JOHANNESBURG - In his voluminous study Towards Socialist Democracy, Martin Legassick, a leading protagonist of the revisionist school of South African history which utilises the analytical tools of Marxism to explore and interpret the past, dismisses President Jacob Zuma as an unlikely leader of the drive to establish socialism in South Africa.

Referring to the ideological differences that brought the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions into conflict with Thabo Mbeki, the former African National Congress and South African president, Legassick writes: "... they fled from Thabo Mbeki, only, unfortunately, to jump into bed with Jacob Zuma."

One of four Marxist theoreticians who were expelled from the ANC for seeking to prod the ANC-controlled South African Congress of Trade Unions into promoting working class interests more vigorously instead of serving as a mere signpost to the ANC guerrilla army Umkhonto we Sizwe, Legassick sees Zuma as a conservative on many issues but particularly on economic policy.

Legassick notes pointedly that Zuma is on record as saying on the economic policy debate in 2006, when Mbeki was still the incumbent president: "I am happy with ANC policy as it is." Legassick might have noted at the same time that Zuma, like Mbeki, deserted the SACP in the late 1980s when it was obvious that the Soviet Union and its Eastern Europe satellites were in the process of collapsing and, moreover, that Zuma kept his head well below the parapet during Mbeki's battles against the SACP and Cosatu in his first 6 years in national office.

A related point is that it was only after Mbeki dismissed him as South Africa's deputy president in June 2005 that Zuma and the leaders of the SACP and Cosatu formed an alliance of convenience, the basis of which is summed up in the aphorism: the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Two deductions flow from these observations: firstly, that Zuma would not lead the ANC towards a socialist South Africa of his own volition and would, on the contrary, have to be persuaded and pressed into doing so by the SACP and Cosatu, and, secondly, that their coaxing and cajoling would inevitably invoke resistance from the more conservative black nationalist lobby in the ANC's national executive committee.

It might be noted en passant that, according to Jeremy Cronin, deputy general secretary of the SACP and probably its leading theoretician, Fidel Castro's Revolutionary Party was not committed to communism when it overthrew the Cuban dictator, Fulgencio Batista, in 1959 and only embraced communism after it established the new regime.

Cronin obviously hopes that the ANC may eventually undergo a similar political metamorphosis, except that he tends to talk about it happening gradually and naturally, rather than suddenly and dramatically in a kind of political epiphany.

It is in that context that the recent criticism of socialists in the ANC by Billy Matsetlha, a former director-general of the National Intelligence Agency, should be reviewed, subject to the warning that it would be a mistake to think that Masetlha is alone when he warns that it would be a fatal mistake for the ANC to adopt a socialist agenda and thereby blur the distinction between itself and its communist allies in the tripartite alliance.

Nor is it surprising that Masetlha's attack on communists for aspiring to hijack the ANC for its own purposes came in the wake of the reported criticism of Blade Nzimande, the general secretary of the SACP, by Nomvula Makonyane, the premier of Gauteng:

She accused Nzimande of double-dipping, which, politically-speaking, may be defined as taking two different positions on the same issue, depending on the capacity in which the assessment is made. In Nzimande's case, he can offer one assessment in his capacity as a cabinet minister in the Zuma administration and another in his capacity as the general secretary of the SACP.

It is not amiss to recall that Peter Mokoba, the fiery former president of the ANC Youth League, questioned the ANC's wisdom of allowing the members of the SACP to join the ANC without resigning from the SACP. He pointed out that it gave SACP members the opportunity of participating in ANC closed policy debates in their capacities as ANC members and then discussing the same issue in their capacities as SACP members and, if they so wished, to take a contradictory position on them.

Perhaps Fikile Mbalula, another former ANC Youth League president, has adopted a similarly critical position on the dual membership debate in his reported preliminary manoeuvres to oust Gwede Mantashe from his position as ANC secretary-general at the ANC's national conference in 2012. Mantashe is, of course, the national chairman of the SACP as well as the ANC secretary-general and thus open to criticism as another double-dipper.

It is interesting - and perhaps significant - to recall that no less a person than Nelson Mandela is on record as admitting soon after his release from prison in 1990 that sooner or latter there would have to be a parting of the ways between the ANC, as a multi-class organisation embracing a diversity of interests, and the communists within its ranks dedicated to establishing worker hegemony and, ultimately, a classless society.

Seen through that prism, Masetlha may be saying that the time to diverge and for the ANC and the SACP to separate has come.

Former Mbeki confidante and millionaire businessman, Saki Macozoma, has provided an interesting perspective on the disparate alliance that coalesced around Zuma after his dismissal: while noting that its hostility to Mbeki provided it with cohesion and purpose, it would, he predicted, be vulnerable to disintegration and internal division once it achieved its purpose.

Macozoma's observation raises the question of whether the anti-Mbeki alliance has begun to unravel, now that it has triumphed by ousting Mbeki and, as important, securing the installation of Zuma as the leader of the ANC and the head of the government and the state.

The present situation is a demanding one for Zuma. He may, of course, seek to avoid having to chose one faction rather than another and attempt instead to hold together the diverse components of the coalition that brought him to power. The problem, however, is that Zuma tends to prevaricate in a bid to appease the competing factions, a strategy that tends to alienate more than it placates.

To re-phrase Abraham Lincoln's famous aphorism: "You can please all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot please all of the people all the time.

As Brian Pottinger observes in his book The Mbeki Legacy, the conflict between the ANC under Mbeki and its communist allies in the tripartite alliance over the market-friendly macro-economic policy of Growth, Development and Redistribution (Gear) has not been resolved by Zuma's rise to power.

It has, instead, been "internalised within the ANC," as manifest by the appointment to cabinet positions of the SACP's Rob Davies (trade and industry) and Cosatu's Ebraham Patel (economic development) and, at the opposite end of the ideological continuum, former finance minister Trevor Manuel (planning minister).

Malesela Maleka, the SACP spokesperson, is dismissive of the attacks on the communists and their fellow travellers in the ANC, declaring that earlier generations of anti-communists in the ANC have been marginalised in, or even expelled from, the ANC.

He is obviously unaware of Josiah Gumede, who served as ANC president in the late 1920s, but who was voted out of office in 1930 after he adopted a strongly pro-communist line following his visit to the Soviet Union and his description of Moscow as the "New Jerusalem, as well as his endorsement of the SACP objective of establishing a "Native Republic" in South Africa.

In those days, of course, communism was seen by many people around the world as an ideology of hope, as distinct from its reputation today as a failed ideology that has led to ruin and oppression across the globe, and seen, for that reason, by millions of people as "the dead hand of the past."

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