SACP Augmented Central Committee
The annual year-end meeting of the SACP's Augmented Central Committee was held over the 28th and 29th November 2008. The Party's Augmented CC meetings are an occasion to review the work of the SACP over the past year, and to plan for the year ahead.
2008 has been an eventful and challenging political year in South Africa. Following the ANC's 52nd National Conference at the end of last year, there has been a major turnaround in Alliance relationships - particularly at the national level. The many progressive social and economic resolutions taken at the ANC's Polokwane conference have created space and a favourable climate for consolidating unity in action across the Tripartite Alliance. This has been evidenced in the important May and October Alliance Summits and in the emerging character and content of the draft ANC election manifesto currently under discussion.
The political report discussed at the CC called on all SACP members to take an active part in the 16 days of activism against women and child abuse. The scourge of abuse continues to affect our communities deeply, undermining our struggle for human rights, development, and safety and security for all. It is at the community level that we have a particular collective responsibility for waging a battle against women and child abuse. The SACP, together with the ANC, has been organizing street committees and engaging with Community Policing Forums. In the course of the sixteen days of activism, let us redouble our efforts on these fronts. The CC also calls on all communists to join other South Africans tomorrow, Monday December 1st,, to mark World Aids Day. We call upon all South Africans to join the 15 minutes of silence called by NEDLAC partners at 12h00 tomorrow as part of raising awareness about the scourge of HIV/AIDS.
The CC discussed extensively a report on the current global economic crisis and its impact on South Africa. This is the most serious economic crisis in the capitalist global economy since the early 1930s. The crisis is not an accident, it is deeply rooted in the unsustainable systemic features of the last three decades of accelerated globalization. Over several years, the SACP has analysed these features, and warned against a naïve globalizing triumphalism that assumed that all we needed to do in South Africa was to align our economy to the Washington Consensus mantra in order to benefit from what was supposedly an unending horizon of global growth. While it remains the most powerful economy in the world, the US has steadily been losing its dominant hegemonic status, and it has long lost its unrivalled productive dynamism. It has used its persisting if waning dominance to foster reckless speculative activity and to prop up unsustainable consumption patterns at home, serviced by third world manufacturing centres (notably China) and oil producers abroad. Its trade deficit is now in excess of a staggering trillion dollars.
It is no accident that the trigger for the current crisis first occurred in the US financial sector, and specifically with reckless sub-prime loans. The crisis has quickly spread from the mortgage and merchant banking sector into regular banking and from there into the productive economy. Across the US, Japan and much of Europe, major economies are entering into recession. Elsewhere, major slow-downs are predicted - in China the forecast for next year is for the lowest growth rate in 19 years.