As we mark the 90 years of struggle of the Communist Party in South Africa a question arises: How should we communists remember our own history? The answer to that question is, of course, AS communists - or, which comes to the same thing, as Marxist-Leninists. But what exactly does that mean?
One way (a non-communist way) of remembering our history would be to recount it as a succession of great leaders. As the SACP, we can certainly be proud of our many outstanding leaders, stretching back over nine decades of struggle - from the early pioneers of communism in South Africa (and indeed in Africa) like Cdes David Ivon Jones, SP Bunting, TW Thibedi, Eddie Roux, Edwin Mofutsanyana and Josie Mpama, through the years of consolidation and mass building associated with Cde Moses Kotane and JB Marks, into the more recent decades of armed struggle, organs of popular power and underground work, and finally through to the democratic breakthrough of 1994 and beyond. We should cherish the memory of our many outstanding cadres. But our Party's history is richer and more complex than a litany of leaders.
We could remember our history as a simple narrative of humble beginnings, then decades of intense persecution, followed ultimately by the "just reward" of an "inevitable" victory. The Communist Party in South Africa has certainly suffered persecution and we have also been in the midst of important popular victories. But a simple narrative in which history (and therefore our own history) marches along towards a just goal is profoundly non-Marxist-Leninist. There are all kinds of dangers in remembering our history in this way.
To be sure we have suffered persecution - it was the Communist Party that was the very first party to banned by the apartheid regime (10 years before the banning of the ANC and PAC).and we have a long list of martyrs, including Cde Johannes Nkosi in the 1930s, all the way down to Ahmed Timol in the 1970s, Matthew Goniwe in the 1980s, and Chris Hani in the early 1990s (to mention just a few).
The Party has certainly earned the respect of a wide range of South Africans, especially the workers and the poor, because our cadres have been prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice. And while we have every right to be proud of our martyrs, the fact that we have suffered persecution does not create any entitlements for us in the present. We have to earn our vanguard role on a daily basis in struggle and through the clarity of our analyses and programmatic lines of march.
More importantly, the idea that history in general (and our own in particular) is a simple narrative moving from lowly birth, through suffering and hardship, to ultimate victory is a vulgarization of what is absolutely central to Marxism-Leninism. Remember what the Communist Manifesto says: history is the history of class struggle. The moment you say "class struggle" you are starting to remember that history does not march in a straight-line. We are not playing solo.