The media has focused on just one thing in the SACP’s Bua Komanisi document – should the SACP put up its own candidates in the next elections? But focusing on this question alone can divert the reader from the real content of the document. Jenny Grice takes you through it.
Last July, the SACP’s Special National Congress agreed to set up a commission to look at the SACP’s relationship to state power “including the question of whether the SACP should consider contesting elections in its own right.”
The discussion document in the May edition of Bua Komanisi is the result of this resolution. The findings and recommendations of the Commission will be tabled for discussion and decision at the Party’s next congress in July next year.
Analysis of the ANC’S path after seizing power
According to the 48-page document, early historical ANC analysis assumed that once the ANC took power in the country there would be an “uninterrupted” transition to socialism. However, once the ANC actually took power, the dominant grouping within the ANC-led state came to believe that the balance of forces was not right to advance to socialism.
Instead the national democratic stage had to be prolonged so as to stabilise capitalism so that it could grow and accumulate the resources needed to redistribute resources to address the apartheid legacy of poverty, dualism and so on.
Economic growth plans went through three different phases:
first macro-economic policy [GEAR] to drive growth [1996-9] [the 1996 class project]
then privatisation as a catalyst for growth [1999-2002] and finally
the period we are now in – infrastructural investment to “lower the cost of doing business”.
The ANC has also favoured the idea of promoting a developmental state. This developmental state is closely tied in to the global community so that it can bring benefits to the country. And because of being so closely linked to the global community, “international best practice” has strongly influenced the move within the government towards a strong presidential centre.
Issues the SACP wants its structures to debate
How do we interpret the current turmoil within the ANC and its alliance – is it a manifestation of the growing crisis and internal contradictions of the 1996 class project?
If so, what are the underlying reasons for this crisis?
How should the Party intervene tactically [and strategically] in this conjuncture?
Should we seek to engage the widest range of ANC forces, presenting a unifying [but left] strategic perspective for emerging collectively from the crisis?
Should we align ourselves with some forces within the ANC against others?
Are the current structures of the Alliance appropriate? Is there the possibility of redefining them, and if so, what priorities should we have?
Should we actively back a specific presidential candidate in 2007 and 2009?
What is the balance of effort that our cadres should devote to the Party itself, and to the ANC? Is there merit in calling on communists to prioritise the struggle to rebuild a mass-based ANC in 2006? Or should we rather prioritise consolidating the SACP – while agreeing that these are not necessarily mechanical alternatives?
What should the Party’s medium to longer-term perspective be on electoral participation?
Often this is linked to a new political elite and a new generation of black private sector BEE managers/capitalists dependent on the state. To fully reap the benefits of the global community has also seen an attempt to “modernise” the ANC from a revolutionary organisation to a “modern, centre-left” electoral party.
SACP criticisms of this path…Economically
The SACP believes that the encouragement of capitalist accumulation to fuel growth has blinded the ruling party to the fact that this accumulation is “actively reproducing” the dualism and poverty that the state is trying to improve.
And emerging black capital that is closest to the ANC is not helping the situation either. Because of the way in which capitalism developed in this country, it has to rely on “special share deals, affirmative action, BEE quotas, fronting, privatisation and trading on its one real piece of “capital” [access to state power] to establish itself.” In short, the document describes this grouping as “excessively compradorist and parasitic” because it is not expanding the forces of production, nor job creation.
To make matters worse, black capital is not united. It is linked to and actively supports different factions within the ANC and because of its links to different media corporations “we see all of these dynamics playing themselves out in the war of leaks and ‘informed sources’ around the various corruption scandals [real or alleged].”
The document also criticises the state’s perception of the developmental state. And it believes that there are dangers in the ANC relying on the global community. Instead it views the global community as playing an even stronger imperialist role now that the Soviet bloc has collapsed. Hence the “disappointments” the country has experienced at the G8, in the United Nations and in the WTO.
…Politically
The document also believes that the ANC’s attempts to modernise the ANC have failed. It has been unable to transform itself from a mass-based party to a modern day electoral party.
It says that in the modernisation process, there has been a “deliberate strategy to marginalise the SACP and Cosatu and even to provoke a walk-out from the alliance.” However, it has underestimated the extent to which members are still strongly in support of the alliance.
If this modernisation is allowed to continue, the danger is that the ANC will be swallowed up by a “petty bourgeois cadre focused almost entirely on commercial racketeering”. If this were to happen it would weaken the ANC’s ability to take on white capital that still dominates the economy.
…and the national democratic strategy
The SACP has no real problem with the idea of a national democratic strategy. The danger is if the strategy is reformist rather than revolutionary. To be revolutionary, the strategy must “transform class, racial and gendered power” and lay the groundwork for socialism. This requires:
a more mass-based ANC strong enough to put pressure on capital.
a progressive developmental state that acts firmly against corruption and has effective public sector managers.
a stronger parliament that has the right to amend the budget
the review of floor crossing legislation.
an alliance between the working class and the mass of urban and rural poor.