“We have thought enough. It is time for sloganeering.” Is this the key message of once-proud Marxists within what once called itself the progressive youth movement?
At the end of 2006 the Young Communist League expelled its deputy, Mazibuko Jara, while the African National Congress Youth League disbanded its Eastern Cape provincial structures for opposing its policies.
This intolerance of plurality comes from a segment of the liberation movement once referred to as the watchdogs of the revolution. Their task was to keep the senior leadership — the vanguard — on its toes and to challenge all shibboleths.
Jara’s primary offence was to have a different point of view. Different points of view once characterised the progressive youth movement, but not any more.
Jara refused to apologise or retract a pamphlet questioning whether the support for former deputy president Jacob Zuma was in the best interests of the working class, which the communists champion.
“Can JZ really be regarded as part of the left and the working-class forces in the ANC? JZ’s own role in the isolation and marginalisation of a working-class programme in the ANC requires scrutiny. Can JZ really provide breathing space for a left project as it is sometimes argued and implied?” Jara wrote in what now appears to have become his political suicide note.
The Youth League in the Eastern Cape was dissolved like a Disprin because it supported a third term as party president for Thabo Mbeki instead of the official line that says Zuma is the anointed leader.
Considering that the cut-off age for both organisations is 35, it would mean that their oldest members were 18 when the Berlin Wall fell and ended the Stalinist project.
One would therefore not be surprised if older members in the organisation’s mother bodies cling to memories of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’ centralisation of all things, including thought.
However, younger people whose teenage years coincided with the upset of the political applecart should be independent thinkers — yet they have shown themselves to wear Joseph’s coat.
It is ironic that their battle cry against Mbeki is that he is intolerant when they are doubly so.
The struggle for freedom was for freedom from all forms of subjugation.
The freedom to think and hold different views from the majority is fundamental. Yet the young communists and the youth league think it is heresy to hold a view that differs from the official one. They give their views a pontifical sense of infallibility and arrogate to themselves the power to excommunicate the heretics.
Even if Jara is wrong or the Eastern Cape Youth League misled it is unacceptable (and thankfully impossible) to silence their analyses, debates and points of view.
As history has proven, not even comrade Joseph Stalin’s iron grip could kill thought.