Is Jeremy Cronin a coward? No, but his craven recent apology to the African National Congress for mildly raising a few of its shortcomings, together with the South African Communist Party’s sullen acceptance of his retreat, exposes the cowardliness of the political Left — and its undemocratic instincts.
The Cronin affair demonstrates that the Left has not grasped the importance of protecting the features of democratic practice that are enshrined in our Constitution — free expression being one of the most key.
What is clearly not understood is that the Constitution not only sets a broad social democratic agenda — by which we can all legitimately measure the performance of every political party — but also, crucially, defines the means by which we are enjoined to achieve those goals.
The Left has not internalised the vital importance of those means to attaining sustainable social development. We are not going to have a proletarian dictatorship — nor should we have — as Cronin candidly admits in his controversial interview. A government built on the political instincts of SACP general secretary Blade Nzimande would be as bad or even worse than the one Thabo Mbeki is trying to construct in his own image.
But if Cronin realised the importance of the means to political ends — the fact that the means in the end determine the trajectory of outcomes — then he would not have apologised.
Instead he and the SACP have bowed to the God of democratic centralism, they have genuflected before the myth of the Liberation Movement.
The ANC — or the alliance — is still fetished as the mythical embodiment of the democratic project.
It is not. It is a political movement, like any other, and is prone to the same corrupting influences of power that beset any political organisation.
What Cronin and the Left ignore, is that we have a competing framework for defining political legitimacy, which exists outside the increasingly authoritarian confines of the alliance. It is our Constitution, of course.
Analysts sympathetic to the ANC still focus on the culture of the ANC historically, and whether particular actions and policies can be defended on the terms of the so-called National Democratic Revolution and its dead prophets — rather than on whether the actions and policies pass muster under the Constitution.
It is significant that Mbeki, in his most recent letter in ANC Today devoted to the Cronin saga, made reference to a sermon delivered by Oliver Tambo in 1980 — at the height of the apartheid era, when the banned ANC was beset by hit squads and other dirty tricks — as a text to justify his immolation of Cronin for daring to be critical outside private boundaries of the organisation’s own structures.
What our Constitution does require is political honesty — a point that may be granted to Mbeki. But that is not the same as the demand Mbeki makes for organisational discipline above all else.
The internal “honesty” he demands is entirely disingenuous. What he asks is for national political debate to take place only in circumstances — such as within the national executive committee — where he almost entirely dominates the terrain.
Mbeki says no organisation can survive the anarchy of members taking opposing positions outside the framework of its own internal deliberations. This is a gross exaggeration.
On the contrary, the open expression of competing tendencies within the ANC would be good for the organisation. It would force the party to decide whether it truly can and wants to be a broad church where the competing demands of our fractious nation are shepherded broadly according to the principles contained in our Constitution — or whether the Grail of National Democratic Revolution is exposed as being dominated by much narrower personal, racial and class agendas whose undue influence would be better balanced through open opposition at the ballot box.
But the Left still wants to fight its battles the old way. Behind closed doors and false smiles. In smoke-filled rooms, with strategies that are kept secret until the necessary critical conditions have been created for them suddenly to be unfurled and the former hero of the revolution (his excellency, comrade President TM Mbeki) to be led away in disgrace.
It is on this basis that many on the Left defend Cronin’s benighted apology as “strategic”, as designed to remove the sting of his critical comments as a potential stick with which to beat the Left at the upcoming ANC national conference.
Such rationalisations might at least make some sense if the Left really had any strategy at all for the conference — other than to cling to whatever diminishing influence it can retain.
But even if there were a tremendous revolution brewing that bursts triumphantly to life on the conference floor in December — if so, I will eat my Made-in-China Congress of South African Trade Unions hat — we will be no better off.
Such approaches are dangerous fantasies that rely on a conception of power (some kind of peoples’ vanguardism) that falls outside the framework of our Constitution and that only legitimises accusations of plots by the “ultra Left”. They are plans that, like the other dominant strands within the ANC, exist inside the framework of hegemony — a model that is fundamentally at odds with our constitutional pluralism.
There is almost a sense that, for many in the alliance, the Constitution is a necessary stage — a fig leaf that will be cast off when it becomes too much of a barrier to the virile propagation of the glorious National Democratic Revolution.
So the Left clings to the alliance and to the fantasy that, as Cronin expresses it, they are partially in power on the coat-tails of the ANC.
In doing so, Cronin shows little insight into the nature of the political struggle within the ANC itself.
He seems to think that the loss of ground by the Left to a more conservative African nationalist grouping within the ANC has been a matter not of power struggles, but of a failure of the Left to pay sufficient attention to policy detail.
As a Marxist, one would expect Cronin to be alive to the possibility that the privileging of black empowerment over poverty relief, the shift to an alliance with a black capitalist class that owes its rise directly to the patronage of the government, is not a matter of mechanical policy — is not a matter of the influence of the World Bank or other left-wing bogeys on a hapless ANC that needs to be rescued from this path by better policy input from Cronin and other communists.
No, it is a political decision — linked directly to the political destiny of Mbeki — as was the shift from the Reconstruction and Development Programme to the growth, employment and redistribution strategy — that calculatedly drew on international power relations and processes to help shift the balance of domestic power.
If Cronin and others don’t like it, it requires a corresponding political response, not a tinkering with the details of some departmental White Paper.
For a Marxist, Cronin betrays a rather vague understanding of cause and effect. But then, as he admits in his interview, he would be “one of the last to notice that the ANC has absolutely and effectively sold out and that what we should have done is to move out long ago and broken the alliance”.
The “Zanufication” of the ANC is not about whether this government would allow land invasions. It’s about the road to hell being paved with good intentions pursued via undemocratic short cuts.
Only when the Left (and the Democratic Alliance, for that matter) accept that the Constitution legitimately and necessarily promotes both the basic rights and aspirations of the poor and those of the privileged, will we begin to develop a new politics.