A communist party politburo discussion document titled “Defend the Unity of our Alliance, Defend Democratic Debate” raises the fear that the ANC is stifling political discussion
The African National Congress’s Briefing Notes on the Alliance is now in wide circulation. In principle, the South African Communist Party welcomes any attempt to foster debate within the ANC. The document affirms the importance of our alliance, and it commits the ANC to engaging in a series of alliance meetings to deepen our shared strategic perspectives.
However, these potentially positive features are in danger of being overwhelmed by other features of the document that could lead to exactly opposite outcomes to the discouraging of debate for fear of being labelled, to a closing of ranks in the face of an exaggerated anti-ANC “left tendency” and even to witch-hunts.
The danger is that divisions may be deepened within the alliance, and within the ANC itself. In our engagement with the document, the SACP is determined to do nothing to exacerbate these potential dangers.
The ANC is a unitary organisation, permitting no organised factions within it. But it has always been a movement spanning diverse, progressive political viewpoints.
Few political organisations have survived for 90 years. Still fewer have come through three decades of exile without splitting into rival factions.
The history of the ANC is also remarkable for the incredibly few expulsions that have happened. The latest ANC briefing document runs the risk of short-changing this proud history. It writes: “Historically, the Congress movement has never [before] experienced a ‘left’ rebellion from within its ranks … threats to its unity have arisen from those who opposed its policies from the right, focusing particularly on the non-racial positions of the movement and its alliance with the SACP.”
Certainly, over the decades the ANC has seen conservative and narrow nationalist tendencies within its ranks. Progressive ANC president Josiah Gumede, who was favourably disposed towards the communist party, was displaced in 1930 by a backlash from conservatives and chiefs within the movement.
In the late 1950s Africanist forces attempted to take over the ANC, using narrow nationalist and anti-party rhetoric. They failed, and launched the Pan Africanist Congress in 1959.
In exile the group of eight disgruntled ANC leaders around Tennyson Makiwane sought to challenge the decision of the 1969 Morogoro conference to open up leadership ranks to non-Africans. The group was expelled in 1975 for factionalism.
Since the late 1920s the most effective socialist current within South Africa (represented by the SACP) has been strategically aligned with, and committed to building the ANC. But there have always been other left currents, and some of them have been non-, or even anti-ANC in orientation.
In the second half of the 1970s, the most significant non-ANC left emerged within the trade unions. This current, which was described as “workerist” in the 1980s, argued forcefully against any alignment of the Federation of South African Trade Unions and later of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) with the ANC alliance. The workerists argued for an independent workers’ party rooted in the labour movement.
At the SACP’s sixth Congress in exile in 1985 the growing strength of this workerist tendency at home was identified. It was agreed that, as part of a strategic response, the SACP needed to enhance its own independent socialist profile in the mass democratic and workers’ movement.
SACP underground work and recruitment in Cosatu was greatly intensified. In recent weeks some ANC comrades have criticised SACP/ Cosatu bilaterals, as if there were something sinister about them, and as if they were a recent development. There were regular underground bilateral contacts between the SACP and Cosatu long before the party’s unbanning in February 1990.
This SACP work contributed to ensuring that a pro-socialist, but also pro-ANC alliance orientation was consolidated as the hegemonic tendency within Cosatu.
The congress perspective became (and remains) the overwhelmingly dominant tendency in Cosatu.
It is in this regard that the ANC briefing document is especially disappointing. It adopts positions that are liable to enhance the influence of anti-ANC forces in the trade unions and mass movement in general. The document does this in several ways:
It portrays the Cosatu-led August strike against privatisation policies as a “general strike … against the ANC government”. But Cosatu (and the SACP in supporting the strike) were at pains to insist that this was not a strike against government, but against aspects of government policy. The minority ultra-left tendency may have harboured other aspirations for the strike. It is disappointing that the ANC document gives credence to these aspirations as if the estimated 40% of the South African working class that went on the strike wanted to remove the ANC government;
By so doing the document side-steps the real issues that have to be confronted. We can’t pretend that all of the restructuring has gone well (whether in the Post Office, Sun Air, Umgeni Water or South African Airways). The ANC and the alliance need to debate, to act as a sounding board for, and to provide leadership to our people. The document declines to do this, by evoking the spectre of a left conspiracy. “We can go into … detail” about government restructuring policy, it argues, “but it will not help because there is more to the problem.”
The document does the same thing with macro-economic policy. Again, we might concede that the growth, employment and redistribution strategy (Gear) has helped achieve macro stability and helped South Africa survive global economic turbulence. But we can’t pretend that Gear has met its growth and especially employment targets. Once more, ongoing comradely debate and assessment is required. Once more the briefing document declines to move in this direction. “We can go into detail and even conclude that we are in fact in a post-Gear period. But this will not help because,” the document argues, “there is much more than meets the eye in the current tensions.”
Perhaps the most unfortunate feature of the briefing document is that, in conjuring up the spectre of an anti-ANC tendency within the alliance, it is never very precise about where this tendency begins and ends.
There is a very real danger that, without effective leadership and clarification, the ANC briefing notes will play straight into the hands of the ultra-left. “We always told you so,” they will argue. “After independence national liberation movements turn on the working class. Debate is bureaucratically suppressed, and workers’ real concerns are portrayed as counter-revolutionary.”
Through our alliance conduct in the coming months let us prove this ultra-left argument absolutely wrong.
This document has been edited for length. The full text is available at www.mg.co.za/mg/011106-sacp.html