SACP message on the 109th founding anniversary of the ANC

Friday, 8 January 2021: The South African Communist Party (SACP) salutes the African National Congress (ANC) on this important occasion of its 109th founding anniversary. The ANC has played an important role in uniting the oppressed to wage the struggle to overthrow colonial and apartheid rule and oppression in our country, and in rebuilding and transforming our country following our 1994 democratic breakthrough in the interests of especially the workers and poor.

The weapon of unity

As things stand, the greatest enemy to our movement is not from outside but from inside. Internal divisions and factional conduct anchored in capitalist relations and associated competition for access to and control of organisational and state power and resources constitute the biggest threat to our national democratic revolution and movement.

The national democratic revolution—our programme for democratic and broader social transformation towards the goals of the Freedom Charter—depends on the weapon of unity to succeed. Therefore, the SACP takes this opportunity to emphasise the importance of organisational renewal and unity of the ANC. That must include the unity and reconfiguration of the ANC-headed Alliance to function optimally. The Alliance remains strategically important. We expect the ANC to lead in protecting and nurturing this Alliance.

The SACP calls upon the ANC and the whole of the Alliance to stop using important gatherings, like conferences and congresses, as battlegrounds for factions. Neither should we begin to attach names and surnames to the resolutions of our movement as if they were adopted to target certain individuals.  

As the SACP, we are ready to make our modest contribution towards the unity of the ANC and the motive forces of our shared strategy—the national democratic revolution. As our Special National Congress resolved in December 2019, our key organisation building task is to unite and rebuild our entire movement and advance the second radical phase of the national democratic revolution. We are facing this strategic task under conditions of mutually reinforcing and worsening multiple crises of the global capitalist system.

The pandemic crisis

The urgent task we face is to overcome the pandemic crisis—the surging spread of COVID-19 and the loss of life that occurs due to the deadly virus. The SACP expresses its heartfelt condolences to all the families that lost their loved ones because of COVID-19. As a people, we need to unleash our entire capacity to bring COVID-19 under control and stop any further loss of life. Therefore, the SACP reiterates its support for the COVID-19 preventative measures announced by President Cyril Ramaphosa on 28 December 2020. We call upon every person, family, and community in South Africa to adhere to the COVID-19 preventative regulations.

The SACP also wants to take this opportunity to emphasise its call—Put people before profits. The World Health Organisation has made an important statement for the COVID-19 vaccine to be made a global public good. What the WHO now needs to do is to ensure that becomes a reality.

In the same Batho Pele (People First) spirit, the government should ensure that the production and/or sourcing of the COVID-19 vaccine is not subordinated to or captured by private wealth accumulation interests. The need to protect the supreme right to life, and the collective interests of the people, must come second to none.

Furthermore, there must be no space left to corruption and state capture, old and new, to occur in the sourcing of the COVID-19 vaccine. By corruption and state capture, we include undue influence by private, vested interests.    

The economic, social reproduction, and ecological crises

The pandemic crisis is not the only crisis of the global capitalist system. Long before the COVID-19 pandemic inequality, unemployment, and poverty were entrenched because of the endemic crisis of the capitalist system and its logic of uneven development across and within borders.

The capitalist systemic problems of inequality, unemployment, and poverty are particularly acute in the Global South. This is because of the persisting legacy of colonial domination and imperialist exploitation. Our efforts to achieve economic turnaround should therefore go hand in hand with intensifying our anti-imperialist struggle. It is crucial for us to drive radical structural transformation of our economy and eliminate colonial, apartheid, and imperialist relations.

The importance of making employment creation, poverty eradication, and inequality reduction, key targets in our economic and social transformation policies, cannot be overemphasised. We need to overcome the crisis of social reproduction linked with inequality, unemployment, and poverty. By the crisis of social reproduction, we refer to the increased problem faced by millions of poor and working-class households to make ends meet—to support life itself.

In the same vein, we should strengthen our collective efforts to tackle gender-based violence and hold the perpetrators to account. The SACP welcomes the ANC National Executive Committee decision to disqualify any person involved in gender-based violence from standing as an ANC ward or proportional councillor candidate in the forthcoming local government elections.

Finally, the world needs to overcome the crisis of climate change caused by the persisting environmentally destructive patterns of capitalist production and consumption. We need to make our contribution as a country to overcoming the catastrophic crisis.

Issued by the SACP, 8 January 2021