Speech to the SACP 13th National Congress by Zwelinzima Vavi, General Secretary of COSATU, University of Zululand, KwaZulu Natal, July 13 2012
General Secretary of the SACP, Cde Blade Nzimande
National Chairperson of the SACP, Cde Gwede Mantashe
Members of the Politburo of the Central Committee
Leaders of the working class from Africa and the rest of the globe
Leaders of the Alliance and other fraternal organisations present here
Members of the Diplomatic Community present
Leaders of the working class from the townships and villages of this country,
Delegates to the 13th Congress of the SACP,
Invited guests and the media,
It is always an extra special honour to be invited to address a National Congress of our vanguard party, the South African Communist Party, the revolutionary Party of Socialism.
Comrade delegates, the importance of this 13th National Congress should not escape us. Contrary to the prophets of doom and the machinations of imperialists across the globe, the red flame is still burning. This is true of South Africa today and the rest of the globe.
This majestic gathering is an indictment of some intellectuals who hurriedly concluded that the demise of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall signified the end of history and the eternal triumph of the capitalist system.
This 13th National Congress is proof that communist parties are not relics of the past or things to be discarded in the dustbin of history. Communism, revolutionary communism in the best Marxist-Leninist traditions, is truly well and alive.
The enduring existence of the SACP is proof that indeed capitalism is not the end of history. On the contrary, the people in various nooks and crannies of the earth are forever engaged in the struggle to abolish capitalism and alter class relations in favour of the world working class and rural poor peoples.
Everywhere on the globe today people are challenging the fundamental ways in which capitalism organises society. There is a global consensus for example, that capitalist greed is killing the Earth through pollution, global warming and climate change, while simultaneously impoverishing billions of the world working class and rural peoples.
This National Congress takes place at a very remarkable moment. The month of July marks the 91st anniversary of the launching of our Communist Party. The SACP has grown from strength to strength. COSATU warmly congratulates all of you for ensuring that the party grows to over 160 000 members. As the general secretary said yesterday, the challenge is to convert each of these members into a new communist cadre armed with working class ideology.
The formation of the Communist Party of South Africa - the forerunner of what is today the South African Communist Party (SACP) - is inseparable from the history of the Great October Russian Revolution of 1917 and the launch of the Communist International in 1919.
The formation of the Communist Party of South Africa in 1921 was also a great victory for non-racialism. It solidified the labour movement's attempts to form a trade union movement that united all workers regardless of race. 1921 was preceded by the attempts of the International Socialist League in 1915 to organise African workers, and later, the formation of the Industrial and Commercial Union (ICU) in 1919 right up until the formation of SACTU in 1955 and formation of COSATU in 1985.
It is with pride that we say that Communists have always been in the forefront of organising workers and planting the seeds for revolutionary trade unionism in South Africa.
The unity of the Communist Party with the trade union movement is not an accident of history but a product of the unique history of South African brand of capitalism - which the SACP has correctly called "Colonialism of a Special Type, CST) and joint consistent programmes and revolutionary strategies over many years.
Today, in 2012, we can proudly say, without any fear of contradiction, that we believe that any narrative of the South African struggle against apartheid and colonialism, which omits the role of the party and communists, is simply ahistorical, incomplete and false.
We in the revolutionary socialist trade union Federation COSATU will forever remain indebted to the pioneering role the communists have played in this country in inculcating socialist revolutionary consciousness among the working class.
Where are we today?
As we mark 91 years of the party of socialism, we must take stock of the advances we have made and the setbacks we have faced in the struggle against national and gender oppression and class exploitation.
One of the most urgent challenges facing the party today is to provide a concise, scientific, clear class understanding of post-apartheid South Africa and the nature of global capitalism.
No one can deny that since the dawn of democracy workers enjoy a range of constitutional guarantees such as the right to fair labour practice, to form and join unions, strike and picket, the right to conclude union security agreements and the right to collective bargaining.
But the working class remains angry and frustrated. Let me share with you fellow revolutionaries what explains the groundswell of anger amongst the working class in South Africa today.
The apartheid fault lines remain in place in employment, healthcare, education, housing, transport, and across the entire broad spectrum of our society and its economy.
A rich, mainly white, minority gets the lion's share of wealth and economic power, access to world-class healthcare and education services in the private sector and a lifestyle amongst the most luxurious in the world.
Meanwhile the overwhelmingly black, poor majority suffer from deep poverty, massive levels of unemployment, pathetic levels of service delivery in healthcare and education, housing and transport, and little hope of escaping from a daily struggle to survive.
Unemployment among Africans was estimated to be 38% in 1995 and it stood at 45% in 2005. Overall, the unemployment rate in the South African economy was 31% in 1995 and increased to 39% in 2005.
Income inequality has increased across the board. In 1995, the Gini coefficient stood at 0.64 but it had increased to 0.68 in 2008. The share of employees in national income was 56% in 1995 but it had declined to 51% in 2009, i.e. there has been reverse redistribution from the poor to the rich.
The top 10% of the rich receive 33 times the income earned by the bottom 10% in 2000. This gap is likely to have worsened, given the fall in the share of employees in national income and the global economic crisis of 2008 wherein in South African we lost 1.17 million jobs.
And inequalities in income and wealth ownership are still racialised. An average African man earns in the region of R2 400 per month, whilst an average white man earns around R19 000, a racial income gap of roughly R16 800. Black women are yet to be liberated from the triple oppression. While most white women earn an average of R9 600 per month, African women earn R1 200, a racial income gap of R8 400. 56% of whites earn more than R6 000 per month whereas 81% of Africans earn less than R6 000 per month.
Almost all the top 20 paid directors in JSE listed companies are white males, and in 2008 the top 20 directors of JSE-listed companies earned an average of R59 million per annum, whilst in 2009 the average yearly earnings of an employee was R34 000.
The means of production remain concentrated in white capitalist hands: 50% of JSE is account for by 6 companies and more than 80% is accounted for by large banks and companies engaged in the core of the minerals-energy-complex. Estimates of black ownership of JSE-listed companies range between 1.6% and 4.6%.
Women and children, especially black working class women are daily subjected to rape and abuse, in many of our cities, townships and villages and yet the repressive state apparatus seems more concerned about quelling resistance to neo-liberalism onslaught as seen through community protests and securing bourgeois private property in the likes of Rondebosch and Sandton.
This bleak picture explains the discontent of the working class in South Africa today. These are the material conditions that led COSATU together with the SACP in 2005 to conclude that in economic terms, it is capital that has reaped the fruits of our hard won freedom.
What does this economic reality mean in earnest? Could it be that the past 18 years of our democracy has mainly been about consolidating neoliberal capitalism whilst the working class has only received breadcrumbs falling from the capitalist masters' table?
Could it be that the dawn of democracy has provided capitalists in South Africa a golden opportunity to deepen class exploitation without the political inconvenience of being linked to a formally racist order?
We should remember that it was Lenin who said that "A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism, and, therefore, once capital has gained possession of this very best shell, it establishes its power so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois-democratic republic can shake it."[1]
We must honestly ask ourselves - has the post 1994 state been no more than a political shell for capitalist accumulation and class exploitation in South Africa?
In 1962, the South African Communist Party advanced the theory of Colonialism of a Special Type, to characterise both the economy and society of South Africa. In this Congress, you, our revolutionary vanguard, must assist us to understand whether we are well on our way in South Africa to dismantling this diabolical capitalist system. If we are not, what is to be done?
As communist revolutionaries and fighters, as the advanced detachment of the working class, you have a duty to interrogate these questions.
We, in the socialist revolutionary trade union movement in this country expect nothing less than the most penetrating, fiercely scientific, disciplined and accurate theoretical Marxist-Leninist critique of the world and South African capitalism, and the resultant correct revolutionary working class political programme to counter South African and world capitalism, from this Congress. Anything short of this will be doing injustice to the 91 years of existence of the South African Communist Party!
As workers, we direct these questions and demands to you because it is from revolutionary communists that we can get the most honest answers, because we understandcommunists to have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.
The ANC and the unity of the Alliance
For 18 years, the SACP and COSATU mainly have been making a point that we need to change the structure of the South African economy to end its external orientation and its domination by the mining-energy-finance complex. We have jointly campaigned for the introduction of a growth path, industrial policy, a change in macroeconomic policies, we have championed that the willing seller-willing buyer policies be abandoned in favour of a more radical and aggressive land redistribution and agrarian transformative programme for food security.
This Congress also takes place after the ANC National Policy Conference in which we consolidated some of the advances we made in the 2007 52nd conference.
Today there is a broad consensus and unity that the status quo is not politically sustainable and that we must move into a new direction which the ANC calls the second phase of the uninterrupted struggle to build a truly united, democratic, non-racial, non-sexist and prosperous South Africa.
The Alliance today is completely united that there is an urgent need for a radical shift to the left, on to a path to economic and social emancipation for the poor majority who have not benefitted economically from the first 18 years of our freedom.
The ANC Policy Conference has provided us with a window of opportunity to assess the class and ideological basis of the errors committed in the past 18 in order to avoid the same mistakes in the future and chart a new course to overcome the legacy of apartheid oppression and Colonialism of a Special Type.
The SACP will surely agree with us that we need to strengthen the campaign for thoroughgoing economic transformation, to escape from the straitjacket we, and other African countries, inherited from colonialism and apartheid.
The SACP will also share with us the sentiment that unless drastic changes are effected, the liberation movement stands the risk of falling out of favour with the majority of the working class.
It would be naive of us to think that a national liberation movement that presides over neoliberal capitalism will always enjoy the confidence of the very same people who are at the receiving end of neoliberalism and capitalism's destructive impact.
The biggest challenge facing the ANC and the rest of the democratic forces is not a lack of ideas but our failure to implement what has been agreed and to have the political will to implement what we know is politically and morally correct.
The ANC, its allies and the rest of the democratic forces, have for many years been pointing out the current weaknesses and have taken bold resolutions on what is to be done. Yet our track record in doing anything about the identified weaknesses leaves much to be desired. This has not been a problem of leadership alone but a problem of both those who lead and those who are led. We lack political will to implement our own decisions, in particular when those decisions are against powerful interests in the organisation.
Perhaps this 13th Congress of Communists in South Africa must address the question: what are the class origins and causes for the lack of political will to drive the agreed-upon revolutionary programmes of the liberation movement?
What is the real price of the social distance we have pointed out between the leadership and the masses?
Is there no danger that we will transform the whole movement into a weapon to fight palace politics but fail to implement revolutionary pro-working class and pro-poor people programmes?
Obviously, the answer to the question above will necessitate answering a second and very much related question: whose class interests dominate in the post-1994 South African state and government? This Congress must tell us.
It is clear to us that a critical question facing this Congress, as well as the 11th National Congress of COSATU in September, is: what is it that we as communists and a revolutionary trade union movement should do to keep the ANC united and focused on the task of giving a pro-working class and pro-poor people content to the second phase?
The unity we are referring to is genuine revolutionary unity, that is unity around a revolutionary programme of action in favour of the working class and the poor!
There will be no economic transformation led by divided and factionalised organisations, which are devouring themselves. The answer to the challenge of unity of the alliance cannot be based on practices of slaughtering of others and the savage ideology and practice of "survival of the fittest", but must be based on the need to solidify a broad front of left forces under the leadership of the ANC.
A revolutionary ANC pursuing consistently the goals of the National Democratic Revolution as captured in the Freedom Charter has the greatest potential to unite all motive forces of our revolution. However, this leadership mantle is not God-given; it must be earned in the theatre of struggles. As we have said before, leadership is not declared but earned - ubudoda abukhulelwa!
But there will be no unity in the ANC unless the SACP and COSATU inside themselves and among themselves are united.
More importantly there will be no change of direction and there will be no second phase unless the socialist axis itself is united. Such an axis of course must take the responsibility to mobilise the broadest left coalition of social formations including progressive intellectuals, academics and journalists, NGOs, faith organisations, progressive and revolutionary youth formations and yes, even single-issue-based but progressive organisations such as those that are fighting for free HIV and AIDS care and medicines, the protection of sex workers, the rights of rural landless peoples and so on.
Let us come to the area that has caused irritations and at times sharp differences between COSATU and the SACP in this period under review. That is the area of deployment of full time elected positions to parliament, which in the view of COSATU and not just a single one of its affiliated unions, had a potential of weakening the SACP and lowering its profile as a party for socialism.
We have discussed this matter a number of times privately and at the last meeting of the officials of the two formations we agreed that firstly a problem arose because the matter was taken into the public terrain and that there was no creation of a better environment for us to confront this internally. This was a mistake that all of us must learn from. By the way, addressing this matter here in this conference in full view of the bourgeoisie's media is not addressing it internally.
COSATU was and is still raising the point that there must be a balance between the need to build a strong and independent SACP capable of providing leadership to the working class and the need for the communists to contest power and influence every sphere of transformation. This is the official COSATU position and it is not a position of NUMSA or any one of its affiliated unions. The agreed to bilateral between the SACP and NUMSA must be held urgently.
The SACP assured us that they understood where COSATU is coming from in raising the matter, that we were raising the matter unlike others such as the strategic enemies of the SACP. At the same time COSATU understand that the SACP must contest political power. COSATU was raising the matter genuinely from the point of being jealous with the SACP as a vanguard party of the working class.
In the same bilateral SACP assured us, just as we assured the SACP, that we would not seek to impose leadership on one another. The SACP has a right to manage its own affairs in the manner it sees fit and elect its own leadership without any interference from COSATU and the ANC. Equally, COSATU has the same right. The task of the SACP is to unify trade unions not divide them. COSATU has a task to unify the ANC and the SACP and not divide them.
So all of us must recall the Miriam Makeba popular song titled ‘west wind' - whose lyrics make a call that says ‘unify us don't divide us - we are tired of poverty, we are tiring of dying - we don't want to die we don't want to be poor - unify us don't divide us!'
One of the biggest challenges is that we must work together to tackle, as we seek to build true unity of the left forces, is the struggle against innuendos, character assassination, rumour-mongering, slander and pigeonholing of individuals - the "them and us" mentality.
Without detracting from the need to maintain revolutionary organisational discipline and to genuinely provide accurate Marxist-Leninist characterisation of social phenomena, the easy and intellectually lazy mentality and practice of name calling and labelling simply encourages theoretical and intellectual idleness and quite frankly, is un-Marxist.
Historically communists have been in the forefront of advancing genuine human freedoms including the right to think freely and to revolutionary critical thought. Communism itself is, after all, a revolutionary critique of capitalism!
The communists we admire like Marx and Lenin were fearless revolutionary thinkers, polemicists and defenders of true democracy - proletarian socialist democracy.
Let us make a small example. We have made a call that if anyone knows of a communist and socialist trade unionist who is a unionist during the day and a businessperson at night (not that in itself, in fact, trade unionists, who are not communists and socialists are morally barred from being in business!) then such individuals must be confronted by the leadership with facts and be made to choose between being servants of the people and being businesspersons. This would lift the cloud of suspicion on everyone rather than launching a whispering campaign against individuals which does not build unity but aims to destroy such individuals!
The need for a Party rooted amongst the people
Comrades and friends, the vast majority of the organisations that have gained footholds in townships and villages across the country are a reflection of the fact that the neoliberal onslaught has not gone unchallenged.
These organisations that are engaged in mass struggles, through marches and demonstrations, on various issues such as unemployment, housing, water, sanitation and education, health, HIV/AIDS, domestic violence including rape cannot simply be dismissed as imperialist inventions that seek to muscle the ANC government out of power.
It is not the Free Market Foundation or AfriForum that are engaged in popular struggles that challenge the fundamental ways in which neoliberal capitalism organises our society!
Many of the organisations that COSATU passionately works with are engaged in popular mobilisation around the demands of the Freedom Charter.
These are organisations that challenged the state's blatant and murderous refusal to grant people leaving with AIDS the crucial treatment to pro-long their lives. These are organisations that through popular mobilisation and using the courts managed to ensure that today a child born to an HIV positive mother has a fighting chance!
These are organisations that challenged the greed of giant and multinational corporates that posed a stumbling block to the cheaper access to HIV treatment. These are the organisations that recently exposed a calamity where our children in Limpopo had no textbooks for six months.
These are movements that have been consistently calling for the abandonment of the market driven land reform process.
Many of these movements are sounding boards for the working class's frustrations with a commodified citizenship where access to basic needs is mediated through the market and money!
Many of these organisations constitute bulwarks against state privatisation and corporatisation in the fields of education, health and housing.
Many are also a symbol of the disenchantment of the poor and their impatience with a slim state, which allows capital to trample on their chests without any genuine intervention!
Many of these organisations are not in a war to save a minority from what liberals call a ‘tyranny of the majority'; they are instead in battlefields to annihilate the tyranny of the market.
Comrades and Friends, the Communist Party is faced with the daunting task to immerse itself in these struggles and weave these struggles into a potent weapon that can challenge the beast that is capitalism.
Our Party must fight the temptation to slide into easy condemnation, sectarianism, and negative labelling of all progressive organisations which it in fact needs to lead and mobilise against the capitalist system.
Communists have to do this not as an optional extra but as part of the core elements of the work of the Party. To repeat what Mao Tse Tung said, "Communists are like seeds and the people are like the soil. Wherever we go, we must unite with the people; take root and blossom among them."[2]
The groundswell of popular protests and mobilisation that we are witnessing today is a living testimony of the failures of the capitalist system.
Comrades and friends, the spectre of capitalism is haunting the world and our country. Never before the advent of capitalism have global objective conditions been so good for advancing the cause of a just world, a Socialist world as today.
The choice, for us the working class and the rural poor is a simple one - its either we surrender, starve and continue to die miserable deaths, or we continue to resist, fight and defeat the dark forces of capitalism.
The call we are making to you as Communists, as the vanguard of the working class is a simple one - Unify us, don't divide us! Unify us because it is through unity of the working class that we will ultimately defeat capitalism.
The organised section of the working class wishes you a revolutionary congress. Fly high Red Flag, Fly High! We need its shade from which we will hide! Viva SACP Viva.
Issued by COSATU, July 13 2012
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