Senior communist Jeremy Cronin — accused this week of lying about the African National Congress in a controversial interview — was in fact defending the ruling alliance and disputing the far-left view that South Africa is inexorably sliding towards tragedy.
The interview was given to Irish Marxist academic and anti-apartheid campaigner Helena Sheehan in January. Not intended for publication, it was posted on Sheehan’s website.
Selective quotations from it, including Cronin’s reference to the ”bureaucratisation of the struggle”, prompted an extraordinary attack by ANC spokesperson Smuts Ngonyama at a press conference on Monday.
Alluding to Cronin’s membership of the ANC’s national executive committee (NEC), Ngonyama called him ”a frustrated individual” and accused him of being ”unfaithful” and ”spreading lies”.
Cronin has declined to comment.
At the heart of the interview is Cronin’s rebuttal of Canadian leftist John Sauls, who in an article, ”Cry the Beloved Country”, suggests that an increasingly Stalinist ANC has ”betrayed the revolution” and that the Left should go it alone.
Cronin describes Sauls’s thesis as ”irritating, demoralising and demobilising”, and pours scorn on the idea that the left-wing project should be relocated in NGOs and ”a bit” in the trade unions.
”It starts to look depressingly like the Left in North America,” Cronin says.
He argues that it is wrong to see a tragic unfolding of the inevitable in South Africa, because there is still scope for challenges to policy within the ruling alliance and because ”the neo-liberal agenda is losing wheels and direction globally”.
”Naturally I’m going to be one of the last to notice that the ANC has absolutely and effectively sold out.”
Asked why the South African Communist Party has abandoned the policy of ”expropriating the expropriators”, Cronin underscores the SACP’s ”multi-class” strategy since 1928.
”The right emphasis was less about confiscation, but about coaxing, disciplining and persuading the significant private sector to be part and parcel of a major restructuring of their economy, in their own interests. Otherwise there was no sustainable future for capitalism in South Africa.”
And while referring to a ”Zanu- fication” tendency in the ANC, he also points to differences between the parties. These include independent centres of influence — like businessman Cyril Ramaphosa — within the broad ANC movement.
The interview opens a fascinating window on the intense pressures on the Left in the alliance, particularly after last year’s anti-privatisation strike. Cronin concedes the Left has been ”bullied” and that in the NEC, he and SACP colleague Blade Nzimande have been ”marginalised, shouted down, subjected to heavy presidential attacks, beginning with [Nelson] Mandela”.
”We’ve stood our ground, but it’s been hard.”
The privatisation strike had sparked ”deep anger from quarters, presidential quarters, within the ANC”. It was seen as an ”opportunity … to maybe deal a very decisive blow of the kind that the [British] Labour Party dealt at the time of the miners’ strike”.
Cronin insists that last year’s ANC briefing document, which accused communist and union leaders of a counter-revolutionary plot, was not endorsed by the NEC, though it was released in its name.
He suggests the ANC right, and the union ultra-left, used the plot claims to sabotage engagement in the alliance.
”Frankly, some of the worst elements in the ANC were being unleashed … to heighten things and to allege … a hard-nosed conspiracy to overthrow the ANC leadership, the kind of things that preceded right-wing coups in Iraq, Syria and Sudan”.
Cronin suggests that the crisis has passed, at least temporarily.
The reaction of ordinary members of the alliance to the document had been, ”Don’t break the alliance; don’t play games”. The result was a ”a preparedness, grudging in some cases, to listen to some of the concerns being raised”.
Cronin indeed finds a tendency in the ANC to ”bureaucratise” struggle: ”Now we are in power on your behalf. Relax and we’ll deliver. Mass mobilisation gets in the way.”
He suggests this has roots in the remoteness of exile leaders from South Africa’s internal ferment of the 1980s, and the ANC’s misguided belief in guerrilla warfare à la Vietnam or Cuba, when the real battlefront was in the factories, mine compounds, media, churches, civic groups and schools.
He isolates three approaches to mass mobilisation in the pre-1994 negotiations period: ”don’t rock the boat”; the ”tap” to be turned on and off strategically; and the ”Leipzig option”, talks buttressed by mass pressure.
The first was favoured by elements still powerful in the leadership.
His analysis seems intended as a warning, rather than an attack on ANC leaders.
”Those [popular] energies are still present. They’ve been dispersed. They’re confused. Often they get suppressed by the very forces they aligned themselves with originally, the broad ANC … but they bubble through.
”There are levels of disorganisation, demobilisation, disappointment, demoralisation. I personally don’t think it’s all played out at all.”
The interview reveals Cronin’s scepticism about President Thabo Mbeki’s African renaissance, which he concedes is hard to voice as a white ANC member without sounding Afro-pessimistic.
He argues that it is better to talk about the South than Africa only, because ”it is a structural, not continental issue.”
”It’s an escape from a South African renaissance … from the contradictions and difficulties of the present,” he says. ”It is presented as Africa’s century because … every other continent has had its turn, as if there is some kind of divine justice, some kind of divine eye that is seeing a queue.”