Factional battles not in interests of SACP
Adecade ago, the South African Communist Party (SACP) was faced with what should have been an easy choice: to rise above factionalism or become part of a faction in the battle between supporters of Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma in the Polokwane war for the presidency of the ANC. Unfortunately, it decided to be part of the factional dynamic.
The SACP decided to be part of the Zuma coalition — at one point I referred to it as a coalition of the irrational — and forgot that rising above destructive tendencies such as factionalism is an essential element of its historical mission.
Allow me to digress a bit: about a year before the Polokwane conference, I was invited, with two other political analysts, to share my views with members of the National Intelligence Agency about the internecine battle for power and money that was tearing the ANC apart at the time. During my presentation, I made the point that our intelligence services were the midwives of our post-apartheid dispensation given the role they played in shepherding and protecting the negotiation process.
I then implored them to rise above factional battles in the governing party because such partisan behaviour would constitute a threat to both national security and the national interest since the privatisation of state intelligence capacity in pursuit of narrow factional interests would compromise the intelligence capacity of our democratic state. I reminded them that, as professional intelligence officers, they were duty-bound to rise above the narrow political interests of both the Mbeki and Zuma camps. Some of the intelligence officers were completely underwhelmed by my presentation.
They argued that they were revolutionaries and were, therefore, not professionals in the parochial sense I had posited.
They then told me that, as revolutionaries, their job was to defend the national democratic revolution, to which I responded by arguing that, by siding with either the Zuma or Mbeki faction, they were not acting in defence of the national democratic revolution. If my memory serves me, I lost the argument and those who were former apartheid intelligence officers among them kept quiet.
Back to the SACP: similarly, by choosing to be part of the Zuma coalition, the SACP, maybe inadvertently, chose not to act in defence of the national democratic revolution and certainly chose not to act in its best interests and the interests of the alliance and the ANC.
And history has spent the past decade giving feedback to the SACP about the decision to be part of the Polokwane factional dynamic.
Why did the SACP make such a strategic error? The answer is both complex and simple. The SACP’s choice was, in part, influenced by the fact that Zuma is not Mbeki.
Because of the levels of antipathy towards Zuma these days, it can be argued that the strategic error of the SACP was informed by the fact Zuma was not Mbeki then.
At the elective congress of the party this week, there are delegates who will be calling on the SACP to pull out of the alliance. They will also argue that the party must contest elections independently.
While opinion may be divided in this regard, the SACP is united in its antipathy towards Zuma. In fact, the guest of honour at the congress is Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa, whose presidential ambitions are supported by many in the party. How did Zuma become a pariah to an SACP that regarded him as a demigod only a decade ago?
The SACP was duped; it fooled itself into believing that, under the leadership of Zuma, the post-apartheid state would have a discernible, instead of a rhetorical, bias towards the interests of the working class.
This bias would find expression in a radical shift in the content of policy, particularly economic policy.
Also, too many in the leadership of the SACP believed the fairy tale that the alliance, not the ANC on its own, would constitute the strategic centre. It is because the Gupta family has become the strategic centre that some in the leadership of the SACP are denying the existence of white monopoly capital.
In other words, the SACP must not make the same mistake again. That is, it must not support the presidential ambitions of Ramaphosa simply because he is not Zuma. This would betray the same ideological bankruptcy that was betrayed by its decision to be part of the Zuma coalition a decade ago.
Whatever it decides on — pulling out of the alliance or contesting elections independently — the SACP congress must not burn the house to the ground just because a snake is hiding under the bed. Its decisions must not be guided by a linear conception of history.
THE SACP FORGOT THAT RISING ABOVE DESTRUCTIVE TENDENCIES SUCH AS FACTIONALISM IS AN ESSENTIAL ELEMENT OF ITS HISTORICAL MISSION