This month the South African Communist Party celebrates its 80th anniversary. Two SACP leaders and a political analyst examine the party’s past and the history of communism
Tom Lodge
History shows us that communist parties can thrive in liberal social democracies. Before World War II, the most formidable communist party in Eastern Europe was in Czechoslovakia, a reflection of that country’s level of industrialisation, strong trade unions and a relatively developed welfare state.
In freely contested elections in 1946, in the aftermath of German occupation and liberation by the Red Army, the Czech Communist Party won 38% of the votes, giving it a powerful presence in a coalition government. Here communists had genuine prospects of winning power through the ballot box as well as working-class, factory-based activism. Instead, though, a Stalinist leadership opted to use their control of the police and the Ministry of Interior to impose a tyrannical “people’s democracy” in 1948.
More widely, post-war democratic Europe appeared to offer communists favourable opportunities for non-revolutionary progress to socialism. The French and Italian parties could build on the prestige accumulated through their heroic role in anti-Nazi resistance movements.
Italian communists were to draw upon the intellectual legacy of Antonio Gramsci, who in the 1920s had argued in favour of a “war of position” in which communists would work with other forces in “civil society”, engaging with the parliamentary system (so despised by Lenin) to challenge the ideological “hegemony” of the capitalist governing class. By the 1970s Italian communists, reacting to the Soviet suppression of efforts to liberalise the Czech Communist Party under Alexander Dubcek as well as to social changes that accompanied the decline of traditional heavy industry, announced a new doctrine of democratic “Eurocommunism”. Enjoying the support of one-third of the electorate, the Italian Communist Party began to democratise its own internal life.
In Britain, compared to its continental counterparts, the Communist Party never achieved a similar degree of influence over trade unions in Britain, after all, the deepest intellectual roots of working class organisation were in non-conformist protestantism rather than revolutionary socialism. So communists repeatedly (and unsuccessfully) sought influence via electoral alliances with the Labour Party.
After Labour prohibited membership of both parties affecting several councillors and MPs communists tried to influence Labour through “entrism”, that is, discreet infiltration.
From 1945 electoral victory for Labour and its own success in winning two parliamentary seats prompted the Communist Party of Great Britain to elaborate its own “parliamentary road” to socialism. This envisaged the party slowly building elected representation to the point at which it might present itself as an attractive coalition partner for Labour in the event of a hung Parliament. But after 1950 it never regained parliamentary representation and by the 1970s its membership had declined to 18 000.
Where they were most successful, in Italy and France, parliamentary communists looked less and less like revolutionaries. This was hardly surprising in a context that afforded both prosperity and social mobility to the social group which they sought to represent, the industrial working class. In general, working classes at best played bit parts in the great 20th-century revolutions; contrary to Marx’s predictions, agrarian oppression and the decay of pre-industrial bureaucracies provided much more encouraging environments for radical social revolutions than the citadels of advanced capitalism.
In certain respects, South African communists find themselves in a situation comparable to that of the stronger European parties in the aftermath of World War II.
Through their alliance with a dominant national liberation movement and their own contribution to its leadership, ostensibly at least, they may seem to command popularity and influence. Sixty-five communists sit in Parliament as African National Congress members, six belong to President Thabo Mbeki’s Cabinet and many more hold electoral office in provincial and local government. In Gauteng, for example, seven out of 10 MECs are believed to be party members. If the South African Communist Party contested elections by itself it would probably win considerably fewer seats than its members hold at present but it might all the same represent a significant force (especially if it enjoyed trade union backing).
But its real resemblance to the more liberal post-war Eurocommunist parties may be in its diminishing commitment to old-fashioned revolutionary socialism or indeed socialism of any kind notwithstanding the SACP’s base in a traditional industrial working class. To an extent this is the consequence of involvement in a non-socialist government.
Communists can and do defend participation in government by pointing to its reformist achievements the expansion of welfare entitlements, for example, or the improvement of employment conditions, or even, less convincingly, the pursuit of a “left agenda” by Minister of Public Enterprises Jeff Radebe. In such fields, the contribution of communist legislators and ministers has sometimes been decisive.
As often as not, though, communist Cabinet members as well as parliamentarians find themselves at odds with their party as well as with the trade unions. And can communist MPs really feel comfortable defending arms procurements that divert resources from poverty alleviation or protecting the beneficiaries of bribery by munitions contractors?
Do communists sincerely believe today that the government’s housing programme or the crony capitalism represented by black empowerment signifies a “transformation of power relations in the market” (a phrase used by an optimistic Jeremy Cronin, SACP assistant general secretary, in 1994)? How persuasively can a party undertake its mission “to speak out on behalf of the working class and the poor in particular” while at the same time embracing what it terms a “patriotic bourgeoisie” (whose members it includes in its own leadership)?
Party justifications for its presence in government are understandably defensive. “Comrades in management positions” have as their main “immediate revolutionary” duty to make sure that public funds are “effectively managed”. They should also help to isolate and restrain any “counter-revolutionary forces still in our midst”. In other words, the socialist project is a holding operation: communists are in power to ensure good government and to keep out reactionaries. It’s probably more than communists anywhere else in the world can claim.
That’s really the main difference between the present situation of South African communists and any historical antecedents. In the brave new world of post-war Europe, communists could base their hopes on an expanding socialist state system as well as genuine social progress within it. Today local parliamentary socialists can draw cold comfort from geriatric Bolshevik dynasties in Cuba and Korea and a Chinese political autocracy that sanctions truly gross kinds of capitalist exploitation. Without an historically informed sense of destiny, communism loses its point.
Professor Tom Lodge heads the political studies department at the University of the Witwatersrand
@We must turn the tide against capitalist barbarism
Blade Nzimande
The struggle of South Africa’s working class for socialism is integrally connected to deepening the national democratic revolution.
The struggle to build socialism is not just an ideal located in some distant future. We seek to build capacity for socialism, momentum towards socialism, and elements of socialism, here and now, as part of the current struggles to consolidate our democracy. The struggle for free basic services, for instance, is a concrete site to build elements of socialism now.
But in order to do this, the working class and its organisations should not retreat into themselves, nor just be satisfied by leading themselves, as the ultra-left argues. Rather it should seek to lead society as the majority stands to gain from the destruction of capitalist barbarism.
Our task is to educate the mass of our people about socialism, which, we are convinced, is in their deepest interests. This is the role the South African Communist Party has fostered in working together with the African National Congress, trade unions and other mass movements since 1921 and it is a role we seek to play in the immediate and longer term.
As we celebrate the 80th anniversary of the SACP, we are now witnessing the waning of neo-liberal triumphalism of the early 1990s as the reality of global inequalities cannot be swept under the carpet. For instance, 80 more countries are poorer at the end of the 1990s than they were at the beginning of the 1990s.
About half the world’s population does not have access to clean drinking water. Furthermore, according to a report released in June 2000 by the International Labour Organisation, capitalist globalisation has led to job losses and increasing poverty for people in developing countries.
The report also states:
l A quarter of the world’s population of six billion lives on less than $1 a day.
l During the past five years the world’s poor have increased by 200-million.
l More than 40% of the population of Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia live in poverty and this proportion is rising.
l Of the world’s 150-million unemployed, no more than a quarter has some unemployment benefit.
In our own country we have seen the deepening of class, race and gender inequalities, despite some important achievements by our government.
Those who declared the fall of the Soviet Union as the end of history are being rudely awakened to the fact that the early 1990s were not the end of history, but the beginning of a new chapter in human history.
The struggles in Seattle, Prague, London and in many localities in the developing world by ordinary people are a reflection of this renewed human effort towards alternatives better able to meet the aspirations of ordinary working and poor people.
The message is simple: capitalism is no solution to problems facing humanity today. In short, the best organiser for a socialist future is the current inherent inequalities of capitalism. Our tasks are to ensure that we effectively insert a socialist agenda into these struggles, that we consistently take up issues affecting ordinary people, forge alliances with progressive mass formations, rebuild militant labour movements and forge international solidarity through concrete action.
And thus the SACP calls for an international left platform based on, among other things, struggles for the defence and extension of the public sector; the eradication of poverty on the African continent; the elimination of gender- and racially-based inequalities; access to affordable medicines and targeting of the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation, the World Bank, their meetings and policies. We are confident that it is these struggles that will turn the tide against capitalist barbarism.
In our context, the contradiction of transforming the apartheid order in view of the deepening capitalist character of the national and international conjunctures have sharpened the centrality of economic transformation in deepening our revolution. And thus the SACP calls for the building of a people’s economy, which seeks, in the first instance, to challenge the logic of the capitalist market while simultaneously building elements of and momentum towards socialism.
A people’s economy places the eradication of poverty at the centre of economic restructuring. It seeks to strengthen the role of the state in directing major economic resources towards meeting the basic needs of our people. It challenges the dominance of the capitalist market in the allocation of resources. And it intensifies our ideological challenge to, and critique of, neo-liberalism.
Current struggles around the financial sector, restructuring of state assets and land transformation are part of building a people’s economy from a working class perspective.
This entails the working class building its organisations, including the ANC, SACP, Congress of South African Trade Unions, civics and other mass organisations based on a working class programme. In this way the working class will go a long way to put its imprint on the content, direction and trajectory of our national democratic revolution.
The role and future of the SACP and the struggle for socialism must be understood within this context.
We shall seek permission from no one to struggle for socialism other than from the working class itself.
Blade Nzimande is general secretary of the SACP