Blade Nzimande, General Secretary, SACP, Remembering Joe Slovo in the year of Build Working Class Power for a Solidarity Economy: The SACP and the ANC Centenary, Avalon Cemetery, January 6 2012
We gather here today again to commemorate and remember our hero, Cde Joe Slovo, on the 17th anniversary of his passing away. We are also gathering on the eve of the Centenary of the African National Congress, and during the 90th anniversary of the SACP - organizations that Cde Slovo served with distinction and flying colours.
Of course, many things we are going to say about Cde Slovo today, if he were alive he would not allow us to say. This is because Cde Slovo never expected to be praised for the role he played in our national liberation struggle and the struggle for socialism in our country. Instead the sacrifices he made were not for his personal glory or benefit, but for the benefit of the overwhelming majority of our people, the workers and the poor. This is of course one of the major lessons and values that we respectively must learn from and preserve.
As we celebrate the ANC Centenary this weekend, we are also pleased to say that next month, on the 12th of February we shall be celebrating the 100th birthday of Mrs Kotane, the wife of our late and longest serving General Secretary of the SACP, Cde Moses Kotane, uMalume. Mam'Kotane is only exactly one month younger than the ANC!
Intensify the fight in all terrains of struggle
Cde Slovo, like a true communist, spent all his life fighting in all terrains of struggle to advance the national liberation struggle and for the reconstruction of our country after 1994. One lesson we must learn from this that communists must be in all terrains of struggle!
In the lead up to the Second World War, Cde Slovo, as part of the then CPSA and the YCL, was part of the anti-fascist movement in our country. Not only that, but when the Communist Party in our country, and the entire international communist movement, decided to directly participate in the war in the early 1940s after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, Cde Slovo went and served in the war as part of the Allied forces.
When the ANC and the entire Congress movement, embarked on mass action and the Defiance Campaign in the 1950s, Cde Slovo was in the trenches, building on the very successful mass work of the Communist Party in the 1940s, mass activism that produced communist heroes like Dora Tamana.
When our movement decided to embark on the armed struggle in 1961, by the way a decision of both the ANC and the SACP, Cde Joe Slovo - like Chris Hani and many other communists - was amongst the first not only to join, but to plan and recruit for MK.
In 1990, when our movement took a decision to enter into negotiations with the apartheid regime, Cde JS became one of the leading negotiators in both the Codesa and the early stages of the Constitutional Assembly negotiations.
After the democratic breakthrough of 1994, Cde JS - then the National Chairperson of the SACP and a member of the ANC National Executive Committee - joined parliament and became the first Minister of Housing in a democratic South Africa.
There are a number of lessons we need to learn out of this. Firstly, that communists must be in all terrains of struggle, just as the SACP today is pursuing its strategic and programmatic objectives through building working class power in all key sites of power, both within and outside the state.
The second lesson is that whilst participating in all key sites of power we must always keep our eyes on the ball. This means that we must at all times understand the strategic and tactical priorities of our movement in each and all key terrains of struggle. This is the difference between being in all terrains of struggle and being all over the place!
Being all over the place is like shooting in the dark, hoping that you will find your target, usually characterized by the lack of appreciation of the strategic and tactical priorities of our movement. Being all over the place is to confuse the radical sounding noises of populists and demagogues with the interests of the workers and the poor of our country!
What does the above mean in the current conditions? For instance it means that being in an alliance does not mean sacrificing the independent identity of our Party, just as retaining the identity of our Party, does not mean one should and cannot enter into alliances. In fact it is independent parties that enter into alliances!
Cde Slovo was a member and a leader of both the ANC and the SACP. He was an exemplar par excellence of the revolutionary notion of dual membership. In fact ‘dual membership' is a revolutionary innovation of the South African Communist Party in the South African conditions. It simply means good communists must also be in the ANC and, if they are employed workers, they must also be in COSATU as well. Being in the ANC does not diminish your role as a communist!
That is why the (neo) liberals, the ultra-left and demagogues all equally attack the notion of dual membership, because their aim is to break our Alliance, and particularly isolate the communists, as part of an attempt to defeat the national democratic revolution. Let us be like Joe Slovo and serve all our Alliance formations with distinction. In fact dual membership is the very condition for effective communist participation in all terrains of struggle!
Celebrating the life, struggles and sacrifices of Joe Slovo also means working even harder to preserve and strengthen our Alliance. Despite the many challenges, difficulties and, sometimes, serious tensions within our Alliance, communists must never make the mistake of losing faith in, and abandon the task of, strengthening our Alliance. Even in the past when we were provoked to walk out of the Alliance, as the SACP we never stopped seeking to work with the ANC and fully supporting it in the elections, because we always have a broader picture of the revolutionary tasks of our Alliance and the continued necessity of its existence and unity.
The SACP wishes to state that under the current leadership of the ANC, led by Cde Zuma, there has been significant improvements in the relations within the Alliance at national level, despite the many challenges that face us, especially at subnational levels. That is why the SACP wishes to express its confidence in the current leadership of the ANC especially on its commitment to the strengthening of the Alliance!
The ANC Centenary: Let's keep the eye on the ball
As the Communist Party in South Africa, now in our own 90th year of unbroken struggle, we take special pride in the fact that for over 80 years, communists have served in the ranks of the ANC. Shoulder to shoulder with other patriotic revolutionaries, communists have helped to build and sustain the ANC. But also, through their activism within the ANC, communist cadres have carried over into the SACP a deeper appreciation of the centrality of the national question within our struggle, and of the power vested in a majority's sense of collective national grievance and of mass-based, national capacity. Our shared history is a history of continuous cross-fertilisation.
That is why the SACP is immensely proud of the ANC Centenary. Very few, if any, liberation movements have reached this milestone. This is simply because the ANC is a people's movement, whose values and objectives represents the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of our people. It is the only organization, together with the Alliance it leads, that has the programme and policies that are best able to advance the interests of the workers and the poor of our country. Its strength also precisely lies in being a multi-class formations that also represents a wide variety of other social components of our society: the workers, the youth, the women, the progressive middle classes and both black and white of our society.
The strength of the ANC also lies in the fact that from the very beginning the founders of the ANC critiqued and denounced narrow tribalism, and launched an organization to forge in struggle a new African identity. In so doing they were advancing a revolutionary understanding of identity - not something fixed biologically at birth, not something cast in stone by language, or religion, or culture - but rather a complex process of becoming, shaped by social interaction and active organization.
This radical approach to identity also lies at the heart of the ANC's longstanding and remarkable espousal of non-racialism. This inclusive and open-ended approach to national identity is one of the great, world-historical contributions of the ANC and of the struggle it has led. There are many parts of the world today, both developed and undeveloped, that could benefit from this foundational principle of the ANC.
Indeed we all need to remain vigilant against the ever present dangers of bureaucratism, organizational and political stagnation, and distance from the masses - a fate that has befallen may a liberation movement or communist party in power.
The best way to celebrate the ANC Centenary is to be like Joe Slovo, to fight in all sites and terrains of struggle whilst simultaneously being focused. What does this mean? It means a principled commitment to the objectives of the national democratic revolution. It means avoiding populist and demagogic approaches to the solution of our problems, and avoid exploiting the poverty and unemployment situation of our people for opportunistic or short term gains or to seek cheap publicity. Keeping our eye on the ball means focusing our attention on the unity of movement and alliance.
Keeping our eye on the ball also means intensifying the struggle for the battle of ideas and consistently expose, in our current situation, the ideological bankruptcy and political intentions of both the white liberal offensive against the majority character of our democracy AND demagoguery and tenderpreneurship. It means understanding the political agenda of the liberal offensive for what it is, that of using the courts and our other institutions supporting democracy to frustrate government decisions and undermine our sacrosanct principle that THE PEOPLE SHALL GOVERN.
The liberal offensive wants to decide for a President mandated by a popular organizational and electoral mandate, who to appoint as Chief Justice or Public Prosecutor. This liberal offensive seeks to win through our courts and other institutions supporting our democracy what they have failed to win through the vote!
The tenderpreneurs seek to steal our organizations for purposes of personal and private accumulation of wealth. Often they seek to use the ‘slogans' of the left in order to hide their accumulation agendas.
Let us use the Centenary year of the ANC to intensify ideological work both inside and outside our movement. That is what Joe Slovo would have expected us to do in this period. Let us keep our eye on the ball by thoroughly implementing a programme to realize the five priorities of our movement: decent work, access to education and health, fight against crime and corruption and rural development. This requires that we effectively combine both our power inside and outside the state to defend our gains and deepen the national democratic revolution as our most direct route to socialism!
Keeping our eye on the ball, also means an unwavering and principled commitment in the implementation of the SACP's 2012 programme of action:
Remember Joe Slovo in 2012: The Year of Building Working Class Power for a Solidarity Economy
Cde Slovo would today be very pleased at the growth of the SACP both in its membership as well as its stature amongst our people. For instance over the past ten years the membership of the SACP has grown from 20 000 members in 2002 to 146 000 by January 2012. We must indeed grow our Party even further so that our presence can be effectively felt throughout all key sites of power and society. However, as Joe Slovo often emphasized, we must also seek to grow the quality of our membership so that we retain the legacy of our Party as a party of revolutionaries.
Our Party has grown largely because of our own campaigns, but also through our ability to be in all sites of struggle. Through this growth we must be able to take our campaigns to higher levels, and intensify our participation and presence in all key sites of power and influence, both inside and outside the state.
It is for this reason that our December 2011 Central Committee adopted a very focused programme of action to intensify Party activism. The main goal of our PoA is to increase communist activism on the education front, by focusing on improving the functionality of our schools and with intensified focus on skills development, especially the skilling of the working class. We will engage all our communities, teachers, school governing bodies, pupils and government to improve the quality of education in our country and also pay increased attention to closing the infrastructural gap in our education system and the ideological orientation of our curricula.
We will also use 2012 to take forward our campaign for the transformation of the financial sector. We will be seeking to convene a second financial sector summit, involving both the public and private financial sectors, in order to ensure that resources in these sectors are used for developmental purposes.
In addition, as we join the COSATU struggle for a living wage and the fight against the labour brokers, we will also focus on the increase of the social wage for the working class, especially for affordable housing, transport, a national health insurance and access to higher education for the children of the workers and the poor.
The SACP will also this year pay closer attention to the building of the motive forces for rural development, especially to build a rural progressive women's movement serving the interests of the rural poor. We also wish to warn the right-wing Afri-Forum and organizations of their ilk that the SACP will defend the progressive orientation of the Land Reform Green Paper and that we shall not allow the beneficiaries of the apartheid land grab to frustrate access to land and food security for the overwhelming majority of our people. We urge the Minister of Land Reform and Rural Development not to be diverted by the forces of reaction in leading government's efforts towards provision of land for the people.
Our 2012 PoA aims to continue the struggle to roll back the greed of the capitalist economy and seek to build an economy and set of values based on solidarity instead of the dog-eat-dog mentality of the barbaric capitalist system.
In doing all of the above, we will intensify the struggle against corruption. This is also a year for the Congresses of all our three Alliance formations. The SACP will seek to use these major events to deepen the unity and coherence of our movement and fight against all tendencies that seek to undermine this.
We shall do all this in honour and memory of Cde Joe Slovo!
Issued by the SACP, January 6 2012
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