3-18-05, 8:18 am
From Umsebenzi Online
Towards the SACP’s Special National Congress: Class struggles in the first decade of freedom
On 8-10 April 2005, the South African Communist Party will be holding its mid-term congress, the Special National Congress. When the 11th Congress, held in July 2002, decided to convene our national congresses every five years (instead of every four years), it also took a resolution to hold a special national congress during the third year of each five-year term. In this and in the following edition of our on-line publication we will reflect on some of the key issues facing our Special National Congress.
We have decided to hold this Congress on a weekend that is very important to our Party, the commemoration of the 12th anniversary of the assassination of our General Secretary, Cde Martin Thembisile ‘Chris’ Hani. Our Congress will be devoted to his memory.
In honour of Chris Hani, we shall use the actual date of the 12th anniversary, the 10th of April, to launch the ‘Know Your Neighbourhood Campaign’. This campaign is part of the Alliance programme of action for 2005. Its aim is to undertake door-to-door visits to our communities, seeking to understand the problems facing each household, and acting together to try and address these challenges, not least access to basic services. As communists, and acting together with our allies, we shall seek to understand our neighbourhoods, learning from the lived experience and struggles of our people. There is no better way to honour Cde Chris than to undertake, on an ongoing basis, intensive interaction with our people.
The Special National Congress will be held under the theme: “Communist cadres to the front - With and for Workers and the Poor”. The primary objective of the Congress is to consolidate our class analysis of the first decade of freedom, including challenges that lie ahead for the working class in our country.
As the SACP we have been consistent over the decades in grounding our analysis and struggle in South Africa in a Marxist-Leninist class approach. Much as we consistently point out that the class question cannot, in our conditions, be fully grasped and appreciated outside of its relation to the national and gender questions, the latter questions can only be properly understood if grounded in a class analysis.
To this end we are today publicly releasing all our discussion documents for the Special Congress, including the main discussion document “Class Struggles in the National Democratic Revolution (NDR): The Political Economy of Transition in South Africa 1994-2004”. As this paper points out, the SACP has been concerned that during the first decade of our freedom, analysis of class and class formation, both within our movement and in the public arena, has tended to take a back seat. This is happening at a time when the very terms of addressing the national and gender questions in our revolution are increasingly being fought on a class terrain, dominated by global and domestic capitalism.
Most importantly, our Special Congress will use this as a basis for undertaking a very thorough and frank review of our ten years of democracy from a class perspective. Some of the key issues will be the patterns of class formation over the last ten years of democracy, class struggle within and outside the state, as well as the situation of the working class and the challenges that lie ahead. However, we would not be doing this afresh, as the SACP has consistently engaged in analysis and struggle over the last ten years from a class perspective. These engagements range from assessing and interacting with government policies, black economic empowerment, our financial sector and land campaigns, and debates about Zimbabwe. However, we will use the Special Congress to consolidate this class analysis, as a basis for understanding the key challenges facing the working class and the national democratic revolution. For instance, a topic we have tended to shy away from is the analysis of the class struggles and contestations around the state. Ours is a situation where, whilst we have a progressive government whose mandate derives from the workers and the poor, the South African state still largely reflects the capitalist character of our society. Sections of the state have been transformed, but there is still some way to go in building a developmental state, fully biased towards the working class. This is because the emergent democratic state is a highly contested entity. It is contested by the established capitalist class, the emergent (black) sections of the capitalist class, the bureaucratic layer of the state, and the working class. Each of these class forces would like to see a state modelled along its class interests. Two key moments that highlighted sharply some of these class contestations over the democratic state, were around the debates on GEAR and the struggles over privatisation and restructuring of state assets.
It is not only the class character that is being contested, but also its national and gender content. Racial and patriarchal interests are still firmly embedded in many components of the state. Racist and patriarchal practices still remain strong in many state institutions. One has to look at sections of the justice system to understand the depth of some of these practices.
All these pose some fundamental questions that our Special Congress will have to reflect upon. Most important is the question of the contradictory reality of a progressive government within a capitalist state, and the challenges for consolidating a national democratic revolution in favour of the workers and the poor. Related to this is the question of the extent to which we can address the national and gender questions within an accumulation regime that continuously reproduces some of these colonial and apartheid relations.
Our campaigns have struck a chord with the mass of the workers and the poor of our country, as they unashamedly seek to advance the interests of the workers and the poor, and build their capacity as the principal motive forces for the revolution. Our Special Congress will also be doing a comprehensive evaluation of our campaigns since our 11th Congress in 2002.
However it would be wrong for the Special Congress to focus only on analysing class formation and class struggles as phenomena outside our own movement. Our own movement and alliance is a ‘broad church’ representing a variety of class interests. This is its strength, but also its potential fault-line. It is for this reason that Congress will have to frankly reflect on how the class contradiction manifests itself within our own broad movement.
For instance our alliance has been rocked by a number of tensions between 1996 and 2002. Were these tensions, the Congress ought to ask, merely about differences over government policy, or were they fundamentally a reflection of the deeper class contestations in broader society and within the movement itself?
One of the key challenges we face as a country is to fight corruption at all levels. Unlike the right-wing opposition in our country, we do not make the assumption that corruption is somehow inherent within a majoritarian ruling party like the ANC. In condemning corruption, we believe that much of it is related to the contradictory class realities of our situation. Ours is a revolution with political but without economic power. This sets up vulnerabilities to the machinations of the established (and emerging) capitalist class and the accumulation regime underway in our country.
Today we are publicly releasing all our Congress discussion documents, and invite our allies, the broad democratic movement, progressive intellectuals and all other forces interested in progressive transformation to engage with these documents and debates.
--Blade Nzimande is General Secretary of the South African Communist Party.
