Khaye Nkwanyana, Memorial Lecture held in Port Shepstone convened by Young Communist League, Sunday, February 22 2015
20 year anniversary of Joe Slovo: Where are we going?
I must say that it was no easy a task to accede to the request of conducting this lecture. It is not easy to speak in a lecture dedicated to one of our large tree; a Baobab of magnificent proportion. Joe Slovo's stature had grown to surpass the status of a national icon and a country-specific theoretician. But he was an international figure whose footprints were, and still are traceable in the rich theoretical work and strategic frameworks that continue to inform the Left and the movement as a whole even today, beyond South Africa.
Amongst his seminal intervention was his pamphlet that guided the Left formations internationally in the era of despair and confusion after the collapse of the Soviet Union, titled Has Socialism failed?
In this pamphlet Slovo was brutally honest about the errors committed by the Communist Party of Soviet Union and the personality cult that emerged during the era of Joseph Stalin; the conflation of the Party with the State; the brutality and intolerance of the critical views in the interest of absolute loyalty. But he concluded that all of these mistakes were themselves anti -Socialism; and that Socialism is as relevant as ever. Socialism is an answer to capitalist barbarism.
We, who are still wet behind ears and swaddling like infants, have a monumental duty to aspire to the greatness of Slovo. This means a duty to be true to the dictates of the revolutionary cause; the fixation of our eyes firmly to the horizon in pursuit of this long term goal -Socialism.
This memorial lecture comes just in the heels of the KZN successful Congress of the SACP that was, coincidentally, dedicated to the memory of Joe Slovo, 20 years down the line since his departing. Our 7th Congress was held under theme "Protect, defend and Advance the NDR for a Second Phase of Radical Economic Transformation"
For us this dedication to comrade Joe was important from the point of view of analysing the balance of forces both globally and domestically. And within that, locate, the continuities and discontinuities of the Left movement in the obtaining material realities.
The complexion of the revolutionary space in the last 24 odd years since the collapsed of Soviet Union has fundamentally changed; the metamorphosis that capital has undergone through globalisation momentum and the dominance of speculative capital that circulate money at a wink through stock markets. The rise mechanisation and e-commerce through information highways, replacing labour, are but some of the realities that we had to look hard as to inform tactics.
Of cause, for us as KZN Party, we were readying ourselves for the Special Congress of the SACP sitting this year.
Slovo had this art of making swinging theoretical interventions in moments of hard questions confronting the movement and the Party in a given phase of the revolution. He will bell the cat. Going through his writings, even today, one does not fail to see the level of foresight which was like a prophetic trajectory, in most instances.
I will not spend time on cataloguing the details about Joe Slovo himself much as they are well known.
Born on the 23rd of May 1926 in Lithuania named Yossel Mashel Slovo from Jewish parents, Slovo arrived in 1934 at the age of eight (8) with his parents who migrated in South Africa. They settled in Johannesburg and his father worked as a van driver. Slovo was a passionate athlete and robust debater at Observatory Junior High School. After leaving school in 1941 he worked as a dispatch Clerk at the South African Druggists. Here he was elected a Shop steward for National Union of Distributive Workers.
In 1942, he joined the Communist Party. It is from this resolve that Slovo's evolution in the South African revolution against apartheid was set in motion. Inspired by the Russian heroism in the Second World War, Slovo enlisted and fought for the Allies. On his return he completed his LLB Degree at Wits University. He married one of the outstanding theoretician of our Party, the Journalist, Ruth First. Ruth First was a daughter to the founding member of the South African Communist Party (CPSA then), Julius First. Together with Ruth they were active in the Young Communist League with Ruth First, becoming its Secretary.
In the 1950s Slovo was involved in many civil disobedience campaigns and was a founder member of the Congress of Democrats in 1953
He and his wife were banned in 1954 as Communists under the Suppression of Communism Act that saw the Communist Party banned in 1950. As a result of this banishment, Slovo could not attend the drawing up of the Freedom Charter instead he watched all the proceedings using binoculars from a rooftop of the adjacent building!
He was arrested for two months during Treason Trial of 1956. He was detained again for the second time during the State of Emergency that followed Sharpeville Massacre in 1960.
Slovo was one amongst the first cohorts that join and assumed military leadership of Umkhonto we Sizwe in 1961. He was forced to exile, first to UK where he completed his LLM in London School of Economics. He was part of SACP and ANC leadership, he was Chief of Staff for the MK. In Mozambique he was with his wife who was letter- bombed by apartheid government in 1982. He was a Central Committee member of the SACP, ANC NEC and the powerful ANC revolutionary Council from 1969 to 1983.
With the passing of the SACP General Secretary Moses Mabhida in 1986, Joe Slovo became the General Secretary. He brought the Party back in exile in 1990 when the unbanning was announced. He became the Chairman of the Party after the 7th Congress in 1991, allowing comrade Chris Hani to become a General Secretary. His role in CODESA in bringing about the package that enabled the liberation movement to form a government in 1994 cannot be overemphasized.
Second phase of radical economic transformation
Socialism is our future. The national democratic revolution is not an antithesis to our Socialist objectives but a direct route for advance towards socialism in so far as our class social weight and the Party leadership in society are in preponderance. We are not going to assert ourselves only through sloganeering but through incessant programmatic pursuit that, from time to time, should shift the balance of forces to our favour. This is not an easy task and requires cadres of a special type and a Party of foresight.
In this regard, what are the urgent tasks of the Party in this conjuncture whereby we have declared it as a phase of "Second phase of radical economic transformation". The operational word is "radical" and therefore should mean, at least from our perspective:
A bold and decisive state that assert itself and uncompromisingly achieve what it has set out itself within the time bounds to achieve.
An interventionist government that is capable of using its instruments without apology to democratise the economic stranglehold in the hands of white monopoly capital and level the fields for ownerships.
Larger focus and bias to the informal economy upgrade in our township and rural areas through various LED interventions driven by government. Stokvels, burial societies, hawkers, taxi industry, Cooperatives farming in villages need special focus to empower, streamline, finance, market -link and to do other various support services needed to upgrade and coordinate this peripheral economy.
Related to the above is the fast track in the establishment of the State bank or extending the mandate of Post bank that will directly service this lower rung and middle economic actors on favourable rates including those who are outside the banking system.
Radical skilling of South Africa by expanding various pathways in the post-school education and training system so that we create a critical mass of skilled workforce that can be the drivers of our economy, especially the mid-level occupational skills, necessary for the industrial economy.
A cultivation of active citizenry is important to counterpoise the strength of reactionary enclaves that are hard at work in the civil society groupings, media, and other influential institutions which are hell-bent on defiling the movement and its alliance, government and the revolutionary phase that we are pursuing.
Our Party is under intense attacks from its detractors
Some Party detractors are working very hard to portray the Party as an anachronism of the rich past and having submerged its class interest in the interest of the national question underpinned by bourgeois relations. For them, the Party must or should have never participated in the bourgeois parliament but should have concentrated only to civil society struggles and pursue a pure struggle for socialism.
I want to make an extensive quote in Slovo addressing this confusion; Joe Slovo had this to say:
If we pose the question by asking only whether our struggle is a national struggle or a class struggle, we will inevitably get a wrong answer. The right question is: what is the relationship between these two categories. A failure to understand the class content of the national struggle and the national content of class struggle in existing conditions can hold back the advance of both the democratic and socialist transformations which we seek.
The immediate primacy of the struggle against race tyranny flows from the concrete realities of our existing situation. The concept of national domination is not a mystification to divert us from class approaches; it infects every level of class exploitation. Indeed, it divides our working class into colour compartments....."
In the pamphlet "Left-wing Communism, an infantile disorder" Lenin labelled German Communists as infantile in their resolve to withdraw participation in bourgeois Parliament which they had described as historically obsolete thereby opting for other struggles short of this option. Bourgeois parliament is an important site of struggle and so does being in the Executive of all levels.
Communists must use Parliament, Legislatures, and Councils as sites of struggle and irritation against neo-liberal thinking festering in these areas in terms of policy making. This here where accountability of Communists must start. Communists in Executive positions, such as Ministers, Premiers and MECs, Mayors and Mayoral committees, must use these privileged positions to influence policies and decisions that are pro to the working class.
From our detractors, for them, the Party must be in constant militancy, it must fight and shout, and it must be in permanent agitation. And so, without these tactics the Party is condemned to be belonging to the history of antiquity. To the extent that the SACP is seen as less confrontational to the ANC and its government, as for them, that represent a Party in revision from its historical commitment to the cause of building Socialism in this country.
On the basis of these above misconceptions, a particular belief exist therefore, the Party can be supplanted by them. Amongst these quasi left imitators are busy ransacking the national parliament decorum and its ethical standing.
The real problem lies in the confusion in the understanding of tactical and strategic approaches in the ebbs and flows of the revolution. The art of discerning revolutionary and non-revolutionary phases and the assumption of choices in those transient moments. To confuse and therefore congeal tactical choices to strategic choices in a particular historical moments is the extreme act of voluntarism. The dangers of misreading the revolutionary cause and its momentary rhythms, in any given conjuncture, surely yield wrong strategic assumptions.
Some in the ultra-left even go to the extreme and argue that the Party must go out of the alliance, the basis of which being the ANC which has debunked its historical mission. The SACP has always been in the alliance with the ANC since the advent of the "Black Republic thesis" knowingly that it is a multi-class liberation movement whose class character is a function of the dominant class at a given moment.
In the Communist manifesto, Marx and Engels said:
"The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement. In France the Communists ally themselves with the social democrats, against the conservative and radical bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the right to take up a critical position in regard to phrases and illusions traditionally handed down from the great revolution.
In Switzerland they support the Radicals, without losing sight of the fact that this party consists of antagonistic elements, partly of Democratic Socialists, in the French sense, partly of radical bourgeois.
In Poland they support the party that insists on an agrarian revolution as the prime condition for national emancipation, that party which fomented the insurrection of Cracow in 1846.
In German they fight with the bourgeoisie whenever it acts in a revolutionary way, against the absolute monarchy, the feudal squirearchy, and the petty bourgeoisie.
But they never cease, for a single instant, to instil into the working class the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and the proletariat, in order that the German workers may straightway use, as so many weapons against the bourgeoisie, the social and political conditions that the bourgeoisie must necessarily introduce along with its supremacy, and in order that, after the fall of the reactionary classes in Germany, the fight against the bourgeoisie itself may immediately begin......."
In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.
In all these movements they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time"
Political situation in our country.
Everyone is extremely in a state of dejection from what we have seen in the last two weeks during the State of the Nation address drama and the manner in which the decorum has been pettifogged so that petulance acts supersedes. The unfortunate reality is that Parliament sets the tone about society's mannerism in engaging on issues or discourses. It is an apex theatre where matters of running the country and their scrutiny are attended. Theoretically, Parliament should represent the best of minds, the best quality leadership and best mannerism with which we should emulate as rank and file.
I have never seen, as we have witness in this 5th administration, the umbrage deployed against the head of State and all efforts exerted to turn him a persona non grata against the very institution he must come to account. There are honourable ways of raising questions and debate issues without displaying ghetto acts.
The current ill-discipline, degeneration of standards, ghetto political approach and defiling of house is a tinderbox that requires a combative redress of magnificent precision. If these vices are left to their own devices, Lord have mercy, we are standing at the precipice of social upheaval. The replication of this to society and to other collegial constructs of our system will surely supplant democratic practice to Malema-prism-version of democracy.
EFF and DA cannot be allowed further to damage that institution by using all antics and insults which in turn degenerate our sovereignty. They do this with such backing from some small but influential and vocal sections of our media and single-issue non-governmental organisations.
South Africans must stand up and fight this!
That Parliament is not for those elected members. It is Parliament of all South Africans. That house is an expression of will of South Africans within which sworn members are mandated by South Africans, through electoral seats allocation, to act in our interest.
Many of South Africans are angry but silent. Their anger is not the one expressed in the media.
I repeat in saying that our silent majority is still as just that -silent. Listening to radio stations, watching televisions and reading newspapers one can be convinced that if a referendum against Zuma or ANC were to be conducted tomorrow, the juggernaut that is ANC, could be out of power the following day. But in reality, these are small voices in control of megaphones whose acts serves to irritate even more our people.
If there is one thing that we know definitely, is the fact that the disability that is affecting Parliament is a passing wind and so are the perpetrators in their organisations which are ephemeral. In the passing of time, we will gaze back and say, once upon a time there was this irritation that once was.
Defend the Party
If there is one task that Communists must do is to defend the Party. Our Party is a future government of this country. We were not established in 1921 to be in vicinity to power in perpetuity. That understanding must sink firmly in the minds of young comrades of the YCL. We are a Communist Party of power and we want power. As to when that will be the case is a function of the conjuncture and the balance of forces as we proceed forward. To say this, is a not a conspiratorial assertion; it is because we believe in the alternative society and we need to keep the Party united so that it can, in future, succeed in fulfilling its historic mission.
CONCLUSION
We must build this Party, make it strong and jealousy guard it. But we must always sharpen its ideological front and fight the enemy that seek to undermine our existence. We must build and invest in you, the YCL. By so doing we will be ploughing the seed for future sustenance of the cause for socialism.
In this context, Joe Slovo, will smile in affirmation from his last resting place and say: my footprints are deeply entrenched and visible....
Khaye Nkwanyana is the SACP Provincial Executive Member in KwaZulu Natal (Moses Mabhida).
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