5-24-06, 9:46 am
Foreword
The document that follows is in two parts, and it forms the basis for discussions both inside and outside the SACP on the relationship of the SACP to state power in a democratic South Africa. These documents are official Central Committee Discussion Documents, but they do not constitute the official views of the SACP.
Amongst the issues that our Special National Congress (SNC) discussed in July 2005 in Durban was the question of whether the SACP should contest elections in its own right. Much as there was very fruitful and informative debate and discussions, the matter was not concluded by the SNC. That SNC took a resolution that the Central Committee must establish a commission to investigate the SACP’s relationship to state power in the current period and into the future, including the question of whether the SACP should consider contesting elections in its own right.
In discussing this SNC resolution, the Central Committee felt that the best way to guide and conduct this debate must be through a structured discussion document, and this is what this special edition of Bua Komanisi contains. This document has been developed and approved by the Central Committee to facilitate such a discussion...(continues)
Blade Nzimande SACP General Secretary
Central Committee Commission Discussion Document Part One
Class, National and Gender Struggle in South Africa: The Historical Relationship between the ANC and the SACP.
“Our claim that we are a vanguard party of the working class is in no way diminished by our close association with the national liberation front headed by the ANC… A Communist Party does not earn the honoured title of vanguard merely by proclaiming it. For example, a working class Party does not exercise its vanguard role in relation to the trade unions by capturing them or transforming them into wings of the Party, but rather by proving that the Party and its individual members are the most ideologically clear and the most devoted and loyal participants in the workers’ cause. The same principle applies to a situation such as ours in which the main immediate instrument for the achievement of the aims of our national democratic revolution is a mass movement capable of galvanising all classes in an assault on racist power. The African National Congress is such an instrument and our loyal participation in the liberation front which it heads is in the best interests of the class whose vanguard we claim to be”
“It is clear that the dominant force in this alliance must be the working class and it is their supremacy in the new state that will emerge after victory, which will prevent our revolution from grinding to a halt at the point of a formal political take-over.” (“The Way Forward from Soweto” – Extracts from political report adopted by the Plenary Session of the Central Committee of the SACP, April 1977)
The history of the SACP in South Africa can be captured, simultaneously if not principally, as the history of the relationship between national and class struggles in our country. It is a history of a struggle for socialism in a context where the immediate struggle is that of national liberation.
The conception of the national question and class struggles in the history of the SACP
Our critics to the ‘left’ and right have always criticised the SACP for having either prioritised the national question at the expense of the class struggle, or the class struggle over the national. The ‘left’ has over the decades accused us of subjecting the class struggle to a nationalist, if not petty bourgeois, struggle. The right has always insisted that raising the issue of the class contradiction within our revolution threatens to undermine or weaken the unity of the liberation movement to fight against national, and racially based, oppression. We have of course always (correctly) insisted that the question in South Africa is not about which struggle is primary, the ‘class’ or the ‘national’. It is a question of properly grasping the relationship between the two. In addition we have also argued that the fundamental contradiction is the class contradiction – it is the key causal contradiction that helps to explain the underlying dynamics of South African society. The national contradiction remains the dominant contradiction – it is the contradiction that dominates virtually all facets of South African society.
Consequently our approach to the class and national struggles necessarily sought to pose the question of the exact nature of the relationship and ‘transition’ between the national liberation phase and socialism. The SACP has consistently, but sometimes not very clearly, proposed a set of answers to these and related questions. Much as there is a close relationship between:
-the articulation between “national” and “class struggle”, on the one hand; and -the transition from national liberation to socialism, on the other.
These two sets of things are not identical. National and class struggles are always taking place whether consciously or otherwise in any struggle for liberation and independence. But the achievement of formal national liberation and independence may occur without a simultaneous or rapid transition to socialism. The distinction and relationship within and between these two sets of relationships have been a subject of decades of debates within Marxism-Leninism. They are, perhaps, one of the key defining features of Marxism-Leninism in the era of imperialist colonial domination and exploitation.
For further conceptual clarification, the relationships outlined above are not reducible to the relationship between the ANC and SACP, though it could be argued that the dominant organisational expression of these relationships for most of 20th century South Africa was through the alliance and the relationship between these two formations.
From 1928 to 1962 – two stages with an uninterrupted connection
The original tentative elaboration of the question of the relationship between the national and class struggles, and specifically the question of a transition from a national democracy to socialism was articulated for the South African reality in the 1928 ‘Native Republic Thesis’ . This general strategic approach was subject to ongoing debate and increasingly more coherent elaboration, notably in the SACP’s 1962 Programme, ‘The Road to South African Freedom’:
“South Africa is not a colony but an independent state. Yet masses of our people enjoy neither independence nor freedom. The conceding of independence to South Africa by Britain in 1910 was not a victory over the forces of colonialism and imperialism. It was designed in the interests of imperialism. Power was transferred not into the hands of the masses of people of South Africa, but into the hands of the White minority alone. The evils of colonialism, insofar as the non-White majority was concerned, were perpetuated and reinforced. A new type of colonialism was developed, in which the oppressing White nation occupied the same territory as the oppressed people themselves and lived side by side with them
“On one level, that of ‘White South Africa’, there are all the features of an advanced capitalist state in its final stage of imperialism. There are highly developed industrial monopolies, and the merging of industrial and finance capital… But on another level, that of ‘Non-White South Africa’, there are all the features of a colony. The indigenous population is subjected to extreme national oppression, poverty and exploitation, lack of all democratic rights…”
The 1962 Programme thus characterised this political and economic regime as ‘Colonialism of a Special Type’. Incidentally the 1962 Programme does not in any way argue for a ‘two-stage’ revolution, first national liberation and second, a transition to socialism, though a number of indirect inferences and interpretations can be made from the programme to this effect. For example in talking about the SACP’s unqualified support for the Freedom Charter, the 1962 programme states:
“The Freedom Charter is not a programme for socialism. It is a common programme for a free, democratic South Africa, agreed on by socialists and non-socialists… (The SACP) considers that the achievement of its aims will answer the pressing and immediate needs of the people and lay the indispensable basis for the advance of our country along non-capitalist lines to a communist and socialist future”
Clearly the relationship between national democracy and the transition to socialism is seen as being incorporated in the implementation of the demands of the Freedom Charter. The 1962 programme further conceptualises this relationship in its economic development proposals thus:
“In order to ensure South Africa’s independence, the Party will press for the strengthening of the state sector of the economy, particularly in the fields of heavy industry, machine tool building and fuel production. It will seek to place control of the vital sectors of the economy in the hands of the national democratic state and to correct historic injustice, by demanding the nationalisation of the mining industry, banking and monopoly industrial establishments, thus also laying the foundation for the advance to socialism”
The 1962 programme distinguishes between national liberation and socialism, but, at the same time, conceptualises these struggles as inextricably linked. It also seems that the Party had anticipated a transition from national democracy within the framework, of a ‘non-capitalist path’ in the post liberation phase of the national democratic revolution – although this concept is never explicitly evoked for the South African revolution.
However no real details were provided on how this would concretely unfold, perhaps for the understandable reason that the actual trajectory of the NDR would be determined by the historical conditions, both global and domestic, and, by implication, the nature of the transition itself. Of course we said we would be guided by the classic Marxist-Leninist approach, ‘Conrete analysis of concrete conditions’, which would determine the appropriate course of action. However, and interestingly, the 1962 Programme talks about an ‘uninterrupted’ transition from national liberation to socialism, again without any detailed elaboration of the meaning of ‘uninterrupted’.
Perhaps some of the omissions and lack of further elaboration at the time of drafting the ‘Road to South African Freedom’, derived from other contingent factors that shaped its conception of the relationship between the national liberation struggle and the struggle for socialism. It was drafted during one of the most difficult times of our revolution, the banning of the ANC in 1960, exile and imprisonment of many of our leaders and cadres, the declaration of South Africa as a republic in 1961, thus consolidating apartheid rule, and in the process creating many other uncertainties.
Cde Shubin (“The ANC, A view from Moscow”) for instance details some of the many challenges and complications facing the movement as a whole at this time. The priority, under conditions of illegality, was to forge maximum possible unity within the Congress movement and its components, thus for a number of years creating uncertainty as to whether to revive SACP structures, when everything should be thrown into rebuilding structures of the ANC as the prime liberation movement. For instance Cde Shubin hints at another consideration, supposedly suggested by sections of the CPSU to some in the SACP at the time, that perhaps, like in China and Vietnam, the liberation alliance must be headed by the communist party.
1962 and Morogoro, a shared assumption about global trends
The 1962 programme was also premised on what was to be later also elaborated and adopted at the ANC’s Morogoro Conference of 1969, that the world was in a transition from capitalism to socialism. Amongst other things, the SACP’s “Road to South African Freedom” characterised this global trend thus:
“The SACP regards as a dogmatic distortion of Marxism, the concept that African countries which are in a precapitalist stage of development must necessarily pass through a period of capitalism before achieving socialism. We are living in the epoch of the transition, on a world scale, from capitalism to socialism. The experience of the Soviet Asian Republics, of People’s China, Vietnam, the People’s Republic of Korea, and People’s Mongolia, show that in our epoch it is possible for the people of colonial countries to advance along non-capitalist lines towards the building of socialism”
Clearly the analysis of the SACP and (more or less explicitly) the ANC’s Morogoro analysis assumed a ‘global’ trend that was fostering the possibility of a relatively short and relatively uninterrupted transition period between a national democratic breakthrough and a transition to socialism in South Africa.
From the above it is therefore clear that a particular confluence of developments in the 1960s to the 1980s (possibility of ‘non-capitalist’ path to socialism or a socialist oriented national democracy against the background of a ‘world wide transition from capitalism to socialism’, the close resemblance between the SACP’s 1962 programme and the ANC’s Morogoro Strategy and Tactics of 1969, whose similarity were to be further strengthened in the ANC’s ‘Green Book’ of August 1979 , and the overlapping leadership of ANC and SACP) embodied a common assumption about the relationship between the attainment of national democracy and a transition to socialism. All this did not necessitate a thorough discussion and elaboration of this relationship and transition.
For instance, the 1979 ‘Green Book’ had, amongst other things, this to say on the longer-term objectives of the national democratic revolution:
“We debated the more long-term aims of our national democratic revolution, and the extent to which the ANC, as a national movement, should tie itself to the ideology of Marxism-Leninism and publicly commit itself to the socialist option. The issue was posed as follows:
“In the light of the need to attract the broadest range of social forces amongst the oppressed to the national democratic liberation, a direct or indirect commitment at this stage to a continuing revolution which would lead to a socialist order may unduly narrow this line-up of social forces. It was also argued that the ANC is not a party, and its direct or open commitment to socialist ideology may undermine its basic character as a broad national movement.
“It should be emphasised that no member of the Commission had any doubts about the ultimate need to continue our revolution towards a socialist order; the issue was posed only in relation to the tactical considerations of the present stage of our struggle.
“The seizure of power by the people must be understood not only by us but also by the masses as the beginning of the process in which the instruments of state will be used to progressively destroy the heritage of all forms of national and social inequality. To postpone advocacy of this perspective until the first stage of democratic power has been achieved is to risk dominance within our revolution by purely nationalist forces which may see themselves as replacing the white exploiters at the time of the people's victory. We emphasise again, however, that, as was the case with organisations such as FRELIMO and MPLA (both of which committed themselves to the aim of abolishing the exploitation of man by man early on in their struggle), care must be exercised in the way we project ourselves publicly on this question”...(read more)
