Dale T McKinley
Right to Reply
Up here on the seventh floor of Cosatu House, in the rarefied air of the “glorious vanguard of our working class” (aka the South African Communist Party head office), we’ve been wondering for some time about the exact nature of Howard Barrell’s 20/20 vision. It would seem that when it comes to the SACP, Barrell’s vision becomes extremely distorted, either voluntarily or by a consistent tendency to be selective with the facts.
In his latest application of this skewed vision (Over a Barrel, July 16 to 22), Barrell confidently claims that the SACP has been “conspicuous … only for its relative silence”, on the matter of the international gold sales and accompanying job losses.
To put it mildly, that’s nonsense. The SACP was the first political organisation in South Africa to issue a public statement on the matter. Long before the bandwagon debate began, the SACP addressed the issue of International Monetary Fund gold sales in its May Day Statement as well as in numerous May Day rallies held across the country.
Our warning, which preceded the gold sale moves by the Bank of England by several weeks, was clear. For the benefit of Barrell and the Mail & Guardian (whose vision obviously didn’t encompass any coverage of our statement), let me quote the most relevant sections: “The sudden sale of millions of ounces of gold will hit the gold price dramatically. Marginal mines in South Africa (and in other parts of the world) might be closed. There will be mass retrenchments in an industry … already devastated … It is a convenient short cut for the big Western capitalists … they are once more forcing Third World countries (in this case, gold-producing countries like South Africa) to act as shock absorbers. The SACP calls on the South African government to take an even firmer stand … on all countries of our region and on working class and progressive forces around the world to join us in opposing this cynical short cut …”
Long before Barrell penned his supposedly informed column the SACP had issued another public statement on the job-loss crisis as well as two addresses, given by our general secretary, Blade Nzimande, to the National Congress of the Communication Workers Union and the South African Commercial and Catering Workers Union respectively. In these public interventions, the SACP issued a clear call for an immediate moratorium on retrenchments and unilateral restructuring. Additionally, the SACP called for the convening of sectoral job summits and the implementation of other summit resolutions designed to develop coherent (not ad hoc) strategies for job retention and asset restructuring. We also made proposals about negotiation processes between workers and employers, developing industrial policy for key sectors of the economy, and provided in-depth analyses of factors behind the gold-sales and job-loss crises.
All of these very public interventions, which were covered by other sections of the press and sparked substantive discussion within South Africa’s political “world’, were provided to the M&G. How, we would like to know, does this square with Barrell’s sardonic comment that the SACP has exhibited a “diffidence” that indicates “a new-found wisdom … or a view that obscurity may be the better part of valour … or whether, as I suspect, the SACP just doesn’t know its contradiction from its dialectic anymore”?
We suspect Barrell either didn’t bother to do his homework or had already made up his mind to attack the SACP regardless of the reality. Whichever it was, for Barrell to present his distorted vision as informed fact is a great deal more disingenuous than the legitimate responses of those most affected by the capitalist game-playing that has sparked the crises at hand.
Barrell’s concoction of a one-sided version of the SACP’s supposed “silence” fits in nicely with his silly claim that the SACP and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu)”risk making fools of themselves” if “they suddenly … denounce the government they have worked so hard to have elected”. Besides the fact that the African National Congress/SACP/Cosatu political alliance has been at the forefront of much of what is positive about South Africa’s democratic transition, both the SACP and Cosatu have not been shy to oppose government policy when it has impacted negatively on their constituencies.
Whether or not the outcome of such opposition has had, or is now having, the desired effect is a continuing source of debate within both organisations, and will continue to inform the strategic and tactical “battles” that lie ahead. However, this is quite different from positing a false benchmark of “denunciation” for gauging the political bona fides of either the SACP or Cosatu. Do we have to adopt the knee-jerk opposition antics of the Democratic Party to graduate from the Barrell school of denunciation?
The next time Barrell sets his journalistic sights on the SACP, we would suggest that he expand his focus to include those he seems so ready to pillory. We would probably have better “discussions” than you might think, Howard. We actually like ex-Marxists – they tend to confirm our belief that reality is both stranger and stronger than fiction.