Social transformation depends on people and their actions. Too often dogma, simplistic metaphors and inappropriate examples have been the staple answers of socialists and communists to the challenges facing our society. South Africa’s national democratic revolution — and indeed the prospects for socialism — in the context of our negotiated transition and the strength of global capitalism require not dogma but critical thinking.
The president of the ANC opened the ruling party’s policy conference a few weeks ago by reasserting a long-held principle that has held our alliance together over many years.
“There is a distinct, material and historically determined difference between the national democratic and the socialist revolutions,” said Thabo Mbeki. “The ANC, precisely because it accepted and supported the right of our people to choose their path of development, accepted the proposition that our ally, the South African Communist Party (SACP), and not the ANC, would lead the forces and the struggle for the victory of the socialist revolution.”
That the president spent as much time as he did on this issue shows that the ANC also has an interest in this project.
So the obvious question is: when is the socialist revolution?
The questions we ask are as important as the answers we seek. Socialism is not a matter of some declaration or timetable. For socialism to become the hegemonic project of our society, and for capitalism to be relegated to history, certain objective conditions need to be fulfilled. But material conditions are not enough: subjective factors are also crucial — particularly leadership.
In the ANC-led alliance, discussions about the motive forces of our revolution tend to ignore the fact that for the working class to lead this process, it must be able to act in its own interests. This requires the leadership of a socialist party that commands the respect and loyalty of workers and other progressive forces. Such a party must have a clear programme and conduct itself in a manner that wins respect.
A country’s people and economy must also be able to sustain a new development path. If they don’t, they will not be able to resist the fierce economic and political pressures that will inevitably be brought to bear.
In our case, only some of these conditions have been met. This makes the task for socialists in the ANC a complex one. Not only must they defend the national democratic revolution in a capitalist society, they must lay the basis for a different kind of revolution.
This is best done when revolutionary democrats of all persuasions are not unnecessarily antagonised. At the same time, working people, the unemployed, those engaged in subsistence activity, small business people and professionals need to be convinced of the benefits of socialism. They must not be threatened by a force, bullying and scaremongering.
There is no empirical evidence that these broad sections of society are convinced of the potential benefits of socialism and the SACP has made limited progress in defining what policies it would put in place. To date, its proposals suggest that it would merely do what the ANC is doing — only do it better, faster and smarter. As SACP members are or should be ANC members, it begs the question: why have they not ensured that the ANC is “better, faster, smarter”?
Compromises, setbacks and disappointments are inevitably part of political life. How should revolutionaries respond to these? With some degree of sophistication. They should not blame others for their perceived weaknesses, failures or shortcomings brought about by the apparent lack of understanding of the socialist imperative. Labelling, plotting, conjuring up conspiracy theories, factionalism, insulting other leaders and calling their integrity into question may sound revolutionary, but such methods are ultimately counterproductive. They are merely a grievance, not a guide to action.
Real leaders must be exemplary in their own conduct. They must be the most democratic and honest, especially in their own organisations. They cannot hunger for power. They must be the first to eschew opportunism, dishonesty and shortcuts. Patience is a revolutionary virtue.
The worst error that revolutionaries can make is to mislead the people they seek to represent. Much has been said about the collapse of socialism in eastern Europe, and today there are only a few socialist countries. These do not claim easy victories and, if one speaks to their leaders, they are the first to say that they are in the very early stages of building a new kind of society.
The recent victories of popular, radical governments in countries such as Venezuela and Bolivia, while heartening to the left, are not socialist revolutions. These governments are closely allied to the ANC and see South Africa as an example to follow. This is because South Africa has a popular, radical and progressive government in the form of the ANC.
Whatever the ANC’s weaknesses and failures, they do not stem from an anti-communist or pro-capitalist stance on the part of the organisation, but rather from the objective conditions that it endures and the shortcomings of the collective leadership of the movement. The challenge is to provide the intellectual and organisational capacity to ensure that the ANC moves beyond this reality.
To do so we must take account of two important facts. First, the world has changed fundamentally in the period since the last socialist revolution occurred nearly 50 years ago. Second, within the ANC, there are revolutionaries of different ideological traditions — social democrats, socialists, communists and even radical liberals. The first dictates that a South African socialist revolution will not necessarily follow the Cuban or Chinese models, for example, unless socialist forces seek to overthrow the ANC government by force. The second means that any attempt to move towards socialism must be one that ensures the maximum unity of the ANC as a liberation movement.
Within the ANC-led alliance, socialism has historically been understood to mean freedom, democracy, working-class leadership of society and the social ownership of the factories, mines and land. We have won our political freedom and democracy, but we have not even begun to maximise our democratic potential. The working class certainly has the space to lead society, but it has not made effective use of this space. Many working-class issues are not even priorities on the national agenda.
Part of this must be ascribed to a failure of leadership. Recently, much of the energy of the socialist and communist tradition has been misdirected into fighting for the interests of individual leaders, rather than for the working class as a whole.
Most significantly, the critique of the political economy of contemporary South Africa has been mostly superficial. To transform our society, we need to understand it properly. Analyses that seek to paint our situation as a hopeless one, or which define the ANC as the cause of all South Africa’s ills, are shallow and would ultimately destroy the liberation movement.
Joel Netshitenze, writing in Umsebenzi, stated that for the SACP (and we might add for all socialists), “there are difficult choices: contest and win elections so as to construct socialism; pursue insurrection of the revolutionary working class against the current government; or transform the ANC into a Communist Party”.
He also mentioned another choice: the hard slog of consolidating the national democratic revolution, and through this, to lay the basis for a new society. If that less glamorous choice is made, then the possibility of some version of the third option is possible, in which activists work to win over the majority of ANC members and the broader population to a socialist programme.
That will be revolutionary.
Phillip Dexter is a member of the ANC national executive committee. He was recently suspended from his position as treasurer of the SACP