20.01.2000

SACP crisis looms

In the first of two articles Peter Manson reports on South Africa

Last week, long-serving National Party stalwart Pik Botha announced that he had applied to join the African National Congress. Apartheid foreign minister for almost two decades, Botha was one of the mainstays of a regime that ruthlessly and brutally suppressed every trace of opposition in a life and death struggle to keep South Africa safe for the bloc of English-speaking capitalists, Afrikaner bureaucrats and big farmers, white labour aristocrats and international finance capital.

"I want to break with the racist attitudes of the past," he now says. "Afrikaners, whites, should support the ANC." He went on to explain that president Thabo Mbeki's government had proved itself a supporter of market-orientated economic policies: "We are lucky that we have leaders like Mandela and Mbeki." The ANC said it would be "receptive" to Botha's application and thought he could play a "meaningful role in building the nation".

This exchange speaks volumes about the nature of the current administration. Highly commended by the liberal bourgeoisie and most sections of South African and international capital for his Thatcherite cutbacks and fiscal prudence, epitomised by the wondrously misnamed 'growth, employment and redistribution' policy (Gear), Mbeki now presides over a state of affairs that the apartheid rulers could only dream of achieving: the complete negation of the revolutionary situation of the 1980s and the imposition of a new stability, albeit no doubt a temporary one.

What is more, the ANC still enjoys the support - less enthusiastic and more grudging, it is true - of a majority of the population. For a time it looked as though its electoral support would drop in last year's general election - two million fewer voters registered than in 1994 - but, despite the lower turnout, there was a large swing to the ruling party, which failed by just one seat to win a two-thirds majority.

No wonder the white elite is duly grateful and even such arch-reactionaries as Botha are beginning to knock at the ANC's door. But their most heartfelt gratitude, even if it remains unspoken, is not directed towards the governing party itself, but towards the least visible component of the ANC-led tripartite alliance, the South African Communist Party. It is the SACP, wielding the enormous prestige it won through its role in the great anti-apartheid upsurge that ended a decade ago, which is primarily responsible for cooling the masses' revolutionary ardour and handing them on a plate to the ruling class.

Using the language of revolution and class struggle, the SACP has up to now succeeded in persuading the hundreds of thousands of workers it leads and influences not only that their interests are being served, but that South Africa is firmly on the road to socialism. It plays a prominent role at all levels within the ANC and six of its members sit in Mbeki's cabinet. During last year's election campaign the SACP softened its already muted formal opposition to Gear ("We all agree ... that fiscal discipline and care are required"), and trumpeted the rather dubious achievements of the ANC's first five years: according to the party's increasingly infrequent paper, "more than 700,000 houses have been built"; "we have connected two million households to electricity, brought water to three million people, and provided three million new phone lines" (Umsebenzi March-April 1999).

The reality is rather different. The 1994 reconstruction and development programme (RDP) actually promised one million new houses, which it admitted would do no more than keep pace with demand. The number of homeless and squatters has actually increased over the last five years. But the quality of these tiny, box-like 'homes', funded by the government but often constructed by cowboy builders, is pathetically low. Earlier this month 17 RDP houses collapsed, blown over by what the South African Weather Bureau called a "moderate breeze". Another 551 out of 600 at the same site were declared unsafe. The unqualified 'builder', Heinrich Kilpert, claimed that he had been forced to put up less stable houses than were budgeted for. The 30-square-metre hutches, for which he was paid R8.5 million (£850,000) from RDP funds, were "too big" (Johannesburg Sunday Times January 9).

As for electricity and water, in a disarmingly frank assessment of ANC "transformation programmes", the SACP admitted that millions could not pay for their power and had not been connected or had been cut off, and quoted the Sunday World to the effect that more than half of all water schemes were ineffective: "1.5 million people are not getting regular supplies of clean water" (African Communist 2nd quarter, 1999). While the RDP promised greater access to colleges and university, the same article confesses that "in 1999 there are actually fewer black students overall in tertiary education than a few years ago".

While the SACP feeds the masses with headlines such as "An anti-capitalist class struggle" in the populist Umsebenzi newspaper (August-September 1999), in its more rarefied publications it openly admits to the class-collaborationist nature of its "national democratic revolution" (NDR): "In many respects the last five years within SA have been marked by a strategic convergence between all forces committed to some kind of post-apartheid change in our country (ranging from the US state department, big capital inside SA, through to the liberation movement). This strategic convergence has been useful (indeed crucial), in that it has given us breathing space to consolidate the victory over apartheid, and to isolate the most reactionary forces completely opposed to even limited democratisation and deracialisation" (African Communist 2nd quarter, 1999).

With masterly understatement the article concludes this way: "While there have been important popular victories and a major process of change has been underway in our country over the last five years, it is not so clear whether these changes have strengthened the popular forces more than the key strategic opponent. Unless we are prepared to be honest and self-critical, the danger is that changes will be unstrategic (change, but not transformation), confined to marginally improving the lot of an impoverished majority, while actually entrenching the power and privileges of a partially deracialised elite." It is perfectly clear which forces have been strengthened, and the "danger" the SACP claims to foresee is in fact the actual reality.

In what passes for SACP 'theory', the party pretends that its active support for a government which is daily adding to the toll of jobless and forcing through yet more cutbacks is all part of "advancing, deepening and strengthening the NDR". Furthermore it is also part of the process of building "capacity for socialism, momentum towards socialism, and elements of socialism, here and now". This vacuous claptrap is totally meaningless, as can readily be seen when we examine what the SACP means by its "socialism".

Let its general secretary, Blade Nzimande, explain: "A socialist South Africa ... will be a South Africa in which, overwhelmingly, the ownership of the means of production ... is socialised, and not in the hands of those whose prime motive is profit-taking ... These enterprises would need to be subject to various forms of democratic control, including trade unions and workplace worker forums and committees" (African Communist 3rd quarter, 1999).

The groundwork for this socialism is to be achieved through gradual nationalisation by parliamentary legislation. Moreover, we are led to believe the foundations for it are already being laid. The party campaigns for a "strong, active state" (ignoring the fact that this is a bourgeois state), and wants to "defend and extend the public sector" (Umsebenzi August-September 1999). Yet far from nationalising the means of production like good reformist socialists, the ANC government of which the SACP is an integral part is steaming ahead with its programme of privatisation. Pathetically, leading party members and ANC MPs Yunus Carrim and Ncumisa Kondlo use the pages of African Communist to advocate public-private partnerships, claiming they are "different from privatisation" and help "advance social goals" (2nd quarter, 1999). It seems that PPP is also a form of "socialisation" - part of the building of "elements of socialism, here and now".

While the likes of Carrim and Kondlo throw their weight behind the ANC's anti-working class policies, other SACP members find themselves on the other side. The party completely dominates the main trade union centre, Cosatu, which last year called prolonged industrial action against government-imposed, below-inflation pay rises in the public sector, and today is organising protests against cutbacks and job losses.

SACP MPs are bound not only by the 'collective responsibility' of the ANC, but also by the decisions of their own central committee, which in December pledged full support to union action to defend jobs and services. As Terry Bell, a leader of the International Socialist Movement, pointed out, this puts Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, the public service minister, in an unusual position: "As a minister, she has been at the forefront of the battles against the public service unions; as the deputy chairman of the SACP, she is apparently bound to support the unions against herself" (Cape Times January 14).

The party pretends to see no contradiction in such situations. For example, during last year's big pay battles it stated: "Leading party comrades find themselves ... on both sides of the public sector wage negotiations. Rather than seeing this as a cause of embarrassment or hesitation, the SACP, along with its alliance partners, sees in this reality a challenge" (Umsebenzi August-September 1999). African Communist commented at the time: "It would be entirely improper for the party to take a stand on the immediate wage issue. Government and the unions must negotiate" (3rd quarter, 1999).

While remaining studiously neutral over the public sector dispute, leaving it to its comrades in government and the unions to battle it out amongst themselves, the party is still perfectly capable of making revolutionary-sounding noises: "The SACP calls upon the working class to play a leading role in building organs of people's power where we work, where we live and where we study," exhorted Blade Nzimande, in a speech marking the 82nd anniversary of the Russian Revolution (Umsebenzi November-December 1999).

However, what he actually had in mind was "strong developmental committees, crime policing forums" and "democratic school governing bodies" - in other words the SACP should staff existing state bodies. As part of the party's 'Red October' campaign, comrade Nzimande called upon every communist to "distribute a condom or two" on World Aids Day.

Not surprisingly, there are growing tensions within the SACP as a result of its attempts to face both ways. The leadership is under enormous pressure precisely to "take a stand", and not only on wages. The SACP is still winning new members, but lately the recruits have tended to be of a different type - workers who are disillusioned with the ANC and who look to the party to launch an independent fight.

A sizeable minority of the membership are questioning the continuation of the alliance itself. Vusikaya Mvuyisi, secretary of the 1,000-strong Khayelitsha district of the SACP, told me that the present arrangement - where the party is never seen to criticise the ANC, except in the mildest of terms, and where its parliamentary caucus has no public face - could end: "I believe the party will have to contest elections independently sooner or later. Those at the top who do not like it will have to leave."

Evidence of such tensions has started to appear in the pages of African Communist, which last year published excerpts from a report to the July congress from the national secretariat. Reflecting the pressure for a more independent line is the following passage: "In instances where we sense our position is different from that of the ANC, we have ... the tendency to say we therefore cannot adopt that position ... This is tantamount to decimating the identity of the party" (3rd quarter, 1999).

On the appointment of so many members to positions in government, the report asks: "Is it not time now that we honestly ask ourselves how the holding of such positions is practically and substantively advancing the overall strategic objectives and goals of the SACP?" This first tentative questioning of the ANC-SACP relationship is presented as a concern that "deployment to government has seriously deprived the SACP of some of its key cadres in day-to-day party work".

Clearly the leadership, while in its public statements continuing to give the impression that it will forever remain attached to the ANC, is manoeuvring itself into a position where, should it judge the time to be right, it can effect a smooth, painless break at minimum cost in terms of the defection of members, particularly those at the top.

At present Nzimande is doing no more than reviewing his options. He knows the present situation cannot continue indefinitely. There are deep divisions between, on the one side, those at the top who, viewing themselves as responsible politicians, yearn for class peace and believe they are fully entitled to take up the lucrative posts to which their role in the anti-apartheid struggle entitles them; and, on the other side, the many thousands of party militants and supporters who have illusions in its revolutionary credentials and are itching for action.

The crisis is looming and could well break out this year. While Nzimande will seek to minimise its effects, the non-SACP left must actively intervene in order to expose the careerists and hypocrites. The strategic aim must be to split the party, winning over revolutionary cadre and the broad mass of the rank and file to independent working class politics.