As the SACP nears its centenary the fight goes on — now against austerity and corruption JEREMY CRONIN
On Thursday the South African Communist Party (SACP) marked its 99th anniversary. In July 1921 a handful of delegates assembled in Cape Town to launch the Communist Party of SA (CPSA), as it was then known. There are uncanny echoes of those early beginnings in our present.
Ninety-nine years ago the world was stumbling out of the “Spanish” flu pandemic that infected 500 million, with some 40-million deaths. In SA nearly three million contracted it and 140,000 died. The flu was carried into SA by soldiers returning from the trenches of World War 1, but it was black South Africans, particularly mineworkers in unhygienic compounds and poorly ventilated mine shafts, who were especially vulnerable.
The geographic origins of the 1918 flu are unknown, but the key vector for its spread was the social dislocation of the inter-imperialist war. Likewise, Covid-19 is no exogenous black swan event. A pandemic of this kind was predictable and predicted by scientists. The global capitalist accumulation path is destroying wildlife habitats on an unprecedented scale, introducing new pathogens into human society.
World War 1 and the flu were interrelated with another underlying reality: a change in global hegemony was under way. Britain had begun its long decline. Germany, a defeated challenger to that hegemony, suffered suffocating reparations. Austerity imposed by the Versailles Treaty led to the rise of Nazism and the next world war.
The US was steadily ascending to its global hegemonic status. Now, visibly, that status is in full decline. The richest economy in the world has spectacularly failed to deal with Covid-19, as Donald Trump tries to make the US “great again” with sabre-rattling in the South China Sea and federal storm-troopers and armed vigilantes preying on Black Lives Matter protesters at home. Once more, these are dangerous times.
The delegates at the CPSA’s founding congress closely observed the international developments of their time. They condemned the barbarism of World War 1 and the ruling elites of competing imperialist powers who had led millions of workers and peasants to slaughter. The party’s founders called for working class internationalism. They drew inspiration from the 1917 Russian Revolution. There, conscripted workers and peasants had turned their guns on their superiors, overthrowing the warmongers at home and declaring their intent to advance to socialism.
A better world seemed possible. Like the
Russian revolutionaries, the CPSA’s founding members fully expected more developed societies, particularly Germany, would soon follow. Those expectations were not to be realised.
But through 99 years, communists in SA have carried the conviction that a better world is both possible and necessary. Hundreds of thousands of party members have made an inestimable contribution to our country. It was the CPSA, long before the ANC, that first demanded “one person, one vote”. The party was the first, and for many decades the only, political formation in SA to advance nonracialism, not just in principle but in its membership and leadership.
Communists were in the forefront of pioneering progressive trade unionism and investigative journalism. Dora Tamana, inspired by what she’d seen in the Soviet Union, ran co-operatives and food gardens in informal settlements on the Cape Flats in the 1940s and ’50s.
All of this did not go unnoticed by our enemies. Communists have featured strongly among the martyrs of our struggle, from Johannes Nkosi gunned down in 1930 all the way to Chris Hani’s 1993 assassination. Even post-1994, SACP anticorruption fighters have been assassinated in KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga and Limpopo.
In nearly a century of sustained struggle, it would be disingenuous to deny we sometimes harboured illusions or made mistakes. The SACP remains unapologetic about its partisanship across all the great battles of the 20th century. But the necessary taking of sides can lead to a certain onesidedness. The party failed until very late to recognise the horrors of the Stalin years or the degeneration of the Soviet socialist project in the 1970s and ’80s. As Joe Slovo wrote in 1990, one lesson we’ve learnt is that socialism from on high, socialism without democracy, will fail.
What about more recent local events, like the SACP’s implicit support of Jacob Zuma against Thabo Mbeki at the ANC’s 2007 Polokwane conference? This deserves a fuller reflection than is possible here. But a few pointers. State capture didn’t begin with Zuma’s presidency. Before the Guptas there were the Brett Kebbles. Before corrupt police chief Berning Ntlemeza there was police commissioner Jackie Selebi. Before the Estina dairy scandal there was the arms deal.
Much state capture is attributable to what we warned of in 1997 in debate with the Mbeki leadership. The SACP strongly disagreed that a supposedly “patriotic” black capitalist class should be promoted by the state as a key pillar of our democratic struggle. In the South African reality where would these aspirant capitalists without capital acquire capital? With few exceptions this would be through a compradorial route
(essentially fronting for established monopoly capital), or by way of parasitism (looting of public resources). The Mbeki grouping conceded these were dangers, but said the ANC would exert “vigilance”.
Sadly, predictably, there has been a blowback effect into the ANC by these fronting and parasitic networks. Large parts of ANC machinery now act as a transmission belt for primitive accumulation, disgracefully even with Covid-19 procurement.
But the “nine-and-a-half wasted Zuma years” narrative is only a half-truth. It neglects the earlier corporate capture of economic policy, allowing massive capital flight, including illicit transfer pricing and under-invoicing. This loss of potential job-creating, investible South African surplus rose to a staggering 20% of GDP in 2007. None of this excuses the Guptas or Zuma or VBS looters in the EFF. But it does put into clearer perspective the grave dangers inherent in wanting to return to the “sound” macroeconomic policies of the Mbeki era currently promoted by the leadership in the Treasury and the Reserve Bank as they lock us into International Monetary Fund conditionalities with our own self-imposed de-industrialising, unemployment-inducing austerity.
Is a better world still possible?
It has to be. In SA, Covid-19 has underlined the imperative and real possibilities of rapidly implementing a universal National Health Insurance that pools all health resources around common objectives. We need to defend a democratic, developmental public sector. There needs to be effective public support for the tens of thousands of co-operative, social solidarity efforts through which the urban and rural poor sustain some degree of livelihood. We need to advance the Freedom Charter call for the right of all to work. There needs to be aggressive land reform to socialise urban space and provide productive land for the rural poor. We need a real stimulus package, not the bogus one currently touted.
All of this means the battle within and beyond the ANC and state has to be waged on two fronts — against myopic austerity imposed by the Treasury and Bank on the one hand, and against rampant corruption on the other.