IF YOU ask anyone in the independent left of the political spectrum — those outside the alliance between the African National Congress (ANC), the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and the South African Communist Party (SACP) — they will insist the SACP has betrayed the working class it was supposed to lead in the struggle for socialism.
Yes, there were times when it played a leading role forming and running night schools where political education and consciousness-raising took place, in building the trade unions and in the formation of the ANC’s military wing, but as a supposedly revolutionary working-class party, it has failed miserably.
Karl Marx, the father of communist thought, explicitly expressed in the Communist Manifesto that a communist party must vocally and actively and at all times lead, unify and co-ordinate the struggles for the needs, interests and demands of the working class and the poor.
Never once does the manifesto even tacitly advocate that a communist party should or must play second fiddle to other parties or subordinate working-class interests and struggles to other interests. In other words, a communist party ought to be the most resolute and consistent leader of all working-class struggles.
In regard to the latter point, we must bear in mind that even though the SACP deferred to the leadership of the ANC in the anti-apartheid struggle, the struggles against racism and capitalism in SA have had an overwhelmingly symbiotic relationship, to the extent that, in both theory and practice, it was always incorrect to draw a "two-stage" distinction between the two.
But this is exactly what the SACP did. Many people are unaware that some leading figures in the SACP, including Ruth First, were opposed to the two-stage theory.
However, today the crux of a critique of the SACP rests less on its history and more on the role it has played or not played in relation to working-class interests after the watershed 1994 elections and the consummation of the first stage of the national democratic revolution.
The understanding all along, including in relevant literature, was that the party, while playing a supportive and secondary role in the anti-apartheid struggle, would become more vocal and prominent in the post-apartheid period when the struggle explicitly for socialism would be waged, this time led by the SACP. In other words, the SACP would become the undoubted and unwavering leader of all working-class struggles for socialism in this period.
But this is what happened instead. Between 1994 and roughly the 2009 elections, the SACP did little to rock the boat of ANC rule and to lead an explicit anticapitalist working-class struggle — or even lead the struggles by township residents for basic services. In the avalanche of struggles by social movements for access to adequate basic services, the SACP barely featured, even in a supportive role. Why?
Partly because social movements were largely anti-ANC, blaming it for poor services, especially when millions of people’s services were cut in the 2000s due to nonpayment. It was these cutoffs, largely due to problems of poverty, unemployment and affordability, that radicalised and swelled the ranks of social movements. However, the alliance between the ANC and SACP prevented the latter coming out strongly in support of these township struggles for basic services.
What this meant was that political expediency took precedence over important matters of principle that spoke directly and incontrovertibly to the heart and soul of a genuine communist party, especially when the struggles on the shop floor were directly connected to the struggles for services in townships, often waged by the same people. The betrayal was already clear then.
Even the explicitly neoliberal Growth, Employment and Redistribution strategy was initially largely welcomed by the SACP. Only a year later did the party strongly criticise it. However, the real turning point in the role of the SACP came after the 2009 elections, when its general secretary, Blade Nzimande, and his deputy, Jeremy Cronin, were absorbed into the upper echelons of ANC rule by being appointed to ministerial and deputy ministerial posts respectively.
Contrary to repeated denials by Nzimande and Cronin, they know many SACP members firmly believe that since they joined the ANC government, the SACP’s activism on the ground and involvement in many struggles has seriously declined, along with the party’s stature and influence, even within the alliance itself.
Party organisation and morale have suffered. Besides, these leaders have not once publicly differed with the ANC, even when it was wrong in decisions it took on so many matters. The Nkandla scandal and the use of police to remove Economic Freedom Fighters MPs from the National Assembly earlier this year are just two examples.
The SACP has made a cynical mockery of the foundational meaning of a communist party. In fact, considering the party’s trajectory — especially after 1994 — aspiring socialists among the youth would have more object lessons about what is decidedly not a communist or socialist party rather than being inspired.
Nzimande and Cronin showed sheer cowardice and a clear lack of confidence in their party — and thereby in the ideas and goals of socialism — when they combined to defeat strong calls from within the SACP to contest elections independently in the 2000s. Their decades-old alliance with the ANC didn’t make them confident that the SACP could do well in elections, and until it contests elections independently, it is arguable that it has little real support in the working class.
On the other hand, the SACP has been so subservient to the ANC that it was probably not only dissuaded from competing against the ruling party in elections, but was scared to do so.
Nzimande and Cronin were rewarded for their loyalty to the ANC, rather than to the working class, with their ministerial posts in 2009.
We must hand it to the ANC: its strategy of co-opting Cosatu and SACP leaders has paid off handsomely, but not for those who believe that, in the midst of the worst global economic crisis and the devastating consequences it has had for the working class and the unemployed, we urgently need a new post-capitalist dispensation.
• Harvey is a political writer, commentator and author
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