Below we publish excerpts from the ANC national working committee’s (NWC) response to an SACP central committee discussion document. The notes for the ANC NWC’s June 19 meeting with the SACP were headlined: ”A relationship that has stood the test of time.” These excerpts provide a glimpse — but only a glimpse — of the arguments contained in the document, which is more than 7 000 words long. The full notes can be found on the ANC website. The SACP discussion document, from Bua Komanisi (May 2006), is available on the SACP website.
***
The relationship between the ANC and the South African Communist Party (SACP) has stood the test of time. We come to this bilateral with that understanding that we are comrades in arms. Our relationship was forged in the struggle against apartheid, and now, on the terrain of democracy, we share common goals and programmes towards the elimination of poverty and unemployment.
***
Interestingly, the (SACP discussion) document rubbishes prospects for an African Renaissance because this project fails to appreciate the ”persisting (strengthened) role of imperialism after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and the global reproduction of combined development and underdevelopment… This pillar of the [Renaissance] project has also seriously underestimated the frailty of ‘transitions to democracy’ (often little more than elite pacts)…”. Yet, according to the authors, this very same NDR (national democratic revolution) project should have adopted a rapid and uninterrupted transition to socialism in South Africa!
***
The ahistoricism, subjectivism and voluntarism that inform the discussion document come out in bold relief in its interpretation of the ANC’s approach to the relationship between the NDR and socialism. The authors set out looking for a needle in a haystack — to find a declaration of socialist objectives on the part of the ANC… But where, in any of its formal documents and conference resolutions, did the ANC declare that its objective was socialism?
***
There is also a profound bitterness about the manner in which the SACP managed its resurgence from the underground. A number of its senior cadres left the party, and some of them currently occupy senior positions in the ANC. Naturally, the SACP needs to continue reviewing this experience; it needs to debate with these otherwise left forces about the best way of advancing a socialist agenda — if they still share this perspective. But this should not be conflated with formal relationships with the ANC.
Perhaps most importantly, the SACP needs self-critically to pose the question to itself, why it lost and is still losing such senior cadres, rather than just throwing mud at them! It cannot be that a socialist vanguard that experiences such haemorrhaging at the top merely sits in a corner and sulks!
***
Having briefly and begrudgingly acknowledged the complex balance of forces in the transition of the early 1990s, the document does not positively identify the things that could have been done, in the early years of our democracy, to achieve more radical results without disrupting the transition in its totality, and without precipitating the experience that some of our sister countries on the continent have had.
Both Cosatu [Congress of South African Trade Unions] and the SACP have pronounced on these matters, and one can presume consistency in this regard: about the ”jobs bloodbath” and this being a consequence of the ”capitalist accumulation regime” and specifically Gear [growth, employment and redistribution strategy]. In this SACP discussion document, reference is made to how the capitalist class has been the main beneficiary of social change.
***
The SACP discussion document warns against ”over-working” the concept of Bonapartism, and yet it does precisely this. The wriggling to make interpretation of this concept fit an a priori analysis aside, it reduces the concept essentially to an analysis of the first two presidents of our democracy.
***
By reducing an analysis of this otherwise objective challenge to personalities, the document ends up attributing to presidents Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki approaches that otherwise reflect the collective, if experimental, attempt on the part of the ANC to manage this challenge. Generously, one can conclude that this wrong approach is responsible for: misguided references to so-called centralisation of power in the state presidency (when Cosatu has called for a stronger presidency to ensure implementation of AsgiSA [Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa]), a misreading of the ANC constitution about the roles of the president and the secretary-general and, to some extent, a presumed orchestrated marginalisation of Parliament.
Further, in what seems an attempt at psychoanalysis of Nelson Mandela, the document descends into colonial anthropology of the worst kind. His ”Bonapartism”, we are told, ”also owes something to his sometimes arcane, quasi-feudal, pre-capitalist corporatist values … (p20)”. The less said about such insults the better!
***
Interestingly, references in the document to pre-1990 alliance dynamics, and parts of post-1996 developments are referred to as if the current leadership of the SACP were and are objective distant observers of the march of history. Yet when it comes to decisions that the authors agree with, they become proud actors …
Besides the possibility of conceitedness, this patently subjective treatment of history does pose another question about the character of the authors of the discussion document, which we assume are its most senior leadership: for how long have they been in SACP ranks!
***
Much that is positive and useful is said about the Second Economy and the challenge of providing basic services such as water.
However, without much elaboration, a suggestion is made that marginalisation of these communities from the economic mainstream is ”potentially a revolutionary asset”. Is this to suggest that we should abandon the struggle to bridge the gap and to encourage sustainable livelihoods…?
Measuring household usage of water, through water meters, is discouraged because it atomises working class communities…
It is not so much the detail of these two instances that is at issue. Rather it is the romanticism in the approach to a disorganised and survivalist small business sector and the suggestion that no efforts should be made to lift marginalised people into the mainstream. Further, it is the romanticism that suggests limitless resources to provide, for instance, free basic water and not even measure its usage.
***
Without going into the debates that have taken place in the ANC and the rest of the alliance on gender issues, it is quite disappointing that the discussion document does not go into any comprehensive analysis and, less still, into current challenges with regard to gender. In fact, the document confines the gender issue to a section (as if plonked in just for convenience). Is the history of the party’s treatment of this matter accurate? What about the relationship between women’s emancipation and creation of the objective and subjective conditions for this? Should the gender struggle consciously address, at the same time, socio-economic conditions of the poor and the issue of gender parity in leadership structures?
***
That most of the observations are confined to a critique of the SACP discussion document does not subtract from the fact that the document raises many positive issues which will help inform the ANC’s own internal discussions in the coming period. Rather, we sought to isolate areas of critical engagement to help generate further debate within the alliance and society at large.
We do hope that, in this our input, we have met the SACP general secretary’s injunction that, in this debate, there should be no holy cows.