South African Communist Party
Augmented Central Committee statement, 22 November 2015
Build and defend the unity of the alliance and mass democratic formations!
Advance radical economic and social transformation!
The SACP Augmented Central Committee met in Ekhuruleni over the weekend of 20th to 22nd November. The annual Augmented CC includes a wider representation of provincial officials, SACP district leadership, and representatives from SACP associated institutes. It is convened primarily to review the past period and to plan actively for the coming year.
The organisational report tabled recorded the continued and unprecedented membership growth of the SACP, with an audited membership of 234,900. We are committed to continuing building this membership in terms both of numbers as well as activism and quality. The growth of organised SACP membership is not accidental.
It occurs in a context in which the ongoing global capitalist crisis and its knock-on impact on South Africa is aggravating the plight of the working class and urban and rural poor, and large sectors of the middle strata. It is in this context that there is the imperative of maximum unity of our Alliance formations and of the working class and poor in general – in defence of our democratic advances, in defence of democratic national sovereignty, in defence of the national democratic revolution in the face of looters and regime change agendas funded from abroad.
In discussing the political report, the CC noted that parts of the media have once more resurrected old headlines predicting the forever-imminent demise of the ANC-led alliance. None of this is remotely new. Over many decades the SACP has grown accustomed to periodic spasms of wishful thinking of this kind from the capitalist media. The present obituaries have been occasioned by the statements and posture of a factionalist group that is simply taking up, although with less skill it should be said, where Julius Malema was forced to leave off following his belated expulsion from the ANC.
Once more, the anti-communist rhetoric is grounded in the realisation among these circles that the SACP stands in the way of their ambitions to loot public resources. The SACP has no intention of abandoning its resolute and principled stand against political parasitism, cults of personality, and the plundering of state and SOC resources. Equally the SACP has no intention of breaking with the ANC and the alliance it leads.
The alliance needs to be reconfigured not abandoned. We know that our stand against corruption and factionalism is shared by the great majority of ANC members and an even wider spectrum of ANC supporters who fervently hope that our liberation movement will not lose its bearings. In this regard, the CC warmly welcomed important resolutions of the ANC’s National General Council, including the outright condemnation of slate politics funded by money that simply reproduces endless factional churn.
In early December, the SACP’s senior leadership in the Political Bureau will meet with our counterparts in the Alliance Political Council. The Augmented CC mandated the SACP PB to firmly encourage the practical implementation of these important NGC resolutions.
Together, let us build on the momentum of the student struggles!
The CC saluted the widespread, radical mobilisation of students over the past several weeks. We fully associate ourselves with the demand to advance towards free access to higher education for the working class and poor. No qualifying student should be excluded from post-school education and training on financial grounds.
In the course of the student mobilisation the liberal smugness of many university administrations has been exposed. At Stellenbosch and the University of North West student mobilisation with academic support has exposed language policies that have been used to perpetuate exclusion and frustrate transformation.
In many cases, the student mobilisation has also achieved important non-racial unity. The student mobilisation has also added fresh impetus to the long-standing struggle of the SACP and the union movement against outsourcing of campus workers. These are important advances that must be consolidated and strengthened as part of the wider national democratic struggle.
It now becomes imperative that we build on the energies, aspirations and concerns of students, many of whom have become politically active for the first time. To take this momentum forward we need to expose a small minority of externally-funded, anarchistic forces who are seeking to use the legitimate demands of students for entirely other agendas. Indeed, over the past weeks in particular, these forces have exposed themselves.
The destruction of university property, and criminal actions are not the work of those who genuinely seek to transform the higher education and training terrain. On the UWC campus, 300 odd, misguided anarchists associated with the EFF and PASMO have tried to disrupt examinations, holding 30,000 students hostage. In one case at UWC, a PASMO ring-leader wrote his own engineering exams and then opportunistically led the disruption of other exams.
What is the way forward? The ANC-led alliance and particularly the PYA formations and NEHAWU and SADTU have a critical responsibility in this situation. We must speak with one voice, and we must listen patiently to the many issues confronting students. We must provide concrete leadership on the ground, campus by campus, addressing the specific issues in different localities. We must not provide leadership arrogantly or by proclamation, but on the basis of a common radical programme for the transformation of the entire post-school education and training system.
In the immediate short-term, resources must be found to meet the commitment to a zero fee increase for 2016, as well as to address the debt crisis confronting returning students in the new year. As we move forward, a comprehensive review must be undertaken to ensure that the government’s budgetary processes are aligned with the key strategic priorities of our country, including how to achieve the appropriate balance in funding universities, on the one hand, and vocational technical training, on the other.
While upholding the constitutional principle of academic freedom, the modalities of university autonomy when the evocation of autonomy blocks progressive transformation must be addressed. In an extremely unequal society, simply implementing free university education for all will actually reproduce class, racial, gendered and geographical inequalities. As long as South Africa remains grossly unequal, there needs to be a graduated, means-tested application of fees. Those who can pay, must pay.
The funding of post-school education and training needs also to be integrated into a more general struggle for the transformation of the financial sector. Consideration should be given to an income tax add-on dedicated to post-school education and training. The SACP’s campaign to enhance community re-investment obligations on the financial sector needs also to be included in the funding challenges. Monopoly capital is the principal beneficiary of the public funding that goes into post-school education and training, greater mobilised pressure must be directed there.
Transform the Financial Sector!
The Financial Sector Campaign (FSC) this past week succeeded in securing agreement that NEDLAC will convene a Financial Sector Summit in the first half of 2016. The Summit will be an important milestone in the SACP’s ongoing financial sector campaign. Working with a broad alliance of forces within the FSC, we will use the summit to assess the implementation of the resolutions emerging from the first NEDLAC-convened financial sector summit, a key outcome of the SACP’s Red October campaign launched 15 years ago.
The National Credit Act; a National Credit Regulator which recently has been showing much greater determination in protecting consumers against predatory behaviour by credit providers; and much greater transparency in the conduct of the credit bureaux are some of the key outcomes of the original financial sector summit. Local-based and social movement campaigns against financial sector abuse have also gathered important momentum – including the exposure of systemic abuses in emolument attachment (“garnishee”) orders. In Gauteng, SACP structures working with communities have been active in anti-eviction campaigns.
But a great deal more still needs to be done. The IMF itself has identified the high levels of oligopoly in the South African banking sector and the interpenetration of banking and short- and long-term insurance as a significant risk factor. The levels of household debt and student debt are of great concern. Since the first financial sector summit, the degree to which the non-banking sector itself has become excessively financialised is another source for concern.
Much of the retail sector, for instance, now depends for profits less on selling groceries, furniture, or clothes, and more on selling credit at exorbitant interest with all manner of fine-print add-ons like unemployment and multiple life insurance included. The growth of a casino economy has far outpaced the growth of the rest of our economy while an effective productive investment strike persists.
In this connection, and as part of the CC’s regular policy discussion slot, the CC received an input from the Minister of Finance, comrade Nhlanhla Nene, on the Financial Sector Regulation Bill recently tabled in Parliament. In the context of the 2008 global financial sector crisis, and the local collapse of African Bank, the Bill seeks to introduce more effective regulation of the financial sector via a “Twin Peaks” approach, regulating, on the one hand, prudential behaviour and, on the other, market conduct.
In welcoming in principle the move to introduce a more effective regulatory regime the SACP and its broader alliance within the Financial Sector Campaign will engage with the Parliamentary process. Amongst other things, the CC flagged concern that the National Credit Regulator’s current powers should not be diluted, and that the approach to prudential behaviour should not compromise the important task of consolidating public and cooperative banking.
Nor should prudential requirements hamper the leveraging of financial sector resources for productive investment, and for community reinvestment requirements into social housing, or vocational training, for instance. The SACP will also continue to advance the call for more effective capital control and capital account management to defend national resources from speculative capital flight.
We condemn terrorism, we condemn imperialism
The CC expressed condolences to the communities who have been victims of recent terror attacks in Mali, Nigeria, Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and France. In condemning these atrocities, the CC notes that without exception, the origins of these despicable acts can be traced back to the social turmoil provoked by US-Nato regime change interventions particularly in Iraq and Libya and the current regime change strategy in Syria.
Over the past year and indeed even in the past weeks there have been important geo-political developments that underline that, while the US undoubtedly remains the dominant global hegemon, its ability to unilaterally achieve its strategic objectives has suffered significant decline.
The importance of the re-opening of diplomatic relations between the US and Cuba should, of course, not be unduly exaggerated – the US will continue to attempt to erode Cuban socialism and sovereignty now much more through “soft” power (i.e. economic leverage and consumerist ideological power). Nonetheless, the re-opening of diplomatic relations marks a strategic defeat and reversal of five-and-half decades of US imperialist policy directed against Cuba and indeed the Latin America region. US-imposed sanctions against Cuba must now be lifted.
In the course of 2015, US/NATO politico-military strategic agendas in the Ukraine and now in Syria have also suffered humiliating set-backs. In the past weeks, the Russian air campaign against ISIS and other terrorist groups has caught the US and its allies off-balance in the region, with Russia succeeding in forging a strategic alliance not just with the Syrian government, but also the Iranian government, along with operational collaboration with Hezbollah and Kurdish forces.
There is also now intelligence sharing between Russia and the Iraqi government (installed originally by US intervention!). The Vienna Declaration marks an important diplomatic victory in which the US and its allies were forced (at least in words) to abandon the strategy of territorial fragmentation (along “ethnic/religious” lines) of Syria and the removal of Assad as a pre-condition for a political settlement, as opposed to a principled line that the future of Syria must be determined by the Syrian people themselves in conditions of peace.
All of these developments – political, military and diplomatic – have caused a substantial setback to US imperialist geo-political regime-change strategies that were honed in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and repeated in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Amongst other things, the Russian air campaign in Syria deliberately pre-empted the US-NATO plans for a Syrian “no-fly zone” – which, as we know from Libya and before it Yugoslavia, means a US-NATO bombing campaign to effect regime change.
Losing ground in Syria and Iraq, ISIS has now launched terror attacks in Paris. The events in Paris have been widely condemned in the Western media (as opposed to the somewhat luke-warm concern about the ISIS bombing of a Russian civilian plane, or the ISIS slaughter of thousands of Azidis in Northern Iraq, or ISIS bombs in Beirut, or the ISIS-aligned Boko Haram in Nigeria and neighbouring countries). Domestic public outrage has now forced France and the US into greater action in dealing with ISIS in Iraq and Syria, after years of half-hearted intervention in which ISIS was seen as a useful counter-balance to Iran, Assad, and the Kurdish PKK and its allied YPG forces in Northern Syria. Western public outrage has forced Western governments to work more closely with Russia and its allies to counter the ISIS threat. Despite its feigned opposition to ISIS, it is inconceivable that the US was ignorant of the thousands of trucks involved in the road-based pipe-line from ISIS-controlled Syrian oil-fields that has been the principal source of funding for this terrorist group.
Forward to a unifying COSATU national congress!
The SACP wishes COSATU well in its important National Congress starting tomorrow. In the recent period there have been important indications of consolidation of unity within the federation and we trust that the National Congress will consolidate the unity of the federation around a radical programme of socio-economic transformation to address the triple crisis of unemployment, poverty and inequality within our society. Such a programme needs to be consolidated on the bedrock of worker-democracy, service to members, and collective leadership. The revitalisation of the ANC-led alliance requires an independent, militant COSATU
Statement issued by the SACP Augmented Central Committee, from Kopanong Conference Centre, Benoni, Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality, Gauteng Province, South Africa, 22 2015
