There are many good reasons for communists to exist. Anti-communists cite the plentiful examples provided by the 20th century of rampant corruption, dictatorship and mass impoverishment associated with such regimes, in which the comrade leaders lived it up far from the unwelcome gaze of the proletariat.
Conveniently, however, they fail to mention that such a scenario is not only sketched in red.
The likes of Mobutu Sese Seko, Saddam Hussein, Robert Mugabe (despite his vaguely Marxist rhetoric) and our very own apartheid regime prove that a government need not be communist to inflict hardship on the people.
So those who wish for communism’s demise need to find other reasons than the ones stated above. For as long as there is poverty and an unjust redistribution of wealth and opportunities, there will be communists.
Even President Thabo Mbeki, in his pamphlet Why I joined the Communist Party, attributed his then-association with the party more to the appalling living conditions he experienced in South Africa than to the irrefutability of Marxist-Leninist thought. And that was long before he became, in the view of his detractors, an agent of neoliberalism.
Mbeki and the SACP are, of course, not unique in witnessing poverty and wanting to do “something” about it. The average human being doesn’t like suffering and, wherever he or she can, tries to make things better.
The problem with the leaders of the South African Communist Party is not that they want to eradicate poverty using a system that has been discredited everywhere else. It is that, by their own admission, they are not really interested in state power. At least not now.
They want “socialism now” under someone else’s government. In that way, if the idea works, they can always bask in the glory. If it does not, they will accuse its implementers of not doing it right.
They want to have their cake and eat it. And we in the media should take some responsibility for their belief that they can. We are chained to habits learnt a generation ago. The circumstances that warranted the type of media attention the SACP got in the old days no longer exist. Prospects of the SACP wielding state power are as likely as Douglas Gibson crossing the floor to the ANC.
Even the Herstigte Nasionale Party has its ideas, but we don’t lose sleep worrying about who is in line for the leadership of that outfit.
It is not enough that the SACP is a historically important organisation. So are the Azanian People’s Organisation and the Pan Africanist Congress — and both of them, like the SACP, fought on the side of right. Yet these parties do not proliferate in our newspapers because the most objective measure, the ballot box, says their influence is rather limited.
In contrast, the SACP continues to enjoy massive coverage, yet they have never tested the appeal of their theories. It appears that most of their anger in recent times stems from the fact that they are not taken as seriously in the corridors of power as they are in newsrooms.
It has become conventional wisdom to argue that the SACP is a more effective opposition than the DA. But whatever you think about the DA, at least they have demonstrable support for their ideas. And what is the point of an effective opposition if it is not interested in taking responsibility for the implementation of its policies?
In my view, news of the party having purged whoever they are supposed to have purged at their last congress is as interesting as who will captain Bafana Bafana at the 2010 World Cup. Nothing turns on having insight into the matter.
Unlike Cosatu, which has the membership and organisation to advance its point of view, the SACP has no demonstrable stick to wield should nobody be interested in what they have to say. So they need as many media friends as they can get.
Another self-salving argument among the communists is that they are a highly influential body within the congress movement. But, given that the influence is only relevant if they use it within the ANC, it appears to me an unnecessary duplication for them to organise and agitate as communists and then do the same when they wear the ANC membership hats. It is as though the type of thoughts they think are dependent on who called the meeting.
Surely, if they were as strong a tendency as they pretend, they would change the ANC without having to shout from the periphery.
As I said at the beginning, communists have every right to exist. I just don’t understand why they need to involve all of us in their quest to justify that.