[Marxism] Statement of The South African Communist Party (SACP)

["Charles Brown" <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Statement of The South African Communist Party (SACP)
Central Committee
February 15, 2004

United - towards an overwhelming an election victory

The Central Committee of the South African Communist
Party (SACP), chaired by cde Charles Nqakula, met on
February 13th and 14th. This is the final CC before the
April 14th elections, and much of the meeting was
devoted to ensuring that the SACP's organisational
structures and activists are ready to intensify the
Party's contribution to ensuring an overwhelming ANC
election victory. In particular, the SACP will target
workers and the urban and rural poor.

The CC received and debated an extensive political
report presented by the secretariat. In the run-up to
the elections we believe it is important to celebrate
the achievements and assess the challenges and
difficulties of ten years of freedom. In particular the
CC underlined two key aspects of our government's own
assessment of the past 10 years. In its important ten-
year overview ("Towards a Ten Year Review") government
notes:

"The advances made in the first decade by far supersede
the weaknesses. Yet, if all indicators were to continue
along the same trajectory, especially in respect of the
dynamic of economic inclusion and exclusion, we could
soon reach a point where the negatives start to
overwhelm the positives."

We note that others, like the DA's Tony Leon, have also
quoted this passage for their own purposes and with
some malign glee. However, what they have failed to
quote is another critical insight contained in
government's ten year review:

"From an assessment of the various themes, it can be
seen that the government's successes occur more often
in areas where it has significant control and its lack
of immediate success occurs more often in those areas
where it may only have indirect influence."

Taken together, these and other critical strategic
insights go to the heart of the matter. This appraisal
by government explains the ANC election manifesto's
commitment to a strong, developmental state and
parastatal sector. It explains the commitment to spend
R100 billion of public money to drive a massive
infrastructural programme. It explains the
prioritisation of creating work and of mobilising
millions of ordinary South Africans to work together
with government to carry forward transformation.

As government's review correctly implies, wherever
there has been a reliance on the private capital to
drive transformation, there has been disappointment and
frustration. In its elections campaigning for an
overwhelming ANC victory, the SACP will point out how
capitalists have systematically sought to undermine
major gains. The very significant legislative and
regulatory gains made by workers in terms of labour
rights, safety regulations, minimum wage determinations
for farm and domestic workers, or security of tenure
rights on farms are often systematically undermined.
Private capital has retrenched, casualised and
outsourced -depriving workers of the hard fought-for
gains they had made in terms of pensions, medical aid
and other rights. Private capital has made solemn
commitments to create jobs at the Jobs Summit and the
Growth and Development Summit, but everywhere it is
importing machinery and firing workers, or
disinvesting. In the election campaign the SACP has
every intention of placing the principal blame for many
of the social and economic challenges that confront our
people squarely where it belongs.

As we speak, there are a number of worker struggles
going on. One strong thread that runs through these is
the impact of casualisation and outsourcing, and of
retrenchment. We condemn the stubbornness of Equity
Aviation in persisting with its unilateral increase of
working hours without increasing wages, and we call on
Transnet to assume some responsibility. It was Transnet
that privatised this function and reached an agreement
with affected workers that there would be no downward
variation of conditions for a period of about two
years. This agreement has been flagrantly broken. The
CC pledged to mobilise SACP structures in support of
these worker struggles.

In the campaign, the SACP will be taking further its
Red October campaign, focusing in particular on the
most vulnerable sectors of the working class -rural
workers, casualised workers, those in the "informal"
sector. Vulnerability in these sectors often
particularly affects women. We are broadening this
campaign to focus on acceleration of land and agrarian
transformation, with a particular focus on access to
productive land for household-based subsistence
farming. We will also be engaging all the role-players
in this regard, including white commercial agriculture.

The Party, along with the ANC, will also be paying
particular attention to two key provinces, KZN and the
Western Cape. In these provinces in particular, there
are sections of the working class that, for various
reasons, have tended to vote for opposition parties.
The SACP will actively engage with these sections of
the working class, and we will ask them to consider the
consistent anti-worker, anti-trade union, and anti-poor
stance of the DA and the IFP. These parties are also
the strongest advocates of whole-sale privatisation,
outsourcing and casualisation. Dominated by grandees
from the past, they have launched vicious attacks on
working people, calling for less regulation of the
labour market, and for poverty wages.

The CC also devoted considerable time to a discussion
on the deepening crisis in Zimbabwe. The SACP sent a
formal delegation to Zimbabwe in December, which met
with senior ZANU PF cabinet ministers, the leader of
the opposition, Morgan Tsvangirai, and the leadership
of the ZCTU, amongst others. The SACP has continued to
engage actively with our own government, with our
alliance partners, and with our various colleagues in
Zimbabwe.

The CC expressed cautious optimism that both ZANU PF
and the MDC have committed themselves to formal
negotiations in the coming weeks. The SACP agrees with
our government that a negotiated transition offers the
most probable and certainly the most desirable path to
breaking the political impasse that is impacting with
such devastating effect on the social and economic
situation in Zimbabwe. However, the SACP is uncertain
about the degree of commitment to serious negotiations,
particularly from the side of the ZANU PF government.
We are concerned that there might be a lack of urgency.
We are also deeply concerned at the continued
repression of workers, opposition activists and of
journalists. Such measures do not help to create a
climate in which serious negotiations, in which both
sides assume full, patriotic responsibility for taking
their country out of its crisis.

The SACP also believes that it is very important that
we do not allow ourselves, as South Africans, to be
manoeuvred into a position in which it seems that we,
or at least our government, needs the negotiations to
succeed more than the Zimbabweans themselves. The
negotiations are, fundamentally, about Zimbabwe's
needs. Successes should be Zimbabwean, and failures and
delays should be blamed on the relevant Zimbabwean
formations.

The SACP further believes that, for too long, the
public debate in South Africa about Zimbabwe has been
dominated by a conservative liberal paradigm. Zimbabwe
is read as an allegory for South Africa, and it is
supposed, if implicitly, to represent the inevitable
outcome when "they" (a black majority government) "take
over". In the course of this public discourse, human
rights get opposed to national aspirations - for
national sovereignty, for land reform, for overcoming
the legacy of settler domination of the economy. The
Freedom Charter of the ANC, and the longstanding values
of our own movement have always understood the profound
linkage between human and broader social rights and
constitutionality on the one hand, and the struggle for
national liberation on the other. We must not, as South
Africans, allow the Zimbabwean reality to drag us into
the trap of opposing these things.

The SACP agrees that the land question is very central
to consolidating the Zimbabwean independence struggle.
We agree that the continued monopolisation of this key
sector of the Zimbabwean economy as late as 2000 (20
years after independence) by some 4 500 white farmers
acted as a massive brake on transformation. However, a
lawless, populist inspired land grab by an elite in the
inner circles of government is a cruel caricature of
the kind of land reform that the rural poor of Zimbabwe
(and South Africa) so desperately require. The "fast-
track" land reform in Zimbabwe has left hundreds of
thousands of the poorest of farm workers displaced and
without work.

In the coming period, the SACP will continue to engage
our counterparts in Zimbabwe, we will continue to
express our grave concern at human rights abuses, we
will support all genuine attempts to take forward the
social and economic struggle for full independence, and
will do our best to foster negotiations.

In the course of our meeting, the CC learnt of the
death of Catholic Archbishop Denis Hurley. Archbishop
Hurley played a hugely progressive role in our country,
particularly during the apartheid years. He urged
Catholics to engage with the realities of our society,
he encouraged defiance of racist laws by Catholic
institutions, including schools, and from a perspective
of compassion and Christian duty he consistently
advocated taking the "choice of the poor". The SACP
joins millions of other South Africans in expressing
our sense of pride that our country nurtured such an
outstanding human being. We dip our banners in his
honour.

http://www.sacp.org.za/pr/2004/pr0215.html
<http://www.sacp.org.za/pr/2004/pr0215.html>





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