SACP is merely red, filled with hot air and vague all over
The South African Communist Party’s (SACP’s) 14th party conference this week was a predictably smug affair. In its own eyes, the party has a special “scientific” understanding of the dynamics of the capitalist mode of production. Little wonder, then, that when the central committee surveyed almost a century of tumultuous historical events in its political overview, the only unbroken thread the party’s leaders could discern was their own extraordinary prescience and insight.
Given that it has failed to secure any of its key objectives over the past 96 years, it is surely time for a rethink. In particular, the SACP needs to explicitly say what is wrong and what is right, and how its goals can actually be accomplished.
SACP activists still find it hard to look history in the face. In exile, the party achieved the only real triumph it has enjoyed: its ascendancy in an alliance with the ANC. Their joint formation of a military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, was the key to this power. But it was also counterproductive when it came to ending apartheid, because “red peril” and “terrorist” narratives deterred domestic and international forces from acting decisively against Pretoria.
The SACP has never come to terms with the malign character of the Soviet Union. This week, its central committee noted that there was a “strong economistic tendency” in the Soviet system and “an overemphasis on developing and modernising the forces of production to the detriment of democratising the relations of production”. This resulted in problems such as “the harsh treatment of other popular classes, notably the peasantry”. You can say that again.
Instead of distancing itself from the party of the gulags, the SACP still celebrates its role in “keeping the red flag flying” when the Russian empire gratefully imploded. The party needs to decide where it stands on the political institutions and ideals of democracy. Does it support constitutional government, the rule of law, media freedom and human rights? Or do these continue to be “bourgeois” and “liberal” institutions and ideas, or merely provisional pseudo-accomplishments that are a diversion from the real revolutionary project?
The SACP’s biggest failing, however, is that it usually knows roughly what it is against, but has no credible positive programme to define and realise concrete policy objectives.
This week, it complained about accelerated rent-seeking, the emergence of a shadow state and creeping authoritarianism. It knows where some of these problems come from: a history of private monopoly capital domination, the subordination of SA within global capitalist value chains, and spatial inheritances from the reserves, bantustans and apartheid cities.
The trouble is that the SACP has no real idea what to do to remedy these problems. It attacks “Third Way” social democracy but has no equivalent philosophy for running a capitalist economy.
THE PARTY NEEDS TO DECIDE WHERE IT STANDS ON THE POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS AND IDEALS OF DEMOCRACY
It supports “game-changing sectoral measures”, but has no plans for the human or financial resources of such interventions. It wants “working class hegemony over the state” – whatever that means — but advances no concrete steps to attain it.
Instead of practical proposals for action, the SACP continues to celebrate vague generalities such as “anticapitalist agitation”, the “decommodification” of social services and “struggling against bureaucratic aloofness” in the public sector.
We should expect more from a self-styled “intellectual vanguard”.