Some people, understandably, have questioned my statement that the South African Communist Party is now the "most important political party in South Africa ". (See "The Modern Prince in South Africa", here).
I will repeat my statement and strengthen it: the SACP is now the most powerful party in South Africa. By comparison with this organised, coherent and carefully prepared party which exists both outside and inside the African National Congress, the ANC is a mass of jelly.
The ANC's national conference at Polokwane last December should now be understood as a carefully prepared and democratically conducted purge by the SACP and its allies of the only organised and coherent opposition to the Communist Party within the ANC: the grouping around ex-President Thabo Mbeki. The Mbeki grouping suffered a rout. It was wiped out in the senior executive body of the ANC, its National Executive Committee, and thus also - given the despotic nature of South Africa's electoral law, which allows Members of Parliament no accountability to constituents and thus no freedom of conscience - in Parliament and in the Government. Given the despotic character of the ANC's practice (developed under the Mbeki presidency) of party "deployment" of its so-called "cadres" throughout the agencies of state, there is no independent civil service, and the SACP is now increasingly in control of the levers of state.
In that sense, the eleven months since the conference at Polokwane have seen a fully constitutional "coup" within Government and the state in South Africa.
That is the significance of two related facts of the last six months: that an unelected ANC backroom apparatchik, Kgalema Motlanthe - whatever his qualities might or might not be - was parachuted into Parliament and then into the Presidency of the country, followed by the departure from the ANC of forfmer senior leaders of the Mbeki grouping and their forming of the nucleus of a rival political party, currently known as the Congress of the People.
With its two most senior leaders the former Minister of Defence and ANC national chairman, Mosiuoa Lekota, and the former Gauteng premier, Mbhazima Shilowa, this indicates the scale of the rout. Only by means of withdrawal from the ANC could the Mbeki grouping - a year ago, still the princes of ANC and government - attempt to regroup and recover some of its lost political position in the country.
In order to regroup, the Mbeki faction has had to change. Despite the fact that Mbeki himself and most of his most senior former administrative aides (his former Minister in the Presidency, Essop Pahad; his secret services minister, Ronnie Kasrils; his police minister, Charles Nqakula; and even Shilowa, former premier of the most powerful economic and administrative region of the country) are all former members of the SACP and had commanded the party for decades, and are in the best position to know the scale of their defeat by a revamped SACP, this faction has been forced to turn to many of the most important ideas in the political philosophy of its former main rival, the Democratic Alliance, rooted in the liberal and constitutional history of western Europe and the United States.
The leopard has had to change its spots.
Lekota was best placed to represent the former Mbeki grouping as its most articulate public exponent, in making this sharp turn. This was for several reasons. He had not been a member of the SACP. He did not go into exile, and had not been part of the Stalinistic apparatus of the SACP and the ANC in their despotic rule over ANC members in exile. He had developed extensive personal support and respect as a leader of the United Democratic Front within South Africa during the Eighties. He belongs to the generation of the Black Consciousness Movement within the country from the late Sixties and Seventies, and thus has a completely different political pre-history by comparison with his older colleagues, who were suckled almost from the womb by the SACP and the ANC. And finally, in a grouping heavily dependent for mass support on an ethnic base so far mainly of isiXhosa speakers, he is a SeSotho speaker.
The SACP prepared well. No adequate attention has been given to this by any political commentator, myself included, despite the fact that the thinking of the SACP in preparing itself to become kingmaker of the country has been in the public domain for at least three years. The victory at Polokwane was won by years of slow, careful winning of support on the ground by the SACP, particularly in the trade unions, but also in ANC branches and in ANC bodies such as the Youth League, the Women's League and the Umkhonto we Sizwe Military Veterans Association, as well as in a variety of civic associations.
This was guided by a significant re-positioning of the political philosophy of the Communist Party. By the time of the downfall of the Soviet Union in the very early 1990s, the SACP - and its predecessor, the Communist Party of South Africa - had been governed by a slave-like obedience to the dictates of the Russian state for roughly 70 years. No demand by Moscow for this or that political turn was ever refused, or ever seriously contested. When Stalin and Bukharin (soon to be eaten up by Stalin) demanded a major reorientation of the South African party at the Sixth Congress of the Communist International in 1928, it duly complied, and accompanied its new turn with the expulsion of the party's founder and ardent loyalist, Sidney Percival Bunting. (He was lucky not to be in Russia, and died in his bed in South Africa).
Return of the SACP to South Africa as a legal body in 1990, and access of its members to government from 1994 as leaders of the ANC, was best symbolised in the figure of Joe Slovo, the leading architect of the party's political and military strategy over the previous thirty years. The fact that Slovo was born and bred in Lithuania, which was incorporated into the Soviet Union very shortly before the Nazi invasion less than five years after his family's departure for South Africa, was not entirely unconnected with the slavish loyalty of the SACP (and of the ANC in exile) to the Soviet state. (Had they remained, all Slovo's family would have perished under Hitler).
ANC government was a triumph for the SACP, but combined with the downfall of the Soviet Union - its essential precondition - this was also the cause of a major crisis for the party. A whole swathe of senior SACP leaders from exile, including Jacob Zuma, the current ANC president, as well as Mbeki, simply abandoned their membership of the CP.
Simultaneously, a whole corps of ANC leaders and significant supporters were almost overnight inducted into the capitalist class, whether by means of state-enforced Black Economic Empowerment programmes or through the strategic opening of their executive bodies to politically helpful black leaders by previously white-owned major corporations. This in turn was integrally related to the strategic neglect by the ANC (managed essentially by the Mbeki grouping) of the statist economic paragraphs of the ANC's most general programmatic document, the Freedom Charter, adopted at the Congress of the People at Kliptown in 1955.
A Stalinist-type command economy had been advocated by the SACP within the ANC for decades. Within South Africa, however, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe - home from home for many of the exile leaders, and hundreds of their cadres - was followed by a rush for sudden wealth by the ANC and former SACP elite, a bizarre social transformation in which so-called revolutionaries became fat cats overnight. The Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), a proposed statist economic programme prepared by the Macroeconomic Research Group (Merg) under the direction of the former SACP leader, founder of the Anti-Apartheid Movement, former Maoist and former official of the Bank of China, the late Vella Pillay, was left to gather dust.
A fixed pillar of the Mandela and Mbeki presidencies - that no action should be taken against the primary interests of big capital in South Africa, and against the rights of property in general - remained firmly in place: until Polokwane.
Its most visible expression, a grotesque embourgeoisment of the firmament of black political life in South Africa, was sullenly resented however by lower-level leaders and members of the SACP, who saw their erstwhile comrades elevated into gods while "the masses" continued in poverty more or less as before, and in some cases, in worse poverty. Along with this sense of "the revolution betrayed", and a sense among lower-level party cadres that they had been relegated to the status of oxen for bringing in the vote for the elite at election time, the tide of economic globalism simultaneously swept away a good deal of South Africa's former industrial base; and words were sometimes heard among older black people that, economically, life had actually been better under apartheid.
This was good growing weather for the language of economic autarky, whether of the fascist or the Stalinist type: the state in command over capital, the state as the miracle-worker that would put an end to the poverty and disenfranchisement of the masses, as the dispenser of social justice, and as the avenging angel of retribution on the bowed heads of the elite. The rhetoric of the Zuma grouping at the head of the ANC "alliance" now speaks this language, so familiar from the Great Depression of the 1930s. It is the language of the mob, of "Kill for Zuma", of the establishment by the party-state of street committees (or rather, vigilantes) in the place of an efficient police force, of dispensing with the right of the accused to remain silent when in the hands of the police (see here).
Organiser-in-chief within this state can only be the SACP, the party which has most carefully prepared for this day.
The self-implosion of its former temple of holiness, the Soviet Union, required this party to begin to think for itself (a little), or die. It has done so, more thoroughly than it has been given credit for. Its principal "theoreticians", among them the party's deputy general secretary, Jeremy Cronin, replaced the worn-out, sclerotic loyalty to the dead letter of the Soviet textbooks (familiar from the days of his predecessor, Michael Harmel) with eclectic magpie borrowings from varied writings made available by the international New Left of the Seventies, which had previously been Verboten to the party faithful. Principal among these has been the strategy of the flexible, patient, building-up of support at base throughout the society, as advocated in the writings of the jailed Italian marxist thinker, Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), discussed previously here).
There was a time in exile when a committed Gramscian in the ANC would have landed up in Quatro prison camp in Angola, the SACP/ANC centre for the re-education and rehabilitation of dissenting voices. Now, however, even more terrible concepts from the lexicon of the doomed have entered the basic thought structures of the revamped SACP, among them - get thee behind me, Satan! - Trotsky's concept of "the revolution betrayed" and his theory of the "uninterrupted revolution". (Such unwise sentiments led to their murder for tens of thousands in the days of Comrade Stalin, applauded enthusiastically by the SACP and its predecessor, the CPSA). But more is nog 'n dag, and the SACP has been liberated by the downfall of its Soviet patron to flirt fruitfully with the language and concepts it previously scorned and punished as heretical.
"The revolution betrayed" - by this, the SACP explains the defection from its ranks of the leaders of the Mbeki wing who became transmogrified into the sleek, well-tailored administrators of the post-1994 capitalist state.
"Uninterrupted revolution" - by this classic phrase from Trotsky (alternatively, "the permanent revolution", or "the revolution in permanence"), the SACP means that the task ahead is the really important, second revolution that will transfer the state power into its own hands and all the means of production into the hands of the state (i.e., itself).
"Bonapartist" - here too the Central Committee employs a phrase from the vocabulary of trotskysim. Given that the SACP is a Stalinist party, it does so rather creatively, since Trotsky used the phrase to refer principally to Stalin and the way in which Stalin's bureaucracy imposed itself as the dictatorial power following the decline of the revolutionary process, in the same way that Napoleon Bonaparte ascended as Emperor of the French after the revolutionary Jacobins had followed their moderate rivals, the Girondists, to the guillotine. The SACP refers to Mbeki and his apparatus as "bonapartist" (not without good reason, given its autocratic behaviour). This is thoroughly dishonest, however, since no party in South Africa is as programmatically commited to bonapartist dictatorship as this unregenerate Stalinist party itself ("dictatorship of the proletariat").
These three phrases from the banned book of trotskyism are accompanied by a fourth phrase, generally heard during the decades of the exile from the followers of Chairman Mao Zedong. (Some few of these followers were expelled from the SACP, as in the case of the jailed maoist leader, Rowley Arenstein, and also Vella Pillay in London ). This fourth phrase, the term "comprador", is used to describe the members of a weak, colonial bourgeoisie intimately bound up with and dependent on the great metropolitan capitals of the main centres of international finance: Wall Street, the City of London, the Paris Bourse, and so on. Under the term "comprador", these local capitalists are regarded as traitors to the nation in which they operate, as agents of the imperialist foreign powers. A substantial number of them found themselves before the firing squad in Mao's China , the prototype for the revamped SACP in its war against the "comprador" black bourgeoisie in South Africa , which it accuses of betraying the masses of black people in the interests of white capital.
No doubt this discourse sits uneasily in the post-Polokwane ANC, given the (temporary) co-existence alongside Jacob Zuma and the SACP of a most eminent trio of alleged "compradors" and beneficiaries of BEE: Cyril Ramaphosa, Tokyo Sexwale and Mathews Phosa, all notoriously accused of treachery by ex-President Mbeki in 2001 through the agency of his then police minister, the late Steve Tshwete.
The careful preparation over three years of the SACP's peaceful "coup" at Polokwane should be studied even more carefully by anyone interested in the future of South Africa. An important document from the SACP in which the subject matter of this article is discussed at length appeared in a special edition of the party's online magazine, Bua Komanisi (May 2006).
It is preceded by a foreword written by the party's general secretary, Blade Nzimande, who states that it is an official discussion document of the party's Central Committee, though it did "not constitute the official views of the SACP".
Interestingly, it indicates that the current dispute over the role of the SACP in South African politics between the Lekota-Shilowa grouping in the "Congress of the People" and the Zuma wing of the ANC (with the SACP its principal organiser and strategist) is the outcome of a long-lasting thread of argument in South African political life. It notes that the issue was expressed in a debate among very senior political prisoners on Robben Island in the 1970s and 1980s, around a paper written by the High Command of Umkhonto weSizwe, entitled 'Inqindi ne Marxism' (Nationalism and Socialism).
The acrimonious response of the Mbeki grouping (then at the head of the ANC, in party and government) to the SACP's document of May 2006 in Bua Komanisi is available here.
It ends (page 10) with a series of difficult questions for the SACP, including problems of infiltration and asking (item 53) whether the SACP has the right to align itself with some sections of the ANC against others - and asks how the ANC should respond. These questions are now given an even sharper edge, as the beaten political grouping which once seemed almost as secure as the old National Party surveys its one-time ally, turned adversary, turned master in the party and the government.
Ahead of the general elections next year, the question of the SACP is the question of the hour. Nobody knows this party so well as its former members and allies. One would be unwise to think that the leaders of the Lekota/Shilowa grouping do not know what they are talking about when they argue - however they might restrain their language in public - that the SACP is a threat to the Constitution.
These documents should be studied and restudied, and their thinking carefully analysed. They are at the centre of the forthcoming election campaign, and much else. When Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu warned in September that "The way of retribution leads to a banana republic", and Moeletsi Mbeki, the brother of the ousted President, argued that South Africa is entering an "era of anarchy" these are the parameters of the coming conflict, in which a central place is held by the Communist Party.
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