Jeremy Cronin (SACP deputy general secretary) and Blade Nzimande (SACP acting chair) reject Peter Mokabas proposal that the form of the ANC-SACP alliance be re- examined
Peter Mokabas view that South African Communist Party members should be ejected from the African National Congress (an organisation they have helped to build over 70 years) has excited some observers outside ANC ranks. The National Partys new leader Marthinus van Schalkwyk rushed to congratulate Mokaba. It is tempting to let Van Schalkwyks delight speak for itself, and to rest our case right there.
However, the views that Mokaba is punting, in two closely related papers (On Leadership and The National Question), need to be debated politically. The proposal to eject SACP members must be seen in the context of a broader agenda.
Mokaba is arguing unabashedly for the conversion of the ANC into a party of free market capitalism. The prospects for socialism are at best very dim or at worst no more, he writes. Therefore, the opportune choice is to embrace capitalism. He has to admit that capitalism itself has failed to deliver for the majority of the worlds poor.
But according to Mokaba the failures of capitalism have nothing to do with a system of production based on profit-seeking by a privileged few. Capitalist production, Mokaba argues, is fine. It is simply distribution and allocation that have been mismanaged. The minor problem with capitalism has been that markets are unable to read any signals from the poor and therefore fail to respond to them.
The 23-million who die of hunger each year in our capitalist-dominated world are, presumably, simply the victims of an optical deficiency in the market? Likewise, the super-exploitation of black workers in South Africa, pioneered by the mining houses, with the compound system, pass laws, and the racial organisation of production, was just mismanaged distribution?
Mokabas understanding of recent international developments is equally confused. His requiem for socialism is based on a narrow equation of socialism with the Soviet-style administrative command system. It ignores other socialist traditions. It ignores the dynamic renewal of socialist thinking going on publicly, under his own nose, in the ranks of the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the SACP.
Throughout Europe, and in significant parts of Asia and Latin America, electorates are rejecting the ravages of neo-liberalism, the very policy that Mokaba is advocating for us. Transforming the ANC into a party of black Thatcherites would not exactly be the height of global chic, as Mokaba seems to believe.
All of this can be excused on the grounds of confusion. Less innocent is his attempt to claim the mantle of a time-honoured ANC legacy for his capitalist project. He tells us, with great sleight of hand, that the Freedom Charter has always aimed to build a capitalist South Africa, and the 1969 ANC Morogoro Conference proclaimed a free market capitalist economy as its ultimate goal.
If the ANC and its programmes have not been avowedly socialist, they have certainly never been zealously capitalist. The ANC continues to affirm its bias to the poor, its commitment to a mixed economy, and to a state that plays an interventionist role in the economy.
If Mokaba were more honest with history, he would recognise the precedents for his agenda are not in the Freedom Charter nor Morogoro, but in the Sobukwe breakaway of the 1950s, in the Gang of Eight in the early 1970s. The cause of an aspirant black elite, and a discomfort with socialism and the undue left-wing influence of non- Africans are the hallmarks of this tendency.
But history aside, are we not living in a country that is dominated by capitalism? Yes, obviously. We have to transform our society as we find it, not dream of some distant second stage. But how do we overcome the terrible scourge of poverty and unemployment?
Mokaba talks about democratising capitalism. In the end, he reduces this to a single priority a process that builds the black section of the entrepreneurial class. At least Mokaba is honest here, but he is quite wrong to believe that giving a few black capitalists the chance also to exploit workers is going to be the dynamo for transformation.
For the SACP, if we are going to speak about democratising capitalism then it has to mean rolling back the empire of a purely profit-driven market. Democratising capitalism means, frankly, progressively abolishing it.
While recommending the expulsion of SACP members from the ANC (in order to remove opposition to his agenda), Mokaba nevertheless pays lip-service to the tripartite alliance, it must continue and grow even stronger. What makes him think 1,8-million Cosatu members would be interested in allying themselves with an ANC that had become a party of black bosses? Cosatu members will be interested to hear that the ANC, according to Mokaba, must confine its vision for the working class to upholding formal market rights (like equal pay for equal work). That, he says categorically, is where it stops.
Happily, Mokabas personal views fly in the face of all the official ANC conference discussion papers, and of the draft strategy and tactics document. They also contradict the resolutions of the recent Tripartite Alliance summit.
Mokaba is trying to place the ANC on a trajectory that coincides with Van Schalkwyks dream of a coalition government in 2004. In this dream, a largely white NP gets into bed with an ANC that now represents black capitalists. The two parties agree on economic policy, they simply represent different ethnic factions of the same ruling class.
Mokaba has the right to air his views. The delegates at the ANC national conference in December will have the right to air theirs. Dont hold your breath in anticipation, Van Schalkwyk.