The South African Communist Party is discussing fielding candidates under its own banner in next year’s election.
The issue will be debated at the SACP’s central committee meeting this weekend, as part of its plans to assert its independence from the African National Congress. Earlier this year the party set up its own youth wing and launched a political education institute, in conjunction with the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu).
The election debate has been rekindled by an internal document called Towards an SACP and Working-Class Mid-Term Vision, which tries to define the ”fundamental goal” of the SACP in the next decade.
Analysing the party’s relationship with ”political, economic and mass power in society and its influence and impact on these”, the document refers to the question of fielding candidates under its own banner.
Party officials in provinces have reacted positively to sending members to Parliament under communist colours, and the document mentions that ”some of our comrades have correctly posed this question, including at the 11th Congress”.
However, it takes a non-committal line. ”The issue of elections merely expresses a form and only a part of a fundamental question we need to pose. The fundamental question is building working class power and its impact in society.”
A senior SACP member said: ”It is high time we started acting on fielding our own people. We have failed the fight against privatisation; the neo-liberals are taking political control. We have to act now.”
SACP spokesperson Mazibuko Jara said: ”It is an important debate taking place in the SACP. It is important that the alliance as a whole contribute to the debates about the influence of the working class in the transformation of the society.”
Dealing with the SACP’s approach to the 2004 election, the document notes ”that the related questions of the attitude of the ANC towards socialism in the current period, and the [communist] party’s conception of a transition to socialism have emerged.
”These questions have come to define and set parameters for some of the bilateral and tripartite engagements, particularly between the ANC and the SACP. In concrete terms, beyond interventions in the labour market and aspects of the social wage, the state has been unable to lead a decisive intervention to transform the current accumulation regime.”
It says that the government’s growth, employment and redistribution strategy has reinforced some of the elements of this ”accumulation regime — reinforcing global competitiveness, but without this regime being able to tackle unemployment and job creation”.
A senior SACP official said the party was not seeking to break away from the alliance. But it did want to assert the interests of working people, carve a political niche for itself and ensure that the ANC retained a working class bias.
The SACP debate closely follows the publication of Cosatu’s plan for workers to take control of the ruling ”tripartite alliance” and the ANC. The draft plan, called Programme for 2015, will be debated at the federation’s eighth national congress, due next month.
It is understood that ANC leaders are worried about the reassertion of a working-class perspective within the alliance. Addressing the Joe Slovo Memorial Seminar earlier this year, the ANC’s chief strategist, Joel Netshitentzhe, said certain ANC leaders feared a working-class takeover of the government, and that there was an attempt to force the ANC into socialism.
In recent years, the alliance partners have repeatedly debated the question of which class should be the ”motive force” of change.
The ANC conference in Stellenbosch last December agreed that the working class should be regarded as only one of the ”motive forces”. An SACP official said this was a ”clear indication of where the ANC could be headed politically — so we have no choice but to start thinking about our future”.
Several ANC leaders, including President Thabo Mbeki, publicly attacked leaders of the SACP and Cosatu for undermining the ANC-led government last year.
The SACP discussion document says: ”A substantially larger SACP, with significant presence and influence and impact in key sites of power, has important implications for the SACP, including fundraising and financial sustainability, and the political, organisational and ideological capacity of all our structures.”
The document spells out plans to build SACP workplace structures while underlining the ”interdependence between the labour movement and the struggle for socialism”.
It says Cosatu and the SACP ”also agree that the relationship between socialism and the labour movement is a crucial lever and basis for deepening the national democratic revolution”.
However, the document also talks about maintaining a distinction between SACP and trade union structures in the workplace.
The SACP will also be seeking to recruit workers outside Cosatu. Each district is required to launch and sustain at least one ”industrial unit” —comprising several workplace structures — for the year 2003, while the party will also establish joint structures with Cosatu at district level.