One of the great legacies left to us by Cde Joe Slovo is the requirement that we properly understand and provide answers to the complexity of the South African situation: revolutionaries would have to understand the class content of the national question and the national content of the class question. In other words, their dialectical relationship helps us to correctly navigate vexed questions of the goals of our liberation.
Over recent years South Africans have witnessed an effort by the Democratic Alliance (DA) to rebrand itself as a political party that in racial terms serves the interests of all. With this manipulative and ideological botoxs, the DA has strongly operated from the position that South Africa's problems are devoid of their class and historical contexts.
The DA has conducted a massive exercise in selective amnesia about the historical injustices perpetrated by apartheid colonialism. The oppression, domination and exploitation of the blacks in South Africa have its roots in the economic structure of our country. It is this willful blindness to the blindingly obvious intersection of race, class and gender that accounts for why the DA tries to frame South Africa in post-racial terms. And it is why the DA's economic policies are confined to tinkering with cosmetic poverty reduction, while being deafeningly silent on inequality and class exploitation.
Instead the DA would have rather have us believe that the growing inequality is a sequel of dynamic changes in the global economy that rewards the highly skilled. This logic accounts for their misplaced attacks on the public education system, its objective challenges notwithstanding, and the renewed focus on the so called "knowledge economy".
Essentially this is a continuation of a pre-1994 liberal bourgeois mindset that assumed the "solution" to South Africa's problems is through a strategy that did in no way challenge the capitalist socio-economic and political status quo.
The latest twist in the DA's extreme makeover exercise has been the appointment of Lindiwe Mazibuko as party leader in parliament, and the announcement that Nosimo Balindlela (opportunistically and shamelessly donated by Cope's Terror Lekota) is mobilizing to build strong DA branches in rural areas, and the recent choreographed election (or rather co-option) of more black candidates at the recent DA conference.
The DA is using these developments in a desperate contortion to distance itself from any suggestion that it is a conservative party that represents a class agenda essentially serving a tiny white minority.
Poverty and inequality are increasing in South Africa mainly among formerly racially oppressed groups, and yet the DA has neither the intention nor the ability to frame economic and social policies even obliquely aimed at extricating millions of our people from the misery of impoverishment. Instead the DA has parroted economic policies of the sort that are responsible for the economic crisis in Europe, a crisis that continues to deepen.
The DA advances the 8% growth myth in its plan as part of an intervention to lift millions of our people from the daily hardships they endure through their slogan "make the market work for the many, not just the few". But this is a disingenuous proposition, refuted by decades of empirical evidence of just how the markets do actually operate. The markets have never worked for anybody except capitalist owners, corporations and their shareholders. The current global capitalist crisis is as a result of unquestioned adherence to the myth of benign capitalism. As we now see, even the social democratic welfare states of the Nordic countries cannot sustain their attempts to put a human face on capitalism, and are destroying public health and welfare services because in the final analysis they run counter to the logic of the capitalist system. This is where liberalism, especially its white variant Iike that of the DA, has always sought to betray the interests of the overwhelming majority of our people.
Incidentally whilst the DA preaches the virtue of the market and free choice, all its political predecessors, right up until 1994, never believed in majority rule. Instead they always advocated majority rule for whites, BUT a qualified franchise for the black majority.
With the majority of our people being working class and poor, and black, the argument that the capitalist market must lead is purely an argument in favour of the interests of the capitalist class, a class that continues to be mainly white, just as it was under apartheid.
The rise in poverty and inequality, though, has happened mainly among black South Africans. The Census report of 2011 shows that there are huge disparities in income levels between black and white. The DA however remains opposed to efforts to close the wage gap. In fact they have tirelessly campaigned for the introduction of legislative means to even lower wages for blacks through labour brokering and so forth. The DA has after all never took up the cudgels on behalf of the super-exploited black farm workers, but instead has firmly stood on the side of the white farmers, like in the current legitimate struggles of the De Doorns farm workers against the brutal exploitation by the baases and madames the DA stands for.
Access to healthcare remains extremely inadequate and the majority in this country who are black do not have access to quality healthcare. The DA, which for electoral purposes claims to represent all, remains opposed to the reform of the public healthcare system and the introduction of the National Health Insurance. Its Health Policy states:
"The DA's proposals require the state to provide an overall regulatory framework which would create a transparent and competitive environment, deliver some services and fund health care for the poorest citizens. It would also require the state to meet the overall strategic needs of the health system, and in particular, ensure that our human resources needs are met, that we have an adequate, affordable supply of medicines, and that the health system is properly geared up to meeting our key health challenges.
Within this environment the private sector would co-operate with the state to deploy its expertise, currently only available to a small number of paying patients, to provide quality health care on a far larger scale."
This is quite out of sync with the claims so propagandistically trumpeted by the leadership of the DA. The SACP and its allies argue for a healthcare system that is not based on the logic of profit but of meeting people's needs. In order for us to run an efficient, accessible public healthcare system the 10-point plan that seeks to address issues of infrastructure, management and availability of healthcare professionals remains crucial and must be supported.
The DA is as inconsistent on land as it is on affirmative action. While its policy positions attempts to make the right noises about redress and promises to get financial assistance to small farmers, its economic policy outlook is clear. The DA advocates for a smaller government that should stay out of the economy. This means its promise to engage financial institutions on behalf of emerging black farmers or subsistence farmers rings hollow. It is precisely the DA's insistence to keep the state out of the financial sector that makes nonsense of its pledge to assist rural communities in their struggle for land and food security.
The DA's opposition to affirmative action is rooted in the party's denial of the necessity of redressing historical injustice. This failure is linked to the DA's inability to appreciate the class fault lines and their racial manifestation in SA. The irony is that while the DA denies the correct application of affirmative action within broader society, it is applying affirmative action within its own ranks for narrow electoral purposes. It has taken young black members in the DA and fast tracked them into the upper echelons of the party structures so as to hold up the façade of racial diversity in what essentially remains a party of white and minority interests.
Even the international outlook of the DA is supportive of fascist tendencies, like its support of Zionist Israel against the legitimate aspirations of the oppressed Palestinian people. The DA has consistently and firmly defended the apartheid Israeli regime in its brutal suppression of the Palestinian people.
It is for the above reasons that no matter what makeover the DA tries to make, at it's core it remains the Party of the white baases and madames, and a strong supporter of neo-fascist causes like that of apartheid Israel.
Asikhulume!
Malesela Maleka is the YCL NC & NWC Member and SACP Spokesperson. This article first appeared in Umsebenzi Online, the online journal of the SACP.
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