Our Red October campaign is grounded in a long history of the South African Communist Party’s involvement in land and agrarian struggles since the 1920s. The state that emerged from the 1910 Union Act, embarked on one of the most systematic and brutal land dispossessions in colonial history.
This was achieved through the 1913 and 1936 Land Acts, culminating in the mass removals of black, particularly African, people through the apartheid Group Areas Act in the 1960s. This led to the situation where by 1994, 87% of the land was in the hands of the white minority, and only 13% of the land in the hands of the black majority.
Our national liberation shall remain incomplete until the land question is fully addressed in favour of the overwhelming majority of our people, principally the workers, the poor and the landless rural masses. Without the large-scale dispossession of the black majority, South African capitalism might not have succeeded or have taken the form that it did.
Our goal, through this campaign, is to seek to unite millions of South Africans and as wide a range of progressive forces as possible behind accelerating land and agrarian reform.
In reviewing these struggles and preparing for our Red October campaign, we have also noted some of the current weaknesses in the struggle for land and agrarian reform.
There has been a tendency to separate land reform from agrarian transformation thus, in many instances, we see our people winning land reform demands, but they are unable to use that land for agricultural purposes. That is why our campaign seeks to ensure that land reform is part and parcel of agrarian transformation in order to effectively fight poverty.
Many of the struggles around land and agrarian transformation have also tended to focus only on the state, without confronting the real owners of productive land in our country: the 46 000 white corporate and individual entities. It is for this reason that our campaign is principally focused on capitalist agriculture as an important platform for accelerating land reform.
The campaign is located within the realities of a South African countryside that has two enclaves: the white countryside dominated by white agri-business and small and medium individual farmers, and the former Bantustans.
Our campaign must straddle both enclaves, as well as deal with the question of access to land in the urban areas. However, our primary focus is on the countryside.
The three key demands of our campaign are:
access to productive land for the landless;
rights and basic services for farm workers and their families; and
a national land summit within the next year, ideally preceded by provincial summits.
We also need to point out that this is not a campaign against our government, but primarily focused on agricultural capital, the real owners of productive land. This, however, does not mean that we won’t engage with government, robustly if need be. Over the past three years we have had intense engagements and discussions with the Minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs, Thoko Didiza, who also addressed our last central committee meeting.
In these engagements with the minister we have consistently raised, among other things, our problem with the “willing buyer, willing seller” principle, the Communal Land Rights Act, access to credit for small-scale farming and the question of government policies and legislation for cooperatives. At the first meeting of the Financial Sector Charter Council, we have objected to proposed targets that allocate only R1,4-billion to support black agriculture, while contemplating allocating R50-billion to support the purchase of equity shares by a small elite.
Blade Nzimande is the secretary general of the South African Communist Party
Agri-SA will respond next week