When a group of members of the South African Communist Party’s central committee start advocating a ”third way” — even describing themselves as ”the third wayers”, at least among themselves — then you know that the party is ideologically at a loose end.
Admittedly, there probably is as much self-parody as there is self-styling in the label. Moreover, the ”third way” they seek is not that of the Clinton-Blair third way between the left and right, but between the rock and the hard place of Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma.
Stoically, but with a wistful demeanour, they work more in hope than expectation with others in the broader ANC-led movement to open up political space between the two juggernauts into which an acceptable compromise candidate for president of the ANC might emerge.
So it is not, in and of itself, a final resignation to ”unilateral ideological disarmament”, as Joe Slovo aptly termed it in the days of crisis for much of the left following the end of the Cold War in 1990. But it does signal the extent to which crude and ruthless personality politics have devoured the politics of ideas.
Just as last year’s distraction of its preoccupation with Zuma seriously undermined Cosatu’s core role as defender of the rights of workers, so too now one is compelled to ask if for precisely the same reason the SACP has lost sight of its claim to be an intellectual guardian of progressive politics in South Africa.
Where, for example, is its voice now on corruption? Or on the human rights abuses perpetrated against working people in ZimbabÂÂwe? Or on the vexingly ambiguous concept of the developmental state?
If anything, the party seems more lost than in 1990, with a general secretary hell-bent on revenge against Mbeki, and on purging those who refuse to join him, rather than on solving the quest for a new ideological identity. The notes released by the ANC’s national working committee last June, in response to an SACP discussion document, exposed the SACP for the empty vessel that it has become. Expect more bloodletting at the SACP’s mid-year conference.
Whereas the ANC’s website is bulging with policy documents ahead of its mid-year policy conference, click on 2007 policy documents on the SACP’s website and you will find the cupboard completely bare. In fact, clicking year by year, one discovers that, ÂÂevidently, the last time the SACP had a policy was in 1995.
Seek solace under ”historical documents” and you will find that the most recent entry, dated December 14 2006, is entitled A Message from Underground. This sounds promising, but it turns out to be a reprint of the message that Bram Fischer sent from ”somewhere in South Africa” on January 22 1965.
It is all a little embarrassing. This is not just to poke gratuitous fun — under plain ”documents”, at least, there is one for 2007 and it’s a rather good one at that — a paper in which SACP deputy general secretary Jeremy Cronin asks: ”Should it be a matter of embarrassment that the SACP and Cosatu defence of comrade Zuma has largely been couched in terms that would conventionally be regarded as ‘liberal individual rights’?”
Leftists have always felt squeamish about liberal individual rights, fearing that they are too bourgeois, and with greater justification distrusting the traditional conflation between individual rights and unconstrained free-market capitalism. Yet there is little point in believing in equality if you can’t organise and march in favour of it, or if your followers can’t freely express themselves.
”But we cannot remain locked within the discourse of individual human rights and checks-and-ÂÂbalances on state power,” argues Cronin. ”That way the political quickly becomes depoliticised, drained of substantive content. Going beyond these rights and principles does not mean falling below them. We need to locate these rights and principles within a wider programme of substantive transformation.”
This is the pivot of a freshly articulated, rights-based approach to equality and social transformation. If this is what Tony Blair means by ”political cross-dressing”, his central theme in a speech at Microsoft last year, then perhaps it would not be such an entirely bad thing for some ideological transsexuality.
As Cronin argues in his January paper, ”… it is imperative that socialists take up and defend these [liberal] rights and principles — and that we do so in a consistent way, and not just tactically, when the occasion suits us.”
How right he is. Somehow, despite the toxic yet mesmerising struggle for succession, South Africa must not lose sight of rights and principles — and yes, ideology. Perhaps there is a case for a real Third Way after all — but who will carry its lantern?