SACP ANNIVERSARY MESSAGE DELIVERED BY SACP GENERAL SECRETARY, CDE BLADE NZIMANDE, ON THE OCCASION OF THE 92ndANNIVERSARY OF THE SACP, Ikageng Stadium, Tlokwe, August 4 2013
Our Line of March, Driving the Second Phase of South Africa's Transition to Democracy
Ninety two years of communist proud and heroic struggle
92 years ago the Communist Party of South Africa was launched. We are now celebrating over nine decades of heroic and unbroken struggle. After the ANC, the SACP is the oldest political formation in SA. We are proud of our past, and we are proud of our present. With over 170 000 members we are larger than at any time in our history. Founded in 1921, we were the very first Communist Party on the African continent. Today, we are by far the largest Communist Party in the continent. For over 8 decades the Communist Party has been a consistent and principled ally of the ANC, and an integral and indispensable component of the national liberation movement. Today, together with our alliance partner, Communist cadres are located in all key centres of power.
Building on the great revolutionary traditions of South African communism
We say all of this to celebrate our achievements - but also and especially to remind ourselves of our responsibilities. Our proud history, our growing numbers, our activism, our strategic location in today's South African reality - all of these place enormous responsibilities on Communist cadres.
As today's Communists we have a responsibility to the generations of communist heroes and heroines, those who came before us. They were mine-workers and factory workers, they were farm-labourers and domestics, they were peasants and intellectuals. They were unionists, students, teachers and MK soldiers. Some were religious ministers and lay-preachers who were communists not despite, but because of their religious convictions. Our forebears were internationalists and they were active cadres here on the soil of SA. Many were leaders in their own right of various formations of the national liberation movement. Indeed they proudly wore many caps, as members and leaders, as part of the overall unity and cohesion of our movement!
It was they, those who came before us, who pioneered here on South African soil the construction of a vanguard party of socialism, in the context of a broader national liberation struggle. Today the wisdom of that strategic approach is just as evident and as clear-cut as it has ever been in our 92 year history. It has been this strategic approach that has led to our victory of the racist apartheid regime!
Today, in the midst of considerable challenges and turmoil on the political terrain, the SACP as a vanguard formation remains steadfast, a pillar of stability, of principled consistency. Even our opponents are forced to concede (reluctantly of course) that Party cadres in their various deployments are typically the most diligent, the most hard-working, the most reliable. The unity of the SACP is the unity of a vanguard formation, where discipline is based not on personalities or factions, but on a programme and on our communist values. Our unity and stability is not (and cannot be) based on bureaucratic authority, it has to be based on the political consciousness and activism of our cadres.
If you join the SACP because you think you will get a tender - then you are joining the wrong party. If you join the SACP simply out of personal ambition without any loyalty to the working class and poor - then you are not a communist. These are our principles. They were forged in struggle and handed down to us by Marx and Engels, by Lenin and Moses Kotane, by Frances Baard, Yusuf Dadoo and Dora Tamana, by Joe Slovo, Chris Hani and Ncumisa Kondlo.
Defeat all renegade and counter-revolutionary tendencies
The demagogic tenderpreneurs, those factory faults from Polokwane 2007, who were finally expelled from the ANC, learnt the hard way that this vanguard Party is the enemy of all opportunism. They learnt the hard way that it was the SACP that would constitute the key road-block to their greedy ambitions. They learnt the hard way that it was the SACP that would expose the empty demagogy behind their pseudo-militancy. That it was the SACP, at first alone, that said these are not left-wingers - they are thieves and proto-fascists sponsored by big business interests and promoted by a spectacle-loving, pseudo-liberal media.
They tried to isolate SACP comrades within the ANC - they failed. They tried to factionalise within the SACP - they failed. Their liberal media promoters tried to present the SACP as a house-divided. They failed. All of them collided with a steadfast Party, not some ad hoc bag with a thousand spitting snakes, not a thousand different and competing individual tenderpreneurs - but a Leninist Party, unified programmatically and strategically.
They failed, and they failed again. So now, you will have noticed, the commercial media is doing a U-turn. They are trying another trick. They can't credibly present the SACP as a "house divided", so now they are trying to present us as the key dividers of other houses! We are supposed to be the chief culprit, the hidden hand in factionalising COSATU.
Let's be absolutely clear. The SACP is not backing any personalities or factions (alleged or real) within COSATU. Yes, there are thousands of SACP members, many of them leaders, within the trade union movement. They are there in their own right. Those in leadership positions in unions are there because as Communists they have won the trust of the workers. They have not been deployed from the outside. The SACP does not and will not meddle in the internal affairs of COSATU. We say: Hands off COSATU!
Let's also be clear. The SACP does not want a tame, lame-duck, conveyor-belt federation. The SACP does not want a labour federation that's afraid of "speaking truth" to government or anybody else. But let's be even clearer - we want a labour movement that goes well beyond the petty-bourgeois, hyper-critical, NGO ambition of just speaking (or is it tweeting?) truth to government from the side-lines.
We want a working class movement that is engaged, that struggles to make truth powerful, and power truthful in all sites of power. We want (and we are PART of) a working class movement dedicated to building collective, working class power. We are, as the SACP, part of a working class movement that doesn't just "speak" (or tweet) to power. We are a working class movement, in and out of government, that is confident and powerful itself. Only such a working class movement is capable of exposing and defeating the exploitative power of the real enemy - capital.
In asserting all of these basic principles we are not inventing something new. We are building on our 92-years of struggle experience. We are drawing on a legacy that has been left to us by generations of South African communists who pioneered progressive militant trade unionism in our country - among them Ray Alexander, JB Marks, Moses Mabhida, Alpheus Maliba and Billy Nair. What lessons have they taught us? They have taught us that progressive trade unions are built on the bedrock of shop-floor organization, on worker democracy, on day-to-day servicing of members. They would have told us that you can't build trade unions on the basis of Investment Arms, or head-office politics, or liberal media popularity. They would say to us: "Back to Basics".
At the same time, through their own activism, Ray Alexander, JB Marks, Alpheus Madiba, Moses Mabhida, Billy Nair and many, many others showed us that a militant trade union movement cannot be isolated from the wider social and political struggles of the working class and the broader urban and rural poor. They taught us that our tripartite alliance is the critical weapon of struggle.
Taking responsibility for the national democratic revolution
This 92nd anniversary comes exactly a year after the conclusion of our highly successful and united 13th Congress held at Ngoye University at Empangeni near Richards Bay. Our clarion call from that Congress was that communists, acting together with their allies in the ANC and COSATU, must take responsibility for the national democratic revolution. This means that, as part of the revolutionary forces of our country, we must take responsibility for the advances and victories, as well as the challenges and weaknesses in our revolution. As South African communists we must never act as opportunists in our revolution, claiming and boasting about our victories on the one hand, but then behaving as outsiders to the revolution when it comes to its difficulties and problems.
Our 92nd anniversary also comes some seven months after a historic 53rd Conference of the African National Congress in Mangaung. This conference will be marked by, amongst other things, the rolling back and defeat of a tenderpreneurial tendency, whose objective was an attempt to capture the ANC as an instrument for accumulation for those in leadership positions at the direct expense of the principles of our revolution, that of changing the conditions of the majority of our people for the better.
We are justly celebrating 92 years of heroic communist struggle and activism in a period where communists are indeed in all key sites of struggle in the consolidation and deepening of our national democratic revolution. Communists are to be found in the forefront of many mass and workers struggles in broader society - in the trade union movement, in civic struggles, and in progressive NGOs. At the same time communists are to be found inside the state - in parliament, in government and in many other state agencies where they are proudly serving a democratic South Africa to consolidate our revolutionary gains. Communists are living our mantra - to use both our mass and state power to consolidate our revolution.
On the electoral front, our detractors and enemies try to portray the SACP as "hanging on to the coat-tails" of the ANC - as if the SACP only discovered the ANC after 1994. As if tens of thousands of South African communists, shoulder-to-shoulder with non-communist patriots and democrats, didn't build the ANC, didn't go to jail, or into exile, or to the gallows as communists and proud ANC members.
Our enemies try to goad us to go it alone and abandon the ANC-led Alliance, as if our struggle and that of the overwhelming majority of our people was simply about an electoral contest. Yes electoral contestation is absolutely central in the current period, but it was never about an electoral contest amongst our alliance formations in the current period. Instead it was using the electoral platform to consolidate majority democratic rule, through uniting the Alliance and all progressive forces in order to use state power to advance a national democratic agenda.
The call by our enemies and detractors for communists to stand alone in elections is, of course, thoroughly hypocritical. They want to weaken the ANC and turn the SACP into another UDM, COPE, or EFF - another 7-day wonder. In its essence, their strategy is not a new one. The apartheid regime's strategic political agenda was focused on isolating communists from the broader national liberation movement. This is why the CPSA was banned in 1950, ten years before the banning of the ANC. In fact, the racist apartheid regime, tried to win international friends and imperialist backers by projecting itself as part of the anti-communist forces globally. It sought to translate this cheap strategy by trying to consistently drive a wedge between the ANC and the SACP. While it won imperialist backing, this strategy failed spectacularly at home because the majority of our people saw this for what it was - an attempt at divide and rule strategy to defeat the national liberation movement.
Therefore today's call for the SACP to stand alone in elections, often accompanied by attempts to goad COSATU to position itself as anti-ANC, is a continuation of the same apartheid strategy in the post 1994 conditions! The anti-majoritarian liberal offensive is trying very hard to re-define independence as meaning anti-ANC and anti-government. It is indeed unfortunate that a small section within our own movement has fallen for this bait, thus seeking to define the independence of COSATU and the SACP as meaning attacking and criticizing the ANC and the government it leads. As we celebrate 92 years of the SACP, we shall not be fooled by this old-age divisive strategy of racists and their liberal fellow travellers! Instead we want to say as South African communists, NEVER again shall we allow racists and opportunistic minority-rule liberals to govern our country! Instead, as South African communists, acting together with our allies, we have not only been part of the victorious forces over the criminal, racist apartheid regime, but we will intensify our own struggle against the evil capitalist system and its racist and partriarchal twin partners!
South African communists are proudly celebrating their 92 years of heroic struggles, a year before our fourth national democratic elections. It is also a year before the celebration of 20 years of a democratic South Africa. For us as South African communists, this is a period to also celebrate the many advances made by the ANC-led government in improving the conditions of the overwhelming majority of our people. The housing, electrification, provision of water and sanitation for the majority of South Africans far surpasses the centuries of colonial and apartheid occupation of our country. The expansion of both basic and higher education for our people over the last 20 years far surpasses the more than 40 years of criminal, racist apartheid rule. For example, the fact that our democratic government is going to be spending more than R6 billion rand in loans and bursaries for university and college education is a truly unsurpassed achievement by the ANC government. Under the present, third democratic administration, headed by President Zuma administration, life expectancy has risen by more than 3 years in the short space since 2009. We are proud to say that South African communists have played an active part in all of these achievements.
The SACP itself has embarked on important campaigns that have notched important victories. Our land and agrarian campaign led to a national land summit in the mid-2000s that led to the rejection of the ‘willing buyer, willing seller model' of land reform. The SACP's financial sector campaign, launched in 2000, has led to important gains made in the regulation of the financial sector, including the regulation of the Credit Bureaux, including credit amnesty for the workers and the poor.
Vote ANC in 2014!
Most of the commercial media has done everything to hide the significant advances made by the ANC-led government over the last 20 years, including positive gains over the last four and half years.
It is for the above and other reasons that as we celebrate 92 years of the SACP, we are calling upon the people of our country to come out and vote overwhelmingly for the ANC in the coming 2014 elections. The ANC remains the only organization capable of uniting the broadest range of democratic and patriotic forces, and of isolating reactionary and neo-liberal agendas. The ANC has proven this in practice through its policies and achievements in government.
We are holding our 92nd anniversary in Tlokwe where we have seen the ANC's electoral victory in the 2011 local government elections is being threatened by an opportunistic element that is betraying the ANC. The SACP strongly condemns all those from within the ranks of the ANC who have colluded with the DA to remove an ANC mayor.
However it is important that the ANC itself must act with speed to attend to whatever problems, including suspected corruption, against its own cadres. But, no matter what grievance any ANC cadre may have this cannot be translated to the betrayal of the ANC.
The SACP calls upon all ANC members and SACP cadres, including COSATU members to ensure that we mobilise the people of Tlokwe to vote for the ANC overwhelming, so that we can rightly re-claim this municipality from the party of the baases and madams! All communist cadres to the front to reclaim Tlokwe as an ANC base!
But at the same time we are not calling for an electoral blank cheque for an incoming ANC-led administration next year. It is absolutely critical that our election manifesto is focused upon the key resolution to emerge from the ANC's 2012 Mangaung national conference - namely that we need now to embark on a much more radical, second phase of the national democratic revolution.
What does this mean in practice?
The Key Tasks of the Second Phase of our Transition
It means many things, let us list a few:
We must significantly strengthen the state and public sector.
We must struggle against corruption, bureaucratic inertia, a lack of any sense of responsibility to the public where these things exist in the civil service. We need to consolidate an active, developmental state and this requires action from within and from without. We need to cut back on contracting out, and on the proliferation of state agencies often under independent boards populated by tenderpreneurs.
We need to roll-back the massive, collusive power of financialised monopoly capital. With their "maximizing share-holder value" ethics (where a majority of the share-holders are often overseas), with their double listings on foreign stock exchanges, when things are going well, we see the huge outflow of capital from SA. When short-term profits are down, workers are retrenched and mines are closed and the investment goes elsewhere.
So how do we roll-back the power of financialised monopoly capital? We need to expose and punish their collusive behavior, costing the public purse billions of rands - as recently exposed in the case of the construction sector, and before that the bread cartel. We need to expose and punish tax evasion and transfer pricing - again costing our country billions of rands. All of this relates to the first task - we need to greatly strengthen the capacity of our development state.
We need to impose a windfall tax on SASOL. Let us recall that SASOL was created as a public entity by the apartheid regime in 1950 with tax payers' money. It was subsidized for many years by the apartheid government to cover the difference between the global price for oil and what it cost SASOL to produce oil from coal locally. Back in the 1950s and through most of the apartheid-era, SASOL's cost to produce oil (around $35 a barrel) was well above what was then the global price.
SASOL was privatized before 1994 and it now supplies around 35% of SA's petrol needs. This is sold on the local market at the same price as imported petrol which now costs over $100 a barrel! SASOL is making huge windfall profits out of the South African market, and we are all paying for it. This is why the SACP has long been campaigning for a windfall tax to be imposed on SASOL as a step towards its re-nationalisation.
Partly as a result of SACP pressure, and partly as a result of the global oil price climbing to $60 a barrel in 2003, the Minister of Finance established a task team in 2006 to look into applying a windfall tax on SASOL. The task team reported back in 2007, recommending that a windfall tax be applied. However, the recommendation was turned down by the Minister after heavy lobbying from SASOL. Apparently the Treasury and SASOL reached a "gentlemen's agreement". In exchange for dropping the idea of a windfall tax, SASOL would invest its multi-billion rand profits in building a second massive coal-to-oil plant in Limpopo, known as Mafutha - that was back in 2007.
Meanwhile the global oil price has soared way above $100. SASOL's profits have multiplied astronomically. It produces oil at around $40 but sells it on the local market at the going global price well above $100. Fantastic profits - but still there has been zero investment in the promised new coal-to-oil plant that would lower our fuel vulnerabilities, create tens of thousands of jobs, and become a key factor in driving the development of the Northern Mineral Belt. In 2011 SASOL's operating profits were a massive R30bn (and net profit R20bn). In 2012 it got even better for SASOL, operating profits R37bn, net profits R24bn. But still no major investment in SA as promised.
And now, to add insult to injury, SASOL has announced it will instead be investing nearly R200bn in a US gas-to-liquid plant in Louisiana. Even that arch-pro-capitalist, that rabid anti-communist, the Business Day columnist David Gleason was moved to write:
"Born courtesy of taxpayers...South Africa's biggest company and world leader in various critical energy technologies is investing ever more deeply in the US than it is here. This may be the right thing for the company, but is it right for the country?"
This is the same Gleason, by the way, who week after week tells us that the "markets know best", that "what is good for the market is good for SA".
All of this goes to show that if we are to have a second radical phase of our democratic transition then we need to abandon the illusion of some happy win-win social compact with financialised monopoly capital. The idea of an "Economic Codesa" in which capital is represented by the likes of SASOL, or the corrupt big construction companies, or Arcelor Mittal is to be rejected absolutely. Instead we must build a tactical patriotic front that includes localized, non-monopoly productive capital in key sectors like manufacturing and agriculture. Their economic interests are also not served by neo-liberal macro-economic policies of deregulation, liberalization, and tight inflation targeting.
Using state power, and mobilized popular power we need to drive a comprehensive state-led re-industrialisation programme that accelerates investment into jobs here in SA - not in Louisiana.
We need to support government in socializing access to water and water services
98% of water rights in SA are already taken - largely by the big mining houses and corporate agriculture. This leaves little room for redistribution, or for successfully sustaining land reform, especially in the many water stressed parts of SA.
We all know of major dams and water pipelines next door to impoverished communities without any water supply. The pipes go past them - on the way to some major mining corporation or commercial farming operation.
Government is planning on radically changing the politics and ownership of water. Just as we have nationalized the mineral wealth beneath our soil, so now we must assert greater social control over this critical resource. The plan is to impose a use-it or lose-it policy on water rights. At the same time the plan is to ban any trading of water rights licences. The allocation of licences must be a public function, not a tradeable capitalist market speculative affair.
We must ensure that government does indeed now take forward these major steps that will free up water for more effective developmental redistribution. There will be an outcry, of course, from vested interests. Using state and popular power we must strengthen our determination and our capacity to carry through this important step in line with the Freedom Charter's core vision that the natural resources of country should belong to all South Africans.
As the SACP we pledge to continue to play our ideological role advancing progressive policies and in exposing all opportunistic elements that are trying to contest the ANC, including the thieves that are reshaping themselves as a red brigade!
Let us build on the platform of real advances made since 1994. Let us now drive forward with a more radical phase of the NDR. The SACP remains part of this revolutionary duty as it celebrates its 92 years of heroic struggle for national liberation and socialism. We remain focused on the intensification of the struggle to deepen the national democratic revolution as our most direct route to socialism.
Socialism is the Future, Build it Now!
Issued by the SACP, August 4 2013
Click here to sign up to receive our free daily headline email newsletter
