Cooking

After the Telkom down-time came the power failures (another one yesterday evening). These cut into the time available for composing this Communist University mailing. Yet the requirement for discussing the SACP discussion document is pressing. The difficulty of the matter is great. The fear of making an embarrassing, hasty, loose response looms large. Sometimes it seems as if the telephone and power problems could be the work of Renée Descartes’ “wicked demon”, re-politicised for the 21st century. Therefore please accept these roughly-sketched notes with apologies. Yesterday’s Chris Hani Institute debate at the Sunnyside Hotel was well attended and of a high standard, but finally indeterminate. It showed us to have been brought close to a “Hic-Rhodus-hic-salta” moment where choices will have to be made, or chances lost. The day before (at his Monday press conference) SACP Deputy GS Jeremy Cronin said the following (according to Business Day): “Our core constituencies are exactly the same and we have to ask — why do it? We have about 73 MPs in the National Assembly. As a party, we have huge influence in Parliament.” Cde Cronin’s ability to get to the heart of the matter is evident. If the SACP’s and the ANC’s core constituencies are exactly the same there is hardly even a need for two organisations. Or alternatively if the SACP is already in the National Assembly “as a party” then it does not need to make any changes - and changes are risky. So why are the SACP and the ANC still separate organisations, in alliance, as opposed to one single structure? Is it no longer the case that the working class is distinct and that the SACP is its vanguard party? Is it no longer the case that the working class needs an overt alliance with non-working-class masses through an organisational vehicle of popular democratic power, such as the ANC? The Deputy GS seems to be saying that these questions are best left unresolved for the present. Others have certainly taken the view that the SACP (and by implication the working class as a whole) can “go it alone”. But such comrades are scarce. It is hard to find even one individual who will own up to this foolish position in public. Others again speak of winning a parliamentary majority and forming a “Communist Government”, without specifying what is to be done about the other, and more powerful, constituent parts of “state power”. These are the “special bodies of armed men” (the police and military), the “sovereign” constitutional judiciary, and the administrative bureaucracy. Without dealing with these there is no question of possession of “State Power”. In South Africa, the elected legislature is by design the weakest component of the state. The “levers of power” are not found there. A “Communist Government” would be obliged to manage capitalism, like any other parliamentary “labour” or “social-democratic” government of the past. Others, including some at the CHI event yesterday, believe that the National Democratic Revolution should have been, and should now be, “led by the SACP”. By what means this imposition could be effected is not clear. If, on the other hand, this SACP leadership is to be won and not imposed, then there is no impediment and has never been. In fact the discussion process now under way appears to be, precisely, an assertion of the leadership of the working class and its vanguard party, in practice. The elected presence of the SACP in parliament “as a party” in its own right should not preclude the continuation of the alliance. It is hard to see the force of Cde Cronin’s argument in this regard. Practically speaking, in an SA parliamentary election, there is no confrontation of candidates at local level, but only a “list process”. The existence of a separate SACP list could as easily relieve as exacerbate the scramble for ANC seats in the next parliament, none of which are guaranteed to the SACP. In terms of the whole, concrete picture, some comrades at the CHI event were asking what was the SACP’s intention, or in fact prescription, for the future. The SACP’s purpose, like that of any other communist party, is not to render itself, or the state, into the sole historical agent. Its purpose is only to help make the working class a class-for-itself. The intention, as before, is to realise the slogan: Power to the people! Linked below are the Business Day report of Jeremy Cronin’s press conference plus Zwelinzima Sizani’s excellent article from the current Umrabulo. Click on these links: Cronin rejects going it alone, Wyndham Hartley, Business Day (360 words) Motive forces and the ANC, Zwelinzima Sizani, Umrabulo 25 (2341 words)