SPECIAL NATIONAL CONGRESS
Consolidate our revolutionary advances and roll back neo-liberalism
This CC political report provides the basis of the Central Committee report to the Special National Congress
This political report primarily seeks to provide a framework for the Central Committee report to our Special National Congress (SNC) in July 2015. It also seeks to open discussions on the contemporary political challenges facing our revolution.
Our SNC needs to assess the past two-and-half years since our last Congress and map a way forward, including the strategic and programmatic priorities for the SACP and the working class in the lead up to our Congress in 2017 and beyond. As has always been the case, our Congress is not narrowly about the SACP, but also about the Alliance, its components, and the broader challenges facing our movement and revolution at this point. The acid test against which we need to evaluate the past two-and-a-half years is the extent to which we have advanced our agenda to build working class hegemony in all key sites of power and terrains of struggle.
Over the last two-and-a-half years, the SACP and its cadres have made a sterling contribution in governance, especially in driving an agenda that is of benefit to the workers and poor of our country. No wonder our class and political enemies, including the last apartheid president, FW de Klerk, have resorted to their worn ‘rooi gevaar’ agenda, seeking to use this to roll back the gains that our revolution is making.
The single most glaring weakness since our 13th Congress is that of weakening mass campaigning and activism by the Party. We dare not forget that since 1994 where we have made the most impact, including defending the SACP from our enemies and detractors, including from inside our movement, has been through our strength deriving from mass campaigning, and ideological clarity on the tasks and challenges facing our revolution.
Over the past two-and-a-half years, there have been a number of issues the SACP could have taken up, including the increasing marginalisation of vulnerable workers, especially women in the domestic, hospitality and services sectors. As we have said before, the struggles for gender equality and women’s emancipation must not only be theorised or endlessly analysed but must be taken up through confronting the specific conditions and location of women in the neo-liberal restructuring of the workplace and in the broader economy.
As we proceed towards our SNC it is essential that we discuss ways and means of a serious resuscitation of the mass campaigns of the SACP, especially the financial sector campaign, which must be at the heart of our contemporary struggles against capitalism.
The one defining feature of the conjuncture, including the last few years, still remains the negative impact not only of the 2008 capitalist financial and economic meltdown, but also of the devastating effect of more than three decades of neo-liberalism, not least its impact on our own country and its economy. This is the single most defining feature that runs through what we have been facing over the last while.
Since our 13th Congress, we have seen imperialist aggression in Libya and (imperialist supported armed rebellion) in Syria, which have not created democratic regimes as these military interventions claimed. Instead, since the Nato attack on Libya and the sponsorship of violence against the Syrian government, these interventions have created what are perhaps the most unsafe and insecure conditions in the Middle East. The imperialist military interventions have given birth to one of the most backward and reactionary forces in the form of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Isis).
In these wars sponsored by imperialism, women continue to suffer as captives in conditions of violence, including being used as objects of sexual pleasure and rape by male combatants. One of the worst examples in this regard is the kidnapping of hundreds of young women by Boko Haram in Nigeria. The struggle against imperialist and other wars must also be fought on the terrain of the struggles for gender equality.
The Brazilian sociologist and political activist, Emir Sader, argues that today in the world the main (often male dominated) axes of power can be divided into three great monopolies: “… of arms, of money, and of words. The first reflects the militarisation of conflicts, an area in which the United States believes it exercises unquestionable superiority. The second relates to neo-liberal policy, the commercialisation of all social relations and natural resources, which seeks to create a world in which everything has its price, everything can be bought and sold, and whose utopia is the shopping mall. The third has to do with the monopoly of the private media over the profoundly selective and anti-democratic process of shaping public opinion”.
In South Africa today there is strong similarity and reproduction of the latter two types of capitalist power and monopoly, the dominance of both the ideology and the continuing neo-liberal restructuring of our mainstream economy, and the dominance of bourgeois media.
Sader makes a further important observation about the current capitalist global conjuncture. He argues that “neoliberalism’s biggest achievements were not in the economic field, where most of its promise had lain, but in the social and ideological fields”. The neo-liberal (Thatcherite/Reaganomics) “resolution” of the profitability/overaccumulation crisis was achieved through, inter alia, “globalisation”, increasing commoditisation of untapped global natural and labour resources, and financialisation, including what some have called the “privatisation of Keynesianism” – demand stimulation through the massive extension of credit including to the working class for housing, car purchase, university education – resulting in a massive debt crisis.
Economically the neo-liberal stage of capitalism has not resolved capitalist internal contradictions – it displaced them for a while, only to deepen them in the medium term – hence 2008 going forward.
However, while the global economic crisis (and all of the other symptoms – widening global inequality, the destruction of nature, etc) has demonstrated that the neo-liberal phase of global capitalism has not resolved its economic problems, we should not underestimate its massive successes in the ideological/social terrain – the global fostering of a consumerist culture, the introduction of an individualistic culture into wide swathes of society previously relatively untouched by the capitalist market – from academic research to health-care.
This “made in Hollywood” ideological/cultural hegemony has had a deep impact on the working class everywhere, on the new so-called Third World “middle classes”, and even on the urban and rural poor. The hegemony of this neo-liberal “Westernising” ideological and cultural offensive has, in turn, meant that opposition to it and its many social ills has in many cases taken a simply reactive form by deeply conservative fundamentalist forces (neo-fascist in Europe, religious fanaticism in Asia, parts of Africa and the middle East, etc).
The neo-liberal hegemony has been fostered by the social fragmentation of the global proletariat (something to be elaborated upon in the “Challenges facing the trade union movement” paper to be discussed at the SNC) and a subsequent loss, in many cases, of class solidarity. The neo-liberal ideological offensive has also succeeded in portraying the state (and politics) as essentially “corrupt”, and “bloated” “living beyond its means” (whether in Greece, or South Africa, or Brazil) – so that relatively progressive social movement mobilisation also often adopts a mechanical “oppositionist”, “watch-dog” role – which plays directly (if unintentionally) into the imperialist-led agenda of regime change projects (“Colours Revolutions”) against Third World states that exhibit any ambition for, or degree of, national sovereign capacity in the face of the imperialist agenda.
The 2008 global capitalist crisis is the biggest since the Great Depression of the late 1920s. But it was unlike the Great Depression, which saw the growth of the communist left, followed by the advances of the social democratic left in most of the advanced capitalist centres of Europe in the 1930s (though actualised after World War II). Indeed, the growth of the communist and social democratic left was also in response to the often-heroic struggles against the rise of fascism in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
There is however no serious counter-hegemonic left alternative that has effectively emerged after 2008 to challenge the major citadels of capitalist power. One consequence of this is the re-emergence of confidence by monopoly capital. This is evident in greater determination by the imperialist powers to impose neo-liberal policies once more, on Greece, for instance, and on developing countries, through, for example, current WTO processes and attaching conditionalities to the Agoa (African Growth and Opportunity Act) renewal.
Although the US is not necessarily keen to drop its Agoa relationship with South Africa, as this would run the danger of ceding further market space in Africa to China, it is pushing South Africa very hard. The failure of a left alternative to emerge is a question that the contemporary communist and other left forces will have to ask and seek to answer, as part of seeking to advance alternatives to neo-liberal capitalism and the capitalist system itself.
However, there continues to be growing resistance to neo-liberalism in many parts of the world, with some promising signs of the emergence of alternatives to this capitalist trajectory in places like South America. Even in countries like Spain and Greece interesting left alternatives are beginning to emerge to the EU agenda. Though these alternatives are emerging on the semi-periphery of the core centres of capitalism, they deserve close scrutiny and the drawing of appropriate lessons especially by the communist left.
We need to study developments in Latin America closely. The electoral victories by the left in Latin America pose important strategic and programmatic political questions for the strategy to build socialism. The left electoral victories have been driven by social movements that have united the working class; the urban and rural poor, including the peasantry; intensifying though still somewhat subdued women’s struggles; and the struggle of indigenous peoples, including their struggle to reclaim their culture, identities and territories.
However, Sader makes a general point about social movements in Latin America (a point the SACP has made about similar movements here in South Africa) that they have tended to dismiss “another set of values, phenomena and spaces: parties, politics, collective solutions, state planning ... and the business of state”. While there are natural tendencies towards potentially healthy tensions between electoral politics and the democratic state on the one hand, and social movements on the other, the tendency towards a monolithic oppositionism and an anti-politics politics in social movements can result in this potentially creative tension simply becoming debilitating, and therefore playing into the hands of a neo-liberal agenda. This is why there is a continuing and sometimes debilitating tension between the social movements and the very governments they brought into power in Latin America.
This also raises the vexed question of whether social movements, without a vanguard left, anti-capitalist political and class parties, are capable of sustaining serious revolutionary advances and enabling the retention of state power and a commitment to national sovereignty by the very leftist governments they backed. It seems this question that led Venezuela, under Chavez, to build the Socialist Party in that country, as a way of building political capacity to safeguard the revolutionary advances and political gains made.
In our own South and Southern African context, we come from a relatively strong anti-colonial political tradition of struggle led by strong, political liberation movements, often backed by the trade unions, peasantry and other mass social formations. In the case of South Africa, the communist party played a crucial role in acting as the ideological vanguard of the liberation movement. After 1994, the SACP also occupied a significant space in combining political and mass power to mobilise the working class to build a different and better South Africa, as a route towards a socialist South Africa.
Perhaps the most serious threat facing our revolution is a variation of what is happening in Latin America, the driving of a wedge between the national liberation movement, on the one hand, and the trade union and mass organisations on the other. The offensive to capture and/or weaken Cosatu seems to be aimed at hammering in this wedge, especially to disrupt the strong relationship, and cause a rupture, between the trade union movement and the SACP.
The continuing economic growth and development of China also continues to pose a serious threat to the global economic hegemony of the United States, thus seriously presenting possibilities of an alternative economic centre of power. However, the degree to which China’s economic trajectory opens up an anti-capitalist transformational perspective, or simply a changed centre of capitalist hegemony, remains an open question and will be determined by on-going dynamics, including within the People’s Republic of China and the Communist Party of China. Either way, the rise of China presents countries like South Africa with alternative developmental possibilities and leverage.
The working class, our Party and our Alliance, have all continued to score important economic policy advances, not least in the Mangaung Conference of the ANC. These policy breakthroughs include the resolution to advance and drive a second, more radical phase of our national democratic revolution. We also have an Alliance consensus on keeping the major state-owned companies in the hands of the state, and for them to be strengthened to play a leading role in driving a second, more radical phase of transformation, especially in the economy. The Alliance also remains firmly committed and resolute on the centrality of women’s emancipation as a crucial component of the national democratic revolution, despite its vulgarisation in many other instances.
In addition, government has continued to prioritise investment in infrastructure, as well as new iterations of the industrial policy action plan, and with industrialisation now adopted as the agenda of Southern African Development Community. Despite these policy breakthroughs, unemployment stubbornly continues, thus reinforcing the marginalisation and impoverishing of millions of South Africans. The challenges facing working class South Africans are also characterised by the continued location of women in the poorest paying jobs. Continued investment in infrastructure, while continuing to act as a cushion against further massive job losses, has not turned the tide to achiever uninterrupted growth of employment and a radical transformation of our economic trajectory, and crowding in investment from the capitalist private sector.
However, the struggle to transform our economy has been characterised by sharpening class struggles both from outside and within the state. The implementation of these policies has been heavily contested, not least through the resurgence of a cautious but determined privatisation agenda for Eskom. When there is not a direct privatisation agenda, there is often an agenda to milk the SOCs (state-owned companies) procurement programmes – current examples include exorbitant prices exacted corruptly from Eskom for coal and diesel supplies. There is also chronic asset stripping of some of these public entities. One of the worst examples of this is the capture of the SABC by MultiChoice.
The struggles to drive the second, more radical phase of our transition phase have also been weakened by the challenges facing Cosatu.
The 2008 capitalist crisis was in many ways a strong vindication of some of the major features of our financial sector campaign. That campaign needs to be revitalised in earnest and strengthened as one of the major platforms to fight against the neo-liberal financialisation of the global and domestic economies.
Our campaign to drive a second, more radical phase of our transition must also be built around the intensification of the struggle for the transformation of the financial sector (and the de-financialisation of just about every other sector of the economy – not least the retail and housing sectors).
Our financial sector campaign must seek to dislodge the current hegemony of the financial sector’s interests when it comes to macro-economic and other policy choices. Many national and other global struggles (for example in Greece and Spain) touch fundamentally on this issue. We should advance the struggle for the transformation of the financial sector into a global struggle to be taken up by the international communist movement, acting together with its allies.
The transformation of the financial sector and redirecting its resources towards the productive economy must be at the centre of our struggle for industrialisation and investment in infrastructure. The transformation of the financial sector must thus be central to our strategy to drive the second, more radical phase of our transition. To resuscitate our campaign does not mean returning to the past mechanistically; we also need to take it forward under the present circumstances.
The growing confidence and arrogance of the anti-majoritarian liberal offensive is beginning to show full-blown regime-change ambitions. The agenda in this case does not present its preferred neo-liberal policies for overt public debate, but rather conceals these behind a discourse attacking corruption, maladministration and incompetence. This offensive seeks, therefore, to mobilise the masses on an allegedly better administrative alternative.
The SACP was the first organisation to identify and properly characterise this anti-majoritarian liberal offensive whose aim, using mainstream media, is to discredit and delegitimise the democratic government as inherently corrupt, wasteful and indifferent to the needs of the overwhelming majority of our people. Part of this agenda has been to project DA-led governments as clean and free of corruption, used as a platform to wage a relentless campaign against the liberation movement.
However, the success of the anti-majoritarian agenda also derives from full exploitation of our own weaknesses and mistakes. For instance, most of our state institutions are currently in a state of flux and serious weakness, whether it be the South African Revenue Services, the Hawks, the National Prosecuting Authority or Eskom. There are also real dangers posed by corruption in the state, some of which involves members of our own organisations. The corporate capture of the state and some of its institutions by an alliance of tendepreneurs and commercial capitalist interests, located inside and outside our movement, is a grave threat.
The character and direction of the state we are seeking to build is a subject of major class contestation in contemporary South Africa. One of its sharpest manifestations in the current period is around the character, role and the orientation of the judiciary. It is clear that sections of the judiciary have positioned themselves as part of the antimajoritarian liberal offensive and seek to produce judicial injunctions that are aimed at discrediting the government and particularly the decisions of the executive arm of government.
The role of sections of the judiciary in seeking to enter into the space of the other arms of the state, especially parliament and the executive, is problematic and needs to be debated.
A related and important matter in the broader ideological struggle is that of the urgent necessity of meaningful transformation of the media, including the public broadcaster. It remains one of the most important arenas of struggle, both inside and outside the state, to be taken up energetically by the SACP and the working class more broadly. Progressive forces have allowed themselves to be intimidated by the anti-majoritarian liberal offensive, and by the media in defence its narrow and often racist and anti-democratic posture. At present it is the SACP that is best placed to lead this struggle for the transformation of the media as part of the broader ideological struggle and the battle of ideas.
In the last meeting of the SACP Central Committee Subcommittee on the ‘Battle of Ideas’ there was an extensive discussion on the state of the media in our country, including the public broadcaster. This included a strong recommendation to this Central Committee that a broad media summit on transformation be convened by the SACP. This summit must focus on, among other things:
- The necessity and urgency of the transformation of the media - changing ownership patterns, especially tackling monopolies, with Naspers as an urgent priority;
- Aggressive promotion of diversification to expand and protect genuine community media, including paying close attention to the funding of this project; and
- Reclaiming the SABC and undoing the SABC-MultiChoice deal.
We need to ensure that accelerated media transformation as mooted by government is not designed for, and captured by, a narrow BEE agenda, most of which is nothing but a front for established monopoly media interests.
Recommendations were made to challenge the Naspers monopoly of pay TV, and to intensify the struggle for independent regulation as opposed to self-regulation of private print and electronic media. Consideration should also be given to forming a broad coalition of progressive forces that stand for the transformation of the media for a democratic South Africa, and to expose the anti-majoritarian agenda of most of the media.
In doing so we also need to critique the capitalist and gendered nature of mainstream media and the narrow accumulation agenda it is advancing. In particular we need to expose the Times Media Group as the mouthpiece of the mining bosses and the semi-colonial growth path of a ‘pit-to-port’ economy. In particular we must expose and critique the editorial stances of Business Day and Financial Mail, particularly their relentless criticism and opposition to industrialisation and the building of the manufacturing industry, ostensibly in defence of the interests of the mining industry. Large sections of South Africa’s media are also part of the anti-majoritarian and neo-liberal agenda.
There is a close relationship between the changes and restructuring taking place in the workplace and the changing nature of our communities and the struggles taking place there. In fact the material basis for some of the attacks on foreign nationals derive from intraworking class struggles over scarce resources, as well as the impact of the neo-liberal restructuring of the work-place, both on the working class in the workplace, and on broader working class communities.
What is the political economy of South African communities today? It is important that the SACP, and the ANC, closely analyse South Africa’s (residential) communities. For example the residential patterns of apartheid have not been drastically changed. We still largely have African, white, Indian and Coloured residential communities, despite minimal changes in the residential movement of the middle classes across the racial divide. For the SACP, while we need to properly understand all social classes in the various residential communities, we need to pay closer attention to the working class, especially among the Indian and Coloured residential communities.
For now let us start with the majority of our communities, the African communities in the major urban townships and rural villages. The neo-liberal restructuring of the work place has had a direct influence and major impact on the social dynamics in our townships and villages. As in the past, our townships and villages continue to be both sources of and dumping sites for wanted and unwanted labour in the major economic sites of accumulation in our country.
And these continue to be the urban-based industrial companies, the mines and agriculture. Increasingly we have now highly casualised industry (and ‘regionalised’ services and hospitality sectors) drawing labour from these reservoirs.
The fragmentation of the working class, due inter alia to labour brokerage, casualisation, outsourcing and retrenchments, has shaped the social landscape and dynamics in our urban townships and rural villages. Increased unemployment and the growth of the so-called ‘precariat’ provides the crucial link between the restructuring of the workplace and the working class and its political economy in African townships and rural villages. Women constitute an important component of the precariat – a ‘class’, or rather sections of the proletariat living in precarious conditions, surviving on the margins of the mainstream capitalist economy.
The offensive directed at the organised working class in general, and Cosatu in particular, has further weakened the trade union movement in the workplace, with consequent weakening of the presence and weight of the working class in our communities.
There are two principal, deeply interrelated, challenges facing the workplace today. The first is ensuring that legislation against labour brokering is realized on the ground, especially given the resistance by employers to this intervention. The second challenge is that of rebuilding Cosatu. This must include a comprehensive analysis of the challenges facing the trade union movement in general. We are currently faced the growth of regressive and opportunistic tendencies inside the trade union movement, especially Cosatu, in the wake of the neo-liberal restructuring of the workplace, the working class and the trade union movement.
Some of these regressive tendencies include populism, the cult of the personality, and confusing trade union independence with an oppositionist stance to the liberation movement and the government it leads. These regressive tendencies also include the identification of government as inherently the enemy of the working class.
This regressive and workerist tendency is also characterised by a very narrow definition of ‘civil society’ as consisting of only overtly political and politicised social organisations and NGOs while abandoning other sectors of ‘civil society’ that play important roles in the lives of working class communities – churches, stokvels, burial societies, township and village women’s groups, co-operatives, music and other entertainment activities’ and cultural groups. Because the latter are seen as not overtly political, they are not regarded as part of a broadly working class “civil society”, despite the fact that they play a crucial role in the daily lives of the workers and poor in our society.
The state of, and struggles in, our communities require the full time and undivided attention of the SACP and our movement as a whole. This is one terrain of struggle that perhaps currently poses a major threat to our revolution, including the potential of this site being used as a key platform to dislodge our movement from power. It is these communities that both the United Front and the EFF are targeting in their attempts to weaken the ANC and capture some of these spaces in the 2016 local government elections.
Our township and villages are home to large sections of unemployed (and semi/under-employed) youth. Our townships and villages are also home to a precariat. It is this youth and/or ‘precariat’ that is also the cannon fodder of the ‘service delivery’ protests, as well as internal struggles within our own formations for power. Guy Standing, who has proposed the concept of the precariat (in The precariat – the new dangerous class), says of members of this stratum: “They are floating, rudderless and potentially angry, capable of veering to the extreme right or extreme left politically and backing populist demagoguery that plays on their fears or phobias”.
In Europe for instance, sections of this precariat are mobilised behind highly xenophobic activities in countries like Italy, Germany and France and support the neo-fascist extreme right. However, the same social strata can also be mobilised into progressive movements – in Greece some of the left-leaning and anti-capitalist Syrizia’s support base is precisely from the marginalised and unemployed, notably youth. However, the third largest electoral party in Greece is the openly neo-fascist New Dawn, and it also mobilises among the unemployed and alienated. Some of New Dawn’s leadership are currently on trial for xenophobic murders.
Perhaps one major difference between these residential areas now and under apartheid is that they have been huge beneficiaries of the democratic government’s welfarist interventions, including the extension of vital basic services such as water, electricity, increased access to basic and higher education, free health care to children under five years old, and social grants for key sections that are indigent (child, old age and disability grants). These welfare measures have played a huge role in cushioning our communities from the ravages of neoliberal restructuring of both the capitalist workplace and the working class. Many of these measures have also provided huge relief to the burden on the shoulders of women in their role in looking after the basic needs of families.
There has also been huge transformation and restructuring of the township and village economies since the 1994 democratic breakthrough. The retrenchment and casualisation of the working class especially from the late 1980s led, among other things, to the emergence of a new marginalised section of the working class operating taverns and spaza shops in these areas. While these have acted as important (albeit minimal) sources of income for the informalised (and unemployed) sections of the working class, they have simultaneously dealt a huge blow to the traditional African trading petty bourgeoisie that used to own relatively profitable formalised shops, butcheries and bottle stores in these areas. The traditional African petty bourgeoisie was later to be challenged, and perhaps dealt the fatal blow, by the increasing reach of the malls into townships and villages, and now by the increasing trading activities of foreign nationals. In some areas, particularly KZN and parts of Gauteng, these were devastated by violence.
Our rural villages are also now characterised by a significant and rapid decline in subsistence and small-scale farming, seemingly in proportion with the increase in, and rising dependence on, social grants. The radical addressing of land and agrarian reform would go some way towards resuscitating farming and other related activities in the rural villages. It is women who still play some role in subsistence farming, no matter how minimal. However, a radical but holistic land and agrarian reform programme is necessary if village economies are to be revitalised on a sustainable basis and as part of a broader transformation programme.
Rising unemployment and changing trading conditions in our townships and rural areas have seen growing distress in these areas, accompanied by an increased use of drugs and alcohol. This has also been accompanied by growing distress and disintegration of family life and other protective social structures in these areas.
However, the single biggest predators on the welfarist, social safety nets and economic activity towards sustainable livelihoods and development is the very same monopoly capitalist sector that is responsible for the marginalisation of large sections of the working class through retrenchments, casualisation and labour brokering. The townships and villages are the homes of the precariat and the unemployed.
The social protection benefits received by the working class have become new parasitic sites for monopoly capital. The financial sector continues to be the main culprit in the exploitation of the social protection measures introduced by the state to mitigate against the ravaging impact of capitalist neo-liberal restructuring. The big monopoly banks and financial institutions have become the mashonisas exploiting the beneficiaries of social grants. Elderly women, who remain the main caregivers in many poor township and rural communities, are a particular target of the mashonisas raiding the social grants system.
The social security system created by the workers and the poor on their own, stokvels and burial societies, also bank their money with capitalist banking and insurance monopolies. These funds do very little to develop the townships and villages from whence they come.
The “Know Your Neighbourhood Campaign” becomes an essential weapon in our struggles to drive a second phase of our transition, especially in our communities. It is important that the SACP develops independent contact with our communities and the working class, and that we build ANC branches committed to serving our communities rather than as extensions of tenderpreneurs.
In understanding black communities, it is also important that we revisit the other class realities in these communities. The emergence of black sections of the bourgeoisie has been characterised by narrow BEE, based on 25% shareholding, while private capitalist corporations are run by white corporate technical, professional and managerial elites, driving a narrow racialised agenda within these institutions. Being BEE compliant does not translate into black management of these private corporations. This problem cannot be attributed to narrow BEE, much as it has made its own contribution. It largely reflects the historical exclusion of the black majority from access to skills development, especially access to vocational and professional skills, a matter that requires prioritisation in driving a second, more radical phase of our transition.
All these challenges point to a need for the SACP to focus its attention on organising and campaigns. This must principally involve the building of the SACP organisationally such that it is also able to strengthen the other organisations in the Alliance – its historic task in our revolution from its very inception. Our discussion on the organisational renewal of the SACP must pay particular attention to building an SACP able to strengthen other organisations, both inside and outside the Alliance.
This period requires that particular attention is paid to rebuilding the structures of the ANC from branch level, specifically on building ANC branches to serve its communities. This is perhaps the most important historic task of the SACP and the working class as a whole. This should be the anchor of our organisational renewal.
A crucial area of organising that the SACP has historically neglected is that of the organisation of women, especially working class women. Women communists have tended to generally shy away from participating in the activities of the ANC Women’s League. Why? The sooner we confront this question the better. The SACP played an important role in conceptualising and building the national structures of the National Women’s Movement. But these structures have not really been driven by vibrant local women’s organisation.
This has taken place despite the fact that in the many campaigns that the SACP has taken up, women play a very crucial role – in the co-operatives, in subsistence farming as part of the agrarian question, in the financial sector campaign, in school governing bodies, etc. We have not adequately used these campaigns to focus attention on the organisation of women.
The SACP also needs to pay particular attention, as has always been the case, on how we conduct ourselves in other organisations, and in government. We will have to come back to this matter in a systematic and focused manner. For example, how should communists conduct themselves in government and the legislatures?
This article first appeared in the African Communist 2nd Quarter 2015
