Together, let us Build a Powerful, Socialist Movement of the Workers and Poor
South African Communist Party statement on its 101st founding anniversary
Delivered by the SACP General Secretary Solly Mapaila
7 August 2022
On Saturday, 30 July 2022, the South African Communist Party entered its first day of the second century in our struggle to dismantle racial oppression, patriarchy, class exploitation, colonial and imperialist subjugation, subordination and domination, to secure and freely exercise our national independence, self-determination, democratic sovereignty.
We have chosen to open during the national Women’s Month the celebrations of our Party’s 101 years of struggle for equality, democracy and socialism as a transitional phase towards lasting freedom, peace and the development of all. We must, and we will, use this occasion to strengthen our efforts to deepen our struggle to end patriarchy and gender-based violence in our society. This must include rebuilding the progressive women’s movement as an integral component of our theme: “Together, let us build a powerful, socialist movement of the workers and poor: Socialism is the future—Build it Now!”
From its founding at its inaugural conference, held from 30 July to 1 August 1921 in Cape Town, the Communist Party played an important role towards the South African freedom, which we must complete. Today, the immediate challenge facing the Communist Party and the working-class in its entirety, as well as other progressive forces, is to intensify our struggle to defend, advance and deepen the national democratic revolution.
This is the challenge to safeguard our national democratic sovereignty against imperialist machination and influence in our domestic policy space and other national affairs. It is a challenge to deal a deadly blow to the networks of state capture, what Karl Marx in his book Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Vol. 1) calls the “fraudulent alienation of the state”, and to clamp down on other forms of corruption.
It was the Communist Party playing its vanguard role when it became the first organisation to characterise and expose “corporate-capture”, “corporate capture of the state”, “corporate state capture”, referring to the industrial scale looting, governance decay and mismanagement that had become systemic. The driving forces of the rot, which became known in short as “state capture”, were private sector forces and their collaborators, those they had captured in the public sector. We were playing our vanguard role when we became the first organisation to call for the establishment of the judicial Commission of Inquiry into State Capture.
It is crucial to deepen our work to dismantle the networks of the state capture corruption, among others through a comprehensive strategic response to the commission’s report. To this end, the newly elected SACP 15th National Congress Central Committee will complete the work of studying all parts of the report. This will include engaging with the text of the report, where we believe an alternative perspective will be better.
The main content of our immediate challenge is to put the people and the environment before profits, to address the plight of the people, the majority of whom are the working-class and poor. We need to secure a resounding voice of our people in our domestic policy content and direction, against the revolutionary sounding sloganeering by state capture networks, against neoliberal policy prescriptions from imperialist dominated institutions, foreign organisations, and against the domestic neoliberal agents.
The opposite is the continuing misery of crisis-high levels of racialised and gendered unemployment, poverty and class inequalities, including capitalist uneven development. There is no alternative to the victory of the overwhelming majority of our people, the workers, unemployed and poor. We can and we must, dear comrades, build leadership of the people to secure victory. This is our historical mission. We have our own history to learn from.
The vanguard role played by the Communist Party towards the South African freedom
The Communist Party played its vanguard role when it became the first political organisation in South Africa to advance the principle of non-racialism both in theory and practice, starting with its own organisation.
It was the Communist Party playing its vanguard role that became the first political organisation to advance the historical mission to transform South Africa into a democratic republic with equal rights for all the people, Black and White, women and men, young and old, and equal rights for all children, whether they were born in or out of wedlock.
The Communist Party played an unparalleled role in building the progressive trade union movement. It is the Communist Party playing its vanguard role that started the Alliance. It was the Alliance in the forefront of our liberation movement, with the support of our people, that defeated the apartheid regime.
Through communist cadres and leaders, who openly formed part of the leadership structures and activists of the Congress Alliance formations, the Communist Party played its vanguard role in mobilising demands, contributing to the drafting of the Freedom Charter and organising the authentic Congress of the People which adopted the Charter in 1955.
The Communist Party was itself an underground organisation, having been the first political organisation to be banned in South Africa by the apartheid regime in 1950 under the Suppression of Communism Act of 1950. The ban was, in part, a reaction to the vanguard role played by the Communist Party in the trade union struggles of the 1940s against exploitation in the mines.
When the apartheid regime unleashed violence against the people, intransigently showing that it was not prepared to listen to any other message except an armed response, it was the Communist Party that played a vanguard role when it became the first to start a network of armed struggle units against the regime.
By the time the Communist Party together with the ANC jointly formed uMkhonto weSizwe (MK), whose constitution was written at the headquarters of the Communist Party, Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia, Johannesburg, the units established by the SACP had already undertaken acts of armed response to the apartheid regime, as President Nelson Mandela states in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. As President Mandela says in the book, the units the Communist Party had already established came in handy in the foundation of the MK and simplified building the people’s liberation army.
Those who were arrested, leading to the Rivonia Treason Trial, comprised a core of communist activists and leaders who were prepared to pay the highest price of their lives in pursuit of liberation and social emancipation. This was part of their tasks in carrying out the vanguard role of the Communist Party, which they continued to play in different prisons as political prisoners, and in exile.
We are proud that our history of unbroken struggle (including but not limited to the underground struggle, MK operations, mass mobilisation, forging class-conscious trade unionism, international isolation of the apartheid regime, producing the theory of our struggle and articulating it in practice to change South Africa for the better) has contributed in no small measure to the ultimate victory of our people against the apartheid regime.
Since April 1994, millions of our people have realised massive social gains, building on the human rights culture we established in our national constitution after defeating the apartheid regime. Today, it is a key part of our immediate task to defend our democratic gains against erosion and to expand democracy and real freedom. Needless to mention the absolute necessity to democratise the sphere of the economy, in which the capitalist dog-eat-dog barbarity, exploitation of workers, unfair labour practices, unfair dismissals including retrenchments, widening of inequality, increased high levels of unemployment, and mass poverty are the order of the day.
Our goal as the Communist Party is to achieve a socialist transition, to lay a firm foundation for advancing towards a society without class divisions, exploitation and oppression of one person by another. In pursuit of this direction, towards completing our freedom and securing universalist emancipation, we are striving, in the here and now, to achieve the immediate interests and aims of the overwhelming majority of our people, the working-class and poor.
We therefore decided to use the occasion of the 101st anniversary of our Party to announce the following immediate programme emerging from our 15th National Congress held in mid-July 2022.
FOR THE RIGHT TO DECENT WORK FOR ALL:
We call on the unemployed youth, in their millions, on mothers stuck at home without childcare facilities, on those recently retrenched, on those in precarious work. Together, let us build a powerful, socialist movement of the workers and poor!
Let us unite to change our international trade, monetary and fiscal policies to make building and raising the levels of national production, pursuing industrialisation and sustainable employment creation to take care of the needs of the people as an apex priority. This needs a comprehensive, high impact industrial policy, which must be supported by an enabling macroeconomic framework towards building a new economy.
FOR OVERHAUL TRANSFORMATION OF THE FINANCIAL SECTOR:
Together, let us build a powerful, socialist movement of the workers and poor. Today, 28 years into our democratic dispensation, the banking sector in our country is under the monopoly of profit-driven oligopolies, a few private commercial banks that undermine the state. For example, the government established the state guaranteed loan scheme to assist small, micro and medium-sized enterprises (SMMEs) in the face of the COVID-19 distress. The banking oligopolies dispensed only a fraction of the potential R200 billion state guaranteed loan scheme and mostly to White owned SMMEs, locking out the many affected Black owned SMMEs (needless to mention co-operatives) through their lending requirements.
The banking oligopolies remain intransigent on other transformation fronts as well, including, as revealed by the recent report released by the Financial Sector Transformation Council, ownership, management control, skills development, procurement, enterprise and supplier development, affordable access to finance, as well as socio-economic development and consumer education. As the Financial Sector Transformation Council report indicates, the transformation scorecard of the top six banks to redress historical imbalances at ownership level was a mere 23,01 points in 2018–2019 and a mere 23,57 points in 2019–2020. In terms of management control, it was a mere 14,16 points in 2018–2019 and 14,8 points in 2019–2020, against a meagre target of 25.
Meanwhile, we still do not have a state bank and a state banking sector to meet the financial needs of the people. This goes against the letter and revolutionary spirit of the Freedom Charter.
We need to build maximum unity to intensify our mobilisation for overhaul transformation of the financial sector, for the establishment not only of one state bank but of a diversified developmental state banking sector to take care of the financial needs of the people.
FOR A CENTRAL BANK THAT SERVES ALL THE PEOPLE:
Together, let us build a powerful, socialist movement of the workers and poor. We still live in a racialised and gendered unemployment crisis, which today affects 12,4 million active and discouraged work-seekers, the majority of whom is the Black youth in terms of age. Yet the South African Reserve Bank is bluntly pursuing a high interest rate monetary policy regime. This is unfavourable to employment creation and to those seeking affordable finance to start and run co-operatives and SMMEs.
In terms of our constitution, the Reserve Bank must exercise its powers, functions and operational independence to secure balanced and sustainable growth in the republic. We have never had that since the adoption of the constitution in 1996. Today, we want to warn those entrusted with public power in our democratic dispensation, at the Reserve Bank and the National Treasury, in government and other levers of state power, against exercising that power to advance neoliberalism and stand in the way of the Freedom Charter and other people’s demands.
FOR ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE FOR ALL, THROUGH A JUST TRANSITION:
We call on the working-class and poor living in townships amid pollution, on communities that could become ghost towns because of unjust energy transition, on environmental activists, on progressive faith-based networks. Together, let us build a powerful, socialist movement of the workers and poor!”
Let us defend our electric power and other energy production-based towns, such as eMalahleni and Middleburg, in Mpumalanga Province, and Lephalale, in Limpopo Province. Let us secure the future of these and other electric power and energy production-based towns in new energy generation capacity. To achieve this, we must build maximum unity and wage a relentless struggle against unjust energy transition and its destruction of work. Let us protect existing work, fight against retrenchments and increase the number of people, young and old, women and men, and people living with disabilities, with productive work and income security.
To achieve a just transition, we must intensify mass mobilisation for, among other priorities, decisive public investment in innovation, research and development in clean coal technologies and new power generation capacity. Clean coal technologies will offer environmental, health and economic benefits.
Today, recall the painful history of colonial and apartheid oppression that we come from. During that era, the oppressors created, managed and funded Eskom as a public utility to look after the electric energy needs of the beneficiaries of oppression. Electricity was produced to meet the needs mainly of the White community and the industries controlled by the White bourgeoisie of South Africa and their imperialist counterparts from Western Europe and North America. For a century from 1894 to 1994, the successive oppressor regimes systematically unleashed racism and excluded the oppressed Black majority from household electrification.
Thanks to our 1994 democratic breakthrough, the new government commendably rolled out massive household electrification, covering the previously excluded Black majority. This exceeded 85 per cent nationwide household electrification coverage in 2012.
However, instead of correcting the historical injustice, the post-apartheid government took wrong decisions starting in 1996 under the influence of the neoliberal economic policy called GEAR (“Growth, Employment and Redistribution”). As a result, today, 28 years into our democratic dispensation, the government has not built a single public utility to look after the electric energy needs of the people as a whole and failed to ensure that Eskom is governed and managed competently.
Now Eskom is struggling to cope. It is frequently implementing rolling load shedding. Besides the historical exclusion of the majority of the previously oppressed from household electrification, the neoliberal macroeconomic framework and the governance decay and looting that occurred under state capture are responsible for the energy crisis we find ourselves in.
In a democratic dispensation guided by a national democratic revolution, the government cannot refer the people to profit-driven interests as a solution to the energy crisis. We need new sufficient public power generation capacity to meet and keep pace with the electric energy needs of all the people on a non-racial and non-sexist basis, to correct the historical injustice of the White supremacist oppressors who built public power generation capacity mainly for their constituencies.
In addition, the transition from carbon dioxide emitting internal combustion engine vehicles to new energy vehicles already underway in the global automotive manufacturing industry will remarkably increase the energy needs of the people as soon as it becomes firmly established in our country. While we are still on this score, we want to warn the government against using the transition to take us back to the semi-peripheral, colonial-type mere assembly of imported components. The government must use the transition to build country-wide charging infrastructure and drive increased localisation of energy infrastructure and new energy vehicle components, to protect existing work and increase new employment towards the Right to Work for all.
The future we face today, given advances such as the transition in the global automotive industry, the widening and deepening digital industrial revolution, and the emerging quantum computing capability development, is the future of electric energy centrality as the main motive force in production, transportation and communication. Besides waging the struggle for increased public investment, including through creating new public utilities in energy production to augment existing state power generation capacity, we must wage the struggle for democratic social participation in energy production. However, we must guard against the concept of social participation being co-opted to justify and subordinate it to the rising dominance of profit-driven private power producers being created by neoliberalism.
TO PUT PEOPLE BEFORE PROFITS:
We call on public and private sector workers, on the unionised across federations, we call on the non-unionised, on those in informal work, on South Africans and other nationals. Together, let us build a powerful, socialist movement of the workers and poor, to fight against exploitation, inequality in the distribution of production income, and to achieve social upliftment. Let us build unity to advance the common interests of the workers, employed and unemployed.
On Wednesday, 24 August 2022, let us go out in our numbers to support the protected socio-economic strike action called by COSATU, against retrenchments, high unemployment, mass poverty, sky-rocketing inequality, and the rising cost-of-living crisis. On that Day of Action, we must “paint the streets red” in all major towns and cities identified by COSATU for the marches that will take place.
FOR ACCELERATED LAND REDISTRIBUTION:
We call on the landless, on farmworkers and labour tenants, on subsistence farmers, on those deprived of their communal land tenure rights, on households forced to live on floodplains and dangerous riverbanks. Together, let us build a powerful, socialist movement of the workers and poor to end these injustices, and to strive for a land redistribution programme which focuses on providing infrastructure, water rights, inclusive agricultural expansion based on the Freedom Charter, and integrated human settlement.
Let us come together in pursuit of a land redistribution programme which offers security of tenure for small and subsistence farmers and gives full recognition to a variety of tenure, needless to mention communal land tenure rights. Let us unite to end unscrupulous evictions of farmworkers and their families from the farms. The evictions of labour tenants and their families from the farms on which they have lived and worked must also cease. These evictions are nothing less than an ongoing colonial-type expropriation. As the SACP we say: “Return the former labour tenants as rightful owners to what are, in reality, their OWN farms:
FOR THE RIGHT TO ACCESS AND MOBILITY:
We call on those who are stranded because of dilapidated poor public transport, on the elderly and those living with disabilities, on those living in inaccessible places because of crumbling infrastructure. Together, let us build a powerful, socialist movement of the workers and poor.
FOR A UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME GRANT:
We call on those whose children go hungry at night, on those who cannot afford transport to look for work, on all those who want to live in a society in which no one lives in abject poverty. Together, let us build a powerful, socialist movement of the workers and poor, to take forward to build a comprehensive social security system, including a universal basic income grant.
The new eligibility regulations for the COVID-19 relief of distress grant adopted after April 2022 and non-payment of the grant by SASSA significantly reduced the number of people who depended on the grant to not fall deeper into destitute and abject poverty. To deal with the problem, we need to stand together and deepen the struggle for the extension of the social relief of distress grant beyond March 2023, and for its improvement going forward, towards making it a firm foundation for a universal basic income grant.
We need to roll back the reduction in corporate income tax and increase it as part of the funding sources for a comprehensive social security. In addition, we need to take forward the struggle for an annual wealth tax and for an inheritance tax.
TO DEFEAT STATE CAPTURE IN ALL ITS MANIFESTATIONS AND BUILD A CAPABLE DEMOCRATIC DEVELOPMENTAL STATE:
We call on public sector workers, on patriotic professionals, on progressive journalists, on the defend our democracy movement and other concerned South Africans. Together, let us build a powerful, social movement of the workers and poor to advance an all-rounded renewal—organisational, political and policy renewal—all re-anchored in the letter and revolutionary spirit of the Freedom Charter to put the people first, dismantle the networks of state capture and clamp down on other forms of corruption.
The ANC emerged from its National Policy Conference held from 29 to 31 July with organisational renewal resolutions that defend the “Step Aside if Charged in a Court of Law” principle. As the SACP, in welcoming this outcome, we are calling on all members of the ANC to not weaponise the “step aside” principle.
We put forward an all-rounded renewal as a broader thesis for a comprehensive renewal, including the reconfiguration of the Alliance to achieve its historical mission. The Alliance Economic and Energy Crisis Summit that we called for at the ANC National Policy Conference offers us an opportunity to advance an all-rounded renewal anchored in the letter and revolutionary spirit of the Freedom Charter in terms of the programmatic content and policy direction of the renewal.
FOR PERSONAL, FAMILY AND COMMUNITY SAFETY AND SECURITY:
We call on community activists, on voluntary neighbourhood watches, on gender activists, on honest police officers, let us work together. Let us strengthen our networks and free our townships, villages and other residential areas from the scourge of violence against women and children, against gangsterism, substance abuse, and “protection” racketeers. Together, let us build a powerful, socialist movement of the workers and the poor.
We strongly condemn the horrific incident of gang rape and robbery of eight young women in West Village, West Rand last week. The Police must leave no stone unturned to bring all the perpetrators to book for their heinous crime. Communities opposed to bail for those already arrested are completely justified. As the SACP, we support them.
Through our structures in Gauteng Province, in Linda Jabane District (City of Johannesburg Metro) and in Yusuf Dadoo District (West Rand), we will strengthen our capacity and participation in deepening the lawful efforts of the communities, to ensure a safer community environment by fighting crime and gender-based violence without regard to the nationality of the criminals.
We call on members of the working-class, independent of nationality: Together, let us join hands to fight crime to the finish. This will be one of the best ways we can build and deepen our solidarity.
FOR A CAPABLE DEMOCRATIC DEVELOPMENTAL STATE AND POPULAR POWER:
We call on the entire working-class movement. Together let us build a powerful, socialist movement of the workers and poor to, as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels point in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy and build the supremacy of the proletariat organised democratically as the state itself. The questions of the class character and leadership of the state and the societal power concentrated, organised and exercised in the state are crucial to every working-class revolution, including the national democratic revolution, our advance to socialism.
Together, let us deepen our work to strengthen the independent voice of the working-class, to reinforce our overall capacity to build democratic working-class leadership of the state and society at large, with the proletariat at the centre, and to transform our state to become a capable democratic developmental state buttressed by working-class power to serve and defend the interests of the immense majority of the people.
FOR A COMMUNITY-CENTRED, COMMUNITY-DRIVEN AND COMMUNITY-LED DEVELOPMENT MODEL:
To put people first, not only do we need a capable democratic developmental state, but a community-centred, community-driven and community-led development model. To this end, we call on our communities. Let us join hands. Together, let us build a powerful, socialist movement of the workers and poor. It is said a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. As the SACP, we are launching this model of community development in Mpumalanga Province, in Matibidi Village, Thaba Chweu Local Municipality. Our aim is to expand countrywide from this important step.
WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE FOR PEACE, DEVELOPMENT AND A JUST SOCIETY
We express our solidarity with the people of Swaziland struggling for democracy, against the repressive monarchy, and with the people of Zimbabwe who are facing human rights violations in a country devastated by virtual economic collapse.
After provoking the war in Ukraine, the war mongering imperialist regime of the United States is now provoking yet another war. The SACP denounces the provocative visit by Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the United States House of Representatives, to China’s Taiwan region. The visit, which undermines China’s sovereignty, was calculated at escalating tensions in the Taiwan Strait, with China as the principal target.
We reiterate our call for a peaceful resolution of the conflict in Ukraine and for an end to the war on all fronts.
We pledge our solidarity with the people of the world in the face of the United States imperialist aggression and foreign occupation, including but not limited to the people of Palestine, Western Sahara, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua and the African countries that are destabilised with the active involvement of the United States through its Central Intelligence Agency and other machinations.
The SACP reiterates its support for the Cuban people and government in their struggle for the imperialist regime of the United States to lift its unilateral and illegal blockade against Cuba and end its occupation of the Cuban territory of Guantanamo Bay with immediate effect, unconditionally.
Issued by Solly Mapaila, General Secretary, SACP, 8 August 2022
