left-wing political legacy in South Africa and Africa.
The SACP is on a path-breaking historical journey. Enabling this is the collapse of the authoritarian, bureaucratic socialism of the former Soviet Union, and the emergence of a democratic order in South Africa.
Essentially the SACP today is fundamentally rethinking Marxist politics, thus ensuring a disengagement from – a ”melting” of – Soviet orthodoxy. It is trying to forge an original, South African path to socialism, which is humane, tolerant and self-critical, and rooted in the democratic order.
Nonetheless, the SACP is still an outsider in the new South Africa. It is still construed as an ”insurgent voice” rather than a democratically acceptable political formation within a pluralist political system.
To a large extent the political vilification and demonisation of the SACP, during the days of apartheid still prevails in the political imagination and the minds of the mass media. It is perceived to be undemocratic in its political ambitions, anti-religious and the harbinger of some kind of foreign agenda.
Despite the rooi gevaar mentality of the media, the SACP has been ”melting” in the real world. For discerning political observers it is apparent the SACP is still one of the fastest growing communist parties in the world. It has among its members at least four Cabinet ministers, over 80 MPs, about two premiers, and numerous provincial MECs and members of provincial parliaments and local government.
They continue to play a pivotal role in the realisation of democracy in South Africa, in which individual liberties are protected and political opposition (including the semi- moribund National Party) have continued to exist unharassed or politically unintimidated.
Further contributing to the ”melting” of the rooi gevaar was a recent inter-faith seminar, hosted by the SACP, with representatives of the religious community. This event marked the turning point of an ideological re-reading of Karl Marx that began about five years ago.
At this time, one of the main theoretical contributions was by Charles Villa-Vicencio (a professor of religion at the University of Cape Town), and the other by the late Joe Slovo. It was Villa-Vicencio’s theoretical interrogation and reading of the Marxist maxim, ”religion is the opium of the people” that largely contributed to a more broad- minded understanding of religion.
Not only did he contextualise this crude rejection by the youthful Marx as an opposition to the oppressive and illusory role religion played within capitalist development, but at the same time pointed to a more developed criticism by Marx, which picked up on the potential for liberation within religion. He recognised that Marx was willing to contemplate an ideological role for religion as a protest against suffering.
Picking up on this ideological breakthrough was Joe Slovo, who found religion and socialism shared core values like co- operation, human equality, sharing and liberating hope. At the kernel of this was an understanding that a Christian could be a socialist, and an atheist in theory can be akin to a Jesus in practice.
Digesting this newfound ideological conception of religion, the SACP has ventured into the ”new” South Africa without any dogmatic prescription about religious affiliation or spiritual disposition. Reflecting this ideological stance was Charles Nqakula, general secretary of the SACP, who, in his opening comments of the inter-faith seminar, explicitly asserted, ”the SACP is not anti-religious”.
Participants from the different faiths shocked their radical hosts by critically asserting that ”free-market” globalising capitalism was not an alternative for humanity.
Stiaan van der Merwe, a Christian liberation theologian, pointed out how Christian fundamentalism buttressed the apartheid state, while progressive Christians confronted the truth or ”Kairos” of apartheid South Africa and aligned themselves with the struggle of the oppressed and exploited.
On the failure of Soviet socialism, Chief Rabbi Cyril Harris raised the question: ”Do we make capitalism more compassionate or do we make communism work?”
Swami Agnivesh asserted the need for an anti-imperialist alternative that not only meant changes to socio-economic structures, but also the development of a ”revolutionary” practice anchored within the poorest of the poor and guided by a non- dogmatic socialist spirituality yoked to the pursuit of truth.
All participants made a call for a paradigm shift so that humanity was placed at the centre of social change and development. In a South African sense, the religious leaders were speaking about the need to have a morality and moral leadership, which recognises that crime as well as poverty denigrates the human condition.
At the end of this seminar, Philip Dexter, the SACP respondent, realised he was not speaking to a right-wing religious fundamentalist panel. Besides disagreeing with the option of giving capitalism a more humane value system, Dexter motivated passionately for ongoing dialogue with progressives in the religious sector.
— Vishwas Satgar is a member of the national political education secretariat in the SACP. This article was written in his individual capacity