Some terrains of struggle for a developmental state

Our Central Committee will be holding its ordinary (third) plenary session in 2009. This plenary session takes place against the background of the deepening impact of the global economic crisis and its worsening domestic impact. The Central Committee will reflect on this matter and seek to take forward aspects of the Framework Agreement agreed to at NEDLAC in response to the crisis. Amongst the critical areas of concern for the SACP is how to use the response to this crisis to strengthen co-operatives and the co-operative movement.

The Central Committee will also be finalising discussion documents for our Special Congress in December 2009. These documents will be released for discussion by our structures and for broader pubic debate, at the beginning of September 2009.

In the wake of the steady consolidation of the new administration led by President Zuma, the Central Committee will also discuss the challenges of building a developmental state, including potential obstacles and opportunities in this regard.

As the SACP we have, on principle, refused to be drawn into a process of the Americanisation of our politics, by an obsessive focus on the evaluation of the first 100 days of this administration. Instead, whilst noting progress, we shall also seek to identify challenges and the role that our Party structures need to play in strengthening government and implementation of the progressive policies contained in the ANC Manifesto.

Building co-ordinated capacity for a developmental state

In order to deepen and consolidate the national democratic revolution post the 2009 April elections, it is important that the SACP, and indeed the entire liberation movement focuses its attention on intensifying the struggle to build a developmental state. For the SACP, given the resolutions taken at the 12th Congress as well as at our policy conference, it is important that we intensify the struggle to build working class hegemony in all key sites of power, especially in the state. In undertaking this task, our programme, The South African Road to Socialism, poses the challenge thus:

"The NDR requires a strong state. Its strength needs to lie not in its capacity to exert bureaucratic power, but in its strategic coherence, its skill and catalysing capacity and, above all, in its ability to help weld together a multi-class national democratic movement buttressed by mobilised popular and working class power. Without these realities in a world dominated by powerful transnational corporations, no country can hope to embark on a developmental path".

One of the critical terrains for building a radical, working-class led developmental state is that of exposing and seeking to roll back and disrupt the intersection between the holding of public office and business interests, and to defeat the corrupting influence that this has had, and continue to have, on our movement as a whole.

Agentification of the state?

There are all indications that in the wake of the defeat of the post-1996 privatisation drive; the 1996 class project never gave up on continuing with this objective, albeit under different conditions. This has been through the following:

• Intensive corporatisation of state-owned enterprises through strengthening the power of the boards and restructuring the relationship between government and these entities, basically operating as private companies, and not adequately responding to the mandate of government. In fact the Framework Agreement seeks to re-direct some of the activities of SoEs to respond effectively to the current economic crisis
• 'Agentification' of the state - The existence, and creation, of a multiplicity of government agencies, from functions normally hived off from government departments, and performed by autonomous agencies with their own boards and executives. In a number of instances this has turned some government departments into beggars from these boards, hiding behind their fiduciary duties sometimes to ignore or deliberately undermine departmental directives. These boards are normally populated by business and BEE types, with active marginalisation of representatives from NGOs, trade unions and communities, and only accountable to themselves.

The outcome of this is that there are literally thousands of multiple centres of power, with no clear overarching co-ordinating strategy, whether at national or provincial level. It is important as we discuss the question of building working class hegemony on a terrain of the national democratic revolution to analyse the implications of all these thousands of centre of (class) power. In these entities, there are billions of Rands worth of state resources.

It may as well be that some (or even many) of these institutions and agencies are needed, but this poses a number of questions and challenges for our development agenda. These include:

• Is there no agenda to weaken and fragment the state in order to privilege a capitalist agenda?
• The undermining of the capacity of government departments to drive a development agenda
• Implications on the planning and co-ordinating capacity of the state
• Challenges of building working class hegemony in all key sites of power, building a developmental state, especially in the state, particularly in the context of these challenges
• Attempts to 'brain-implant' capitalist methods of operation within the state, whilst on the outside these still remain 'state' agencies
• Actual and potential multiplication of sites of corruption

The tasks of the SACP and the working class in building a developmental state

The SACP needs to intensify the struggle against corruption, both inside and outside the state. Fighting corruption is not merely a moral crusade, important as the moral dimensions to corruption may be. Fighting corruption must be a principal political struggle based on the following considerations:

• It is not enough to expose corruption, important as this dimension of the struggle maybe, but the necessity to transform the underlying structural conditions that produce and reproduce corruption
• It is often, albeit not exclusively, proceeds from these corrupt practices that sometimes find their way into the war-chest to support this or that faction within our Tripartite organisations

The key task of the SACP and the working class as a whole is that of swiftly dealing with all forms of corruption, as this is one of the biggest obstacles to building a developmental state.

The Central Committee will consider practical ways through which we can mobilise the workers and the poor of our country to take the struggle against corruption to higher levels.

Perhaps the nub of the challenge facing our entire liberation movement and building a developmental state now can be posed in the following manner:

If the 1996 class project permitted the use of access to state power and positions to get a 'slice of the cake' in business, is there no current or emergent tendency in our movement that seeks to use its connections to private BEE capitalist interests and resources to try and capture both our movement and the state?

Is there no other elite agenda that seeks to place its hands on, rather than transform or radically change, the processes and structures built by the 1996 class project? If there is, what kind of working class mobilisation do we need?

The capitalist classes, together with its present day liberal apologists like Max Du Preez, are also seeking to position themselves as the 'conscience' of the nation as a cover to advance their accumulation agenda.

It is in the terrain of these struggles that the working class will be able to defend, deepen and advance the national democratic revolution.

It is on these matters that the Central Committee will be preparing to finalise the discussion documents by all our structures, so that we position our Special Congress to emerge with resolutions that will deepen our national democratic revolution in the interests of the workers and the poor of our country.

Asikhulume!!

This article by SACP General Secretary Blade Nzimande first appeared in the Party's weekly online newsletter, Umsebenzi Online, August 19 2009

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