NDR DEBATE

Let us remain focused

The current conjuncture and building capacity to drive the second phase of our transition

Political Report to March 2015 SACP Central Committee

The present South African conjuncture needs to be con textualised within a wider global reality. The 2008 global capitalist crisis has dramatically exposed a number of critical fault lines within the global capitalist system. It has also deepened the economic and social crisis of a large array of popular strata in both the developed capitalist centres as well as in the periphery. This has given rise, in turn, to a wide range of popular mobilisations, some with a broadly progressive character, others with a seriously negative orientation. All of these realities are being experienced locally with their own South African characteristics.

Capitalism versus Democracy:

Financialised late capitalism in the 21st century

During the decades of the Cold War, the dominant capitalist centres sought to present their systems as “democratic”, as “parliamentary democracies”, in contrast to the socialist bloc countries which they sought to portray as “totalitarian”. While this ideological posture was, of course, seriously flawed, the democratic deficit in the Soviet bloc (see Cde Slovo’s Has Socialism Failed?) and the hey-day of capitalist welfare democracies (1945 to the mid-1970s) in which the Western national state had considerable power over capital (not least through high levels of taxation and Keynesian inspired redistributive measures), this “Western democracy” argument had considerable popular appeal. (It seduced millions of East Europeans who overthrew in peaceful protest “actually existing socialism”).

We are now in a very different global conjuncture. Over the past 30 years, the sway of globalised financial markets has increasingly displaced and eroded nominally sovereign national electoral mandates, even in the most developed capitalist societies. In 2007 Alan Greenspan, then chair of the US Federal Reserve, was asked which candidate he supported for US presidency. His response was revealing: “We are fortunate that, thanks to globalisation, policy decisions in the US have been largely replaced by global market forces … it hardly makes any difference who will be the next president. The world is governed by market forces.” While this might have been a partial exaggeration, it clearly contains considerable  truth.

Assisting this relative “irrelevance” of electoral national politics in most advanced capitalist economies has been the “tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee” electoral party reality – the regular electoral alternation between two dominant centrist parties or blocs, funded by the same corporate interests, and barely distinguishable from each other (Republicans and Democrats, Conservatives and Labour), each pursuing the “middle ground” as the condition for electability.

The continued post-2008 global capitalist crisis is now beginning to have a disruptive impact on this stale-mated party political reality. Across much of Europe, there has been the strong rise of anti-establishment right-wing neo-fascist, anti-immigrant movements, responding demagogically to the growing stress felt by working class, petty bourgeois and unemployed strata in Germany, France, Austria, Greece, etc.

There has also been an important rise of more radical left electoral formations as well – notably in the semi-periphery of developed capitalism, with the current hot-spot being the European South (Greece, Spain). The election of Syriza (with 37% of the vote) in Greece has pitted a national electoral mandate against the banking interests that dominate the European Monetary Union and the wider EU. We are currently witnessing a game of high-stakes poker – who will blink first, the democratically elected Greek left-wing government with a clear anti-austerity mandate, or the European (mainly German) bankers? In Spain, Podemos (a political formation similar to Syriza) is poised to win elections later this year.

It is important to understand our own present South African conjuncture within this broader international context. The 1994 South African landmark democratic breakthrough occurred in the midst of the triumphal onward march of neo-liberal driven globalisation and financialisation. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, for South African monopoly capital and for global imperialism the “gamble” of supporting the negotiated demise of white minority rule with non-racial democratisation and majority rule in South Africa was then perceived as worth the “risk”. Particularly with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the new South Africa would be “governed” by the iron laws of the “financial market”, and any delinquency on the part of majority rule could be curbed and contained.

This was what was fundamentally at stake in the late 1990s battles over the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (Gear) policy and the general liberalisation of the South African economy. It amounted to a considerable opening up, and therefore subordination to the dictates of the financial markets and their ancillary weaponry (“market confidence black-mail”, ratings agencies, debt servicing replacing public servicing, disinvestment and investment strikes, etc).

Nevertheless, the sustained high level of electoral majorities won by the ANC, and the effective presence of the SACP and Cosatu within the Alliance through these two decades, served to act as an important countervailing force or, at the very least, an “irritant” to the neo-liberal agenda.

We are now living through a somewhat different global conjuncture. Globally, the triumphalist hey-day of neo-liberalism is over. Transnational finance capital remains, of course, all-powerful – but its ideological and political triumph is less secure than it has evbeen in the past 25 years. This is clearly intimately related to the post-2008 persisting crisis and the obvious inability of the leading circles of corporate capital to advance any meaningful responses to deepening global inequality, economic stagnation, and high levels of unemployment even in relatively wealthy capitalist countries.

When the local media speaks of “the end of the rainbow dream”, the loss of “Mandela’s leadership and values” – they are in fact reflecting (and misrepresenting) not just a South African reality, but a global reality. The mask of the “third wave of democracy”; of a “new world united behind common liberal values”; of a “Pax Americana”; of “the end of imperialism”; of an “African renaissance”; of a “rainbow nation” based on shallow liberal rights have all been exposed for the hollow neo-liberal myths that they were.

Here within South Africa, the neo-liberal Gear-era package has, of course, failed dismally to address the underlying structural problems of our economy and society, hence the persisting social crises of unemployment, poverty and inequality. While there was at least sustained GDP growth approaching 5,5% percent levels at one point, it was possible (although wrong) for the 1996 class project and others to still project the NDR as being “on track”.

With the post-2008 global reality and its impact upon South Africa, this is no longer credible. An economic growth path premised considerably on unbeneficiated commodity exports, household consumer debt, and macro-economic policies (notably high interest rates) that locked us into a dependency on volatile speculative financial inflows has been shown up for what it is by the global economic crisis.

This has been the context in which the ANC has resolved on the imperative of a “second radical phase of the NDR”. Although the exact content and character of this second radical phase remains considerably vague and even contested, within government there is now a growing consolidation around a package of initiatives focused on re-industrialisation, infrastructure development, training and related issues – localisation, beneficiation, the energetic use of state procurement, anti-private monopoly intervention, etc.

But precisely because of this partial policy and programmatic turn, and because of the leading role played by the left in this regard, the anti-majoritarian liberal offensive has been intensified. This offensive takes many forms. Errors or weaknesses on our side (corruption, poor appointments, the clumsy handling of parliament) are pounced upon in order to advance a “regime change” agenda – both from the ultra-left as well as from the centre-right. The Marikana tragedy is the most obvious example.

Most of the commercial media, significant parts of the intelligentsia, many advocacy NGOs and opposition political parties advance this agenda. Since the May 2014 overwhelming electoral victory by the ANC, there has been a sustained fight back campaign from a disparate range of forces. Most of these disparate forces, including sections of the media, have very little in common, except to dislodge the liberation movement from power. It is as if the ANC had just not won an emphatic overwhelming electoral victory of 62%!

At the head of this offensive has been what the SACP has correctly referred to as an anti-majoritarian liberal offensive, and a range of hangers on or useful tools of this particular agenda. When the SACP coined the phrase ‘anti-majoritarian liberal offensive’, some of our detractors were sceptical, often dismissing the concept as a label rather than an analytical concept. Even an opportunistic strand of business unionism started to dismiss this concept – betraying its own collaboration with this liberal agenda in order to score cheap political points against  our movement.

In the light of the above, it is important for our movement to remain focused on the task of driving a second, more radical, phase of our transition. It also requires a much more effective ideological response, particularly from the SACP, and greater engagement with progressive NGOs, the media and the intelligentsia.

The anti-majoritarian liberal offensive in South Africa needs to be more closely linked to the global capitalist displacement of electoral politics and, indeed, of national sovereignty. It needs to be linked with imperialism’s “regime change” strategies world-wide – directed with velvet glove agendas using the media, and an array of NGOs and “civil society” formations against countries, mainly in the South, with a relative degree of democratic support and national sovereign capacity (Brazil, Venezuela, Russia, South Africa). Key targets of these campaigns are real (or alleged) corruption and the sowing of general demoralisation about elected governments and the state.

Grasping the current conjuncture

The social and economic impact of some 35 years of intense neo- liberal led capitalist globalisation has produced a contemporary conjuncture that is filled with both many dangers as well as progressive opportunities. The growing political and ideological challenges to neoliberalism (both internationally and here at home, including within the ANC itself) open possibilities for consolidating broad anti-capitalist fronts.

However, while this ideological crisis of neo-liberalism has been provoked by its social and economic crises (rampant unemployment, ecological destruction, deepening inequality), the impact of these crises on popular strata can have a diversity of outcomes, including negative phenomena like recourse to religious fanaticism, neo-fascist populism, xenophobia, localised warlordism, consumerist anti-politics politics, etc.

Two decades into democracy in South Africa, we too have not escaped many of these negative realities. It is important that we use this Central Committee to, amongst other things, closely examine the current conjuncture. Conjunctural analyses are often useful in order to connect the immediate past struggles to immediate challenges ahead. But conjunctural analyses do not only serve a purpose of looking at the immediate period, but as a way of grasping both the medium and longer term challenges in their microcosm.

Class inequalities and class struggles

A defining feature of the current global conjuncture is deepening inequality, including within the most advanced capitalist countries themselves.

Part of the deepening ideological and political crisis of neo-liberalism (referred to above) is the growing number of voices coming from non-socialist and non-Marxist sources, documenting and even mobilising (see for instance the “Occupy Movement”) against deepening inequality in their societies. This deepening inequality is no longer just between North and South, it has become a feature of even the most advanced capitalist countries since the end of the post-1945 neo-Keynesian, welfare state period (1945-mid-1970s). Diverse nonsocialist sources are now taking up this theme – including Joseph Stiglitz, Thomas Piketty, and Oxfam – with the result that the inequality crisis has become more main-streamed. In talking about the 2014 Oxfam poverty index, for instance, The Guardian newspaper summarises it as follows:

“The world’s wealthiest people aren’t known for travelling by bus, but if they fancied a change of scene then the richest 85 people on the globe – who between them control as much wealth as the poorest half of the global population put together – could squeeze onto a single double-decker (bus)”! Oxfam research has also further found that since the 2008 financial crisis the number of billionaires has doubled. The number of billionaires (by US dollar) worldwide has increased from 793 in March 2009 to 1 645 by March 2014. In the case of one billionaire, Bill Gates, he is estimated to be earning, at the ordinary rate of 1,9% interest, US$4,2-million every day!

This snapshot graphically captures the reality of our current global reality. A key factor propelling this widening inequality in the current conjuncture is the dramatic process of capitalist “financialisation”. Increasingly, capitalist surplus is circulating within a global speculative casino, to the detriment of productive investment. As noted above, this process of domination by global capitalist financialisation means that increasingly the “one-percenters” (or, more accurately, the 0,1 percenters) are able to escape the discipline of national governments and therefore of democratic electoral mandates.

Their wealth is largely untaxed and it is based in fluid financial instruments, nominally based in tax havens, rather than locked into realizing medium- to long-term returns on productive investment in a mine or factory. They exert their sway on national governments no longer just by investing or not investing in the national economy, but increasingly by financing governments themselves and their SOEs through bond-issues and indebtedness (this is the current reality with GFIP, e-tolls).

South Africa has not escaped the impact of this global capitalist crisis. Prior to 2008, GDP growth in South Africa was based largely on the commodities boom, on household consumer indebtedness, and on a reliance on short-term speculative investments fuelled by quantitative easing, amongst other things. The vulnerabilities and structural flaws of this semi-colonial growth path have now been rudely exposed. The current poor GDP growth in South Africa has little if anything to do with the personality of President Zuma, or “market trust”.

The commodities boom brought increased profits for mining houses and their foreign share-holders. However, the commodities boom never benefitted the ordinary mass of the workers and the poor especially given the structural distortions in our economy and the labour market, reflecting the persistence and stubbornness of the semi-colonial growth path in our economy. Even the surplus accumulated by the mining bosses is not being reinvested into the rest of the economy, nor necessarily into significant expansion of mining activities themselves. In short, we have not been immune to this global meltdown, especially on the back of our own structural challenges of unemployment,  inequality  and poverty.

Government’s response to the crisis

However, against this background, there have been some important advances especially made by the fourth ANC-led administration. These advances played some cushioning role, no matter how minimal, from what could have been the disastrous, if not catastrophic, impact of the global crisis. Contrary to the government response to the 1996 financial crisis, there was no commitment to headlong privatisation and the building of a minimalist state. The first important advance has been the investment of R1-trillion into infrastructure, a project led by the state.

Secondly, despite the impact of the crisis, government did not reduce investment into some of its priorities, especially education and health, while maintaining the social security net through social grants reaching 16-million South Africans and EPWP/CWP public employment programmes which reached 4,3-million over the past five years. In so many ways, government has led some significant projects aimed at transforming our current economic trajectory. Whatever other weaknesses may be there, both the 2015 State of the Nation Address (Sona) and the Budget commit to continuing more spending on our priorities and infrastructure at least for the next three years.

The above realities have shaped and been shaped by what one would call the continuing struggles to build a developmental state. The outcome(s) of some of the struggles to build a developmental state will shape the terms, pace and struggles in driving a second, more radical phase of our transition.

Perhaps the two single most dominant fractions of the capitalist class in our country are the mining bosses and finance capital. The mining bosses had set the tone for black economic empowerment and have managed to produce some of the richest capitalists, albeit few, from within the ranks of the black community. The mining bosses have done this not out of generosity, but as part of an attempt to create a dependent section of the capitalist class in order to secure favourable terms for accumulation going forward.

The mining sections of the capitalist class are also aggressively defending the current semi-colonial growth trajectory, whose foundation is the export of mineral resources and against beneficiation. The mining bosses see beneficiation as a threat to earning foreign currency and selling of our minerals through internationally determined prices. For this reason they are fiercely resisting attempts to ensure, through the Mineral Resources and Petroleum Development Amendment Bill, the designation of strategic mineral resources and percentages to be set-aside for cost-plus pricing to downstream beneficiators.

As argued in our Going to the Root document, South African monopoly capital in general has divested from South Africa and located itself externally as big global oligopolies which now see South Africa as but one of its investment destinations. This sector of the capitalist class is only interested in the maintenance of government as a regulator to facilitate maximum profits, including the export of these profits into their new imperial centres of location. This has reinforced the semi-colonial trajectory of our  economy.

The financial sector (together with real estate and business services sector) and its share of the GDP in South Africa has grown tremendously over the past 20 years: from 17% of GDP to approximately 24% in 2012. The banking sector has been characterised by four major oligopolies that are not responsive either to the needs of the overwhelming majority of our people, including the SME and low-cost housing sectors, or the financing of a new growth trajectory. The financial sector has been funding consumption spending away from investment into the productive sectors of our economy. In a sense there is an objective co-incidence (if not alliance) between mining and finance sections of capital to maintain the current, highly profitable semi-colonial growth trajectory.

The SME sector continues to be hemmed in by, on the one hand, the monopolies and, on the other, government policies that are not adequately supportive of this sector. The set-aside commitments made in the 2015 Sona might go some way towards the creation of a vibrant SME and co-operative sector, provided there is adequate support, and provided the sector is not captured by tenderpreneurs.

Most ‘successful’ developmental states, albeit of different types, have been characterised by the emergence of a new domestic, ‘patriotic’ capitalist class that often acts as part of the motive forces for local (domestic) economic development. Can this pattern be repeated in South Africa? In these other cases the societies were still dealing with: residual feudalism especially in agriculture (see South Korea and, to some extent, Brazil where anti-feudal land reform programmes have been critical components for industrial take-off); and/or low levels of (capitalist) development (South Korea, China); or war-time ruin or dislocation of capitalist production – in the case of post-war social democratic Western European “developmental states”, (eg. West Germany), or post-1945 Japan.

Does post-1994 South Africa resemble any of these cases? Is there “space” for a patriotic bourgeoisie in our situation? Unfortunately our BEE and procurement policies and practices have created two strata of the emergent, especially black, sections of the capitalist class that are rather compradorial and parasitic.

The first stratum of the BEE-inspired fraction of the capitalist class is compradorial in the sense that it has no independent existence of its own, other than as an extension of, and highly dependent upon, especially large mining and telecommunications monopoly capital (two areas that depend on government regulation, and therefore government “access”). For its growth and expansion it is dependent on policy compulsion (and share quotas) by government on existing monopoly capital. However, within this fraction, there is a truly entrepreneurial component that could be nurtured to play some progressive role in the economy.

The other stratum of the BEE type, emergent capitalist class represents the worst component, as it is thoroughly parasitic and tenderpreneurial (to the point of theft and asset stripping of the state) and is dependent on the control of the levers (and tenders) of government. It is often corrupt and ruthless in dealing with whatever obstacles on its way to one of the most vicious forms of primitive accumulation. Of course, there is often an overlap between the compradorial and the parasitic fractions of BEE capital.

There is also a significantly huge amount of what is supposed to be ‘public capital’ located in the hands of development finance institutions (DFIs) and other parastatals, like the Public Investment Corporation (PIC). The billions of rands in the hands of these institutions, if deployed appropriately, can play a crucial role in driving a new growth path in our economy. It is this capital that is currently a subject of intense struggles in the state between a variety of class forces that see it either as sources of accumulation by both established and BEE type capital or as sources of driving a progressive agenda by the working class.

Many of our DFIs and related institutions are not playing a very progressive role if one were to look into their investment portfolios. In fact, in a number of instances their investment portfolios are in direct contradiction to some of the imperatives of working towards a new growth trajectory. For example, the PIC should not be investing in so much building of private hospitals and funding private higher education loan institutions, as these are in direct contradiction to building a NHI and access to higher education for the children of the poor and the working class. The DBSA loans are in a number of instances much more expensive that the private monopoly banks.

One of our most significant struggles against the capitalist offensive, including the 1996 class project, in the late 1990s was that against the privatisation of state owned enterprises and companies. Our struggles on this front, together with Cosatu, played a crucial role in rolling back the privatisation agenda up till today. It is against this background that the SACP needs to develop its capacity to pay close attention to the energy space. Let us approach this weekend’s discussions on energy to identify very clear tasks for the SACP.

However, our very own victory of that period is now being threatened by a take-over by a more sophisticated agenda, which seeks to keep state ownership in order to capture the supply-chain processes and tenders of these SOCs. It is in this agenda that there is actually an overlap in the class agenda of both the compradorial and parasitic strata of the BEE-type emergent bourgeoisie.

A crucial dimension of the current conjuncture relates to the state of the working class and our Alliance. The shifting of the balance of forces in favour of the working class is one of the key challenges in the current conjuncture. Our analysis of the current period must essentially be for this purpose.

A key feature of the current conjuncture is the continued restructuring of the capitalist workplace and the working class through labour brokering and the increasing regionalisation (SADC) of the working class in the more vulnerable sectors of our economy, especially in agriculture and the hospitality industry.

In a way the ‘xenophobic’ attacks on (black) foreigners in our townships and villages are about both a reaction to the growing regionalisation of the working class, including in residential areas (in fact largely in townships – there is very little if any evidence of xenophobic attacks directed against black non-South Africans working in the hospitality or financial sectors, for instance), and local economic activities.

We need to intensify the struggle for a new growth path premised on industrialisation whose primary drivers must be manufacturing, infrastructure and mineral beneficiation.

The above is taking place against the background of a weakened Cosatu which, in itself, is a subject of an imperialist offensive and that of especially the mining bosses. It is for instance within this context that we must locate the growing membership of Amcu (Association of Mineworkers’ and Construction Union) and the concerted attack on the NUM (National Union of Mineworkers). We must, of course, not be blind to the internal weaknesses of the progressive trade union movement as well as the ‘sins of incumbency’ and the complacency arising out of many of the Cosatu unions being the ‘guaranteed’ majority in their various workplaces. The SACP needs to pay particular attention to this, as the progressive trade union movement in itself is a terrain of the current class struggles.

The national question (in the context of the above class struggles)

Both within South Africa and internationally the deepening social and economic impact of the global capitalist crisis is provoking the resurgence of all manner of backward, revanchist, populist reactions. Post-apartheid South Africa has never been free of white racism, but there is a distinct upsurge of anti-black racism and white arrogance in our country.

This is often directly connected to the sustained anti-majoritarian liberal offensive from the media and from opposition benches in parliament, with its implicit and often explicit racism. White racism (and sometimes black counter-racism) is rife in our cyber-space. It is also being fed by parts of the black “intelligentsia”.

For instance, Prince Mashele recently recycled an earlier Sowetan 2012 article in which he writes that “Zuma’s ascent to power could not be understood without a deeper appreciation of rural psychology.” Zuma, he writes with a sneer, has been “marketed to lowly ANC members as a leader who is like them, who dances like them, is uneducated like them is morally and ethically flawed like them.” He laments that in South Africa “functional illiterates have made it all the way to parliament”. And Mashele then suggests in a profoundly anti-democratic statement that only those with certificated academic qualifications should be allowed to stand for  parliament.

The EFF’s flirtation with anti-white sentiments, ethnic   favouritism in service delivery and counter ethnic mobilisation in Malamulele, and the spate of xenophobic attacks on shopkeepers in townships are all fundamentally morbid signs of economic and social distress and opportunistic (and often self-defeating) mobilisation based on one or another form of identity politics. Rather than being seen as the “resurgence of outdated” ideologies, they need to be understood as symptoms of contemporary social distress along with many other variations of intra-poor conflict – taxi wars, gender-based violence, homophobic attacks, the burning down of schools and other community   assets.

In this context the SACP has a critical vanguard role to play. We need to analyse the intersection of class, national and gender dynamics in all key sites of power. We need to underline that a critical part of the present “national question” is the defence of national sovereignty, which is to say the defence of democratic majority rule and the electoral mandate bestowed on the ANC-led government.

It is in this sense that the national question is the key bridgehead between the first and second phase and a critical platform for a more radical phase.

Gender struggles

A major dimension of the past three decades of neo-liberal globalisation has been the feminisation of the proletariat. Women workers, especially African, are still the most exploited, especially in the more vulnerable sectors of our economy. There has also been patriarchal violence against women, some of it occasioned by a loss of male self- esteem as a result of widespread male unemployment and retrenchments. Even in professional jobs, women occupy the lower rungs.

In this context the organisation of working class women in all keys sites of power is critical, as is the empowerment of women in community based struggles. We need to think about more creative ways of organising women where they are: in the church, in co-ops, in SGBs, etc, and not only focus on the organisation of elite women. It is only mass women’s struggles from below that will have an impact on middle class and professional women

The ANC-SACP political relationship as the anchor of our Alliance

This relationship has remained the political anchor, despite decades of sustained attack on it by both imperialism and its lackeys, inside and outside of our ranks, as well as a right wing nationalist and ultra- left offensive, again both inside and outside our ranks. The attack on an SACP meeting by thugs wearing ANC T-shirts, including participation by well-known ANC leaders is something that must not be taken lightly. The ANC- SACP dynamic in the context of the politics in eThekwini region is something we must also study closely in terms of its implications for the ANC-SACP political relationship.

This relationship in the context of electoral politics requires ongoing reflection and strengthening. Post-1994 the relationship has gone through different though sometimes similar challenging periods. Immediately after the 1994 elections, the opportunities to radically deepen and consolidate our democracy were temporarily opened up by the adoption of the RDP (Reconstruction and Development Plan), but quickly squandered by an ill-informed (or relatively well prepared) adoption of a neo liberal economic policy in the form of Gear. Perhaps in hindsight we did not adequately notice the (policy) class assault of imperialism on our movement during the period just prior to the 1994 democratic breakthrough.

In the late 1980s and into the early 1990s there was what one could call an imperialist led ‘policy offensive’, disguised as preparing for negotiations and a post-apartheid order. This saw, among other things, targetted programmes and pilgrimages (short training programmes and learning trips) to London, Germany and the US especially by some of the senior cadres of our movement to be trained in governance and economics, with key (and now increasingly discredited) corporations like Goldman Sachs playing a critical role. Accompanying these initiatives was the hurried closure or weakening of virtually all of the ANC created left-leaning think tanks and policy units, eg. MERG, MEPU, LAPC, and on health, the CEPD.

Gear was therefore in many respects the policy consolidation, within the new government, of these policy restructuring initiatives of the period. They in essence reflected an emergence of “new” class interests within the liberation movement that became the core of the 1996 Class Project. The 1996 Class Project perhaps posed the most serious threat to the political relationship between the ANC and the SACP since the fall-out in the 1930s.

The dislodging of the Class Project in Polokwane rescued this relationship from the doldrums. However its rescue did not deal with all the damage that had been done, especially at sub-national levels.

Nor did Polokwane do away with the new class interests whose consolidation still somehow implies a rupture of the relationship between the ANC and the SACP. It has always been the agenda of the South African capitalist class and its political colonial regimes, including the apartheid regime, to break the relationship between the ANC and the SACP.

It is now necessary to pay closer attention to this relationship, especially given what appears to be a renewed internal (and external) offensive to dislodge and disrupt the SACP as shown through the Mpumalanga thuggery against our Party.

A new class offensive whose agenda now is not privatisation per se, but the capture of procurement by state owned enterprises, by ensuring continued state control of these entities, needs to be tackled. This agenda may appear to be similar to ours but it is not, and instead it is similar to the call by the new tendency to nationalise. In the energy sector this agenda is possibly a mix between part privatisation (eg electricity generation) and state ownership (of transmission).

The significant ‘shift’ and concession by the 1996 Class Project at the Gallagher estate policy conference that the ANC was a disciplined force of the left, was both an attempt to displace us much as it was part of a capitulation to the organised pressure and backlash from the SACP and Cosatu against Gear. It was a grudging concession and part attempt to reclaim the policy space by simultaneously calling the ANC a disciplined force of the left while castigating and falsely accusing comrades of wanting to turn the ANC into a socialist organisation. But it was a project also beginning to feel internal pressure from inside the ANC itself in its reckless marginalisation and treatment of its own Deputy President, Cde Zuma.

We now need to cement the relationship between the ANC and SACP by:

l Forging a left consensus on a second, more radical phase of our transition, rooted in addressing the triple crisis; and

l Paying attention to the state of organisation of both the ANC and the SACP

What is to be done?

What is our task? It is incumbent upon the Alliance that we remain focused on the task of driving a second, more radical phase of our transition. Some of the commitments contained in the President’s 2015 Sona are crucial components in driving a second phase of our transition. For instance, the very radical proposals on land ownership – including the banning of foreign ownership of land, and limits to the number of hectares to be owned by individuals are what we should be focusing on achieving.

There is likely to be a racist and class backlash on this score and it is important that we mobilise all of our rural Alliance structures, individually and collectively, to act as motive forces for this radical land reform. Many of the proposals contained in 2015 Sona are likely to see intensified class struggles, and our Party must not be found wanting in this regard.

The Sona commitments to industrialisation through, amongst others, increased focus on beneficiation, more infrastructure spend and expansion of the manufacturing sector, as well as set-asides for small and medium business and co-operatives, are all important commitments in driving more radical economic transformation. This will require, among other things, intensive engagement with Cosatu affiliates so that the federation becomes an important force in our transformation programmes. This in itself may help to refocus the federation as it seeks to overcome its internal organisational challenges. In fact, it will be through radical mobilisation of organised workers behind some of the commitments made in Sona that they will be achieved.

For the SACP, in particular, it is vitally important that we drive the SACP-led financial sector campaign, to ensure that significant resources in the financial sector are redirected away from consumption into funding for expansion of the productive sectors of our economy. The set-asides for co-operatives are an important breakthrough, and will certainly provide a welcome and renewed emphasis on building a progressive co-operative movement, including co-operative banks.