The most important political party in South Africa at the present time is the South African Communist Party, yet nobody outside it (or, rather, very few) have properly realised this. Still fewer have done their homework and read the basic guiding text in the present period for strategy and tactics of this very capable party, the key book by the Italian marxist thinker, Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), who died shortly after release from 11 years in Mussolini's prisons.

This key study by Gramsci (pronounced "gram-shee") is The Modern Prince, available in English translation along with his Prison Notebooks and Letters from Prison in various editions (see here). Anyone seriously wishing to understand modern South African political life and its possible future developments should make it their business to study these works, as the leading strategists of the SACP have done.

One might ask, why should an Italian marxist thinker call his book The Modern Prince? What should a marxist have to do with princes? Well, Gramsci's genius as a first-rate, very serious and dedicated political thinker was to give proper respect and attention to the most celebrated Italian political thinker since Roman times, Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), whose classic work of instruction in the dark arts of acquiring and holding tightly on to power was called The Prince (written 1513, first published 1532). Gramsci's book, written more than 400 years later, under the impact of the defeat of the Italian Communist Party by fascism, took Machiavelli's sage and cynical advice about power very seriously. For Gramsci, the Communist Party needed to instruct itself as the Modern Prince indeed.

So should modern South Africans. Those wishing to understand South African political life should read, or re-read, their Machiavelli (pronounced "mac-ee-a-vell-ee"), since South Africa is confronted now by a machiavellian political party possessed by a relatively subtle political programme for installing itself as dictator.

I confess I underestimated the SACP in some previous writings on Politicsweb and on its predecessor, the now defunct Ever-fasternews. (The full range of articles on ever-fasternews, remains accessible on the web - see here. This functions as an archive of recent South African political thinking and comment).

I had not realised that this Stalinist party had submitted itself to a partial criticism, and had adapted in a serious manner to the loss of its patron, overseer and iconic model, the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union fell apart in the early 1990s, so in part did the SACP. This was largely the outcome of its own success. Nearly all the founding fathers of the government of the African National Congress in 1994 were actual or former members of the SACP, but all - or nearly all - of them defected from the class programme of the CP to the power-principle and lifestyle of administrators of a bourgeois state. A huge amount of the hatred by the contemporary SACP and its acolytes for the ANC administration of the former SACP Politburo leader, Thabo Mbeki, comes from this modern version of the old-fashioned South African broedertwis. It was just so with the bittereinders of Afrikanerdom for the verraiers (or turncoats), Botha and Smuts, who were inducted into administration of the British-created Union of South Africa in 1910, the grand exemplar for the induction of the ANC into government in1994.

"Traitors!" - you can almost hear the harsh breath of the current crop of SACP leaders, as they turn on their erstwhile comrades, in the classic paradigm of the "revolution betrayed". "Imidlwembe!" they shout, using the word with which the ANC brutalised, tortured imprisoned and also killed its dissenting voices in exile. "Compradors!" - there is a new word for South Africans to learn, borrowed by the SACP from Maoism in China : a swear word to describe the nouveau riches (or newly rich) from the former underling class or nation, now the mega-princes of Black Economic Empowerment.

In my judgement, the most important political document in South Africa since the Constitution of 1994 is the SACP's policy document of 10 September this year, "The SACP and State Power". It is almost a crime for any reader seriously interested in the present and future of South Africa not to read and re-read this document. (See here).

What follows does not attempt a proper analysis of this document. Instead I have set out a few passages from the document verbatim, which I attempt to translate into ordinary language to extricate its sometimes hidden real meaning. Problems arise because when Gramsci's texts became almost a New Testament for the New Left in English translation in the Seventies, the SACP and the ANC in exile - servile as ever to Soviet orthodoxy - shut and bolted the door against their members ever being influenced by such heresy. (Gramsci himself would have received a bullet in the back of the head from Stalin, had Mussolini graciously delivered him to such a fate).

As a result it is only now, 30 years on, that these strange new terms have become current in South Africa, and they remain inexplicable to many. It is vital to decode them. I will try to follow the order of appearance of key passages in the original text, which appear in italics.

The SACP and State Power": A few key points discussed.  

* "...[The] SACP's MTV (medium term vision) document called for the second decade of freedom to be a decade in which the hegemony of the working class in all key sites of power would be realised.""

- "Hegemony" is the key Gramscian term. Basically, it is a "soft" word for dictatorship, but a dictatorship in cotton wool, padded out with whatever tactical compromises and concessions might be necessary to conceal the harsh reality.

* "...electoral politics within capitalist dominated societies is an extremely difficult terrain for principled communist parties."

- In another words, don't expect the Communist Party to try to do what Barack Obama did.

* "...our 12th National Congress met and adopted the following resolution on "The SACP and State Power":

NOTING That the question of state power is the central question of any revolution

That state power is located in diverse sites, including the executive, the legislatures, the judiciary, security forces, the broad public sector, state owned enterprises, and other public institutions

That the strategic Medium Term Vision (MTV) of the SACP is to secure working class hegemony in the State in its diversity and in all other sites of power...."

- Under its Gramscian phraseology, the Stalinist objective of dictatorship by the Communist Party remains the "central question" for the SACP, which it is now driving towards through all agencies of the society.

* "...SACP cadres who are deployed as ANC elected representatives, or as public servants must continue to owe allegiance to the Party and cannot conduct themselves in ways that are contrary to the fundamental policies, principles and values of the SACP. The same principle applies to SACP cadres in other deployments, including within the trade union movement, community organisations, etc."

- Disciplined loyalty to the SACP comes before loyalty to the ANC.

* "The alliance requires major reconfiguration ...if we are to achieve the SACP's medium term vision objectives of building working class hegemony in all sites of power, including the state. ...[This] reconfiguration of the Alliance must respect the independent role and strategic tasks of each of the alliance partners."

- The SACP must have complete freedom of action for itself within its so-called "Alliance" with the ANC and Cosatu. (For a critique of the deliberately misleading nature of the term "Alliance" in this context, see my article "Questioning the ANC ‘Alliance'" here).

* "To mandate the incoming CC to actively pursue the different potential modalities of future SACP electoral campaigning. These modalities could involve either:

An electoral pact with our Alliance partners, which could include agreement on deployments, possible quotas, the accountability of elected representatives including the accountability of SACP cadres to the Party, the election manifesto, and the importance of an independent face and role for the SACP and its cadres within legislatures."

- The same. The SACP wants to have its cake and eat it. It wants the camouflage and respected name of the ANC as well as complete freedom from the ANC whenever that suits it, leaving it whenever convenient with an "independent face and role".

* "The question of the exact role of the SACP (should it aspire to eventually be THE ruling party? for example) is a practical, relatively open-ended, and therefore conjunctural matter...."

- The word "conjunctural" means that it all depends upon the right circumstances (the "conjuncture"). In this revealing passage, the SACP spells out its actual strategic aim to make itself "THE ruling party". How and when will depend upon tactics: the "conjuncture", this or that "practical" issue.

* "Hopefully, the potential contradiction between being both an ANC elected rep in cabinet or parliament and an SACP member will be minimised. But the principle of retaining an independent SACP profile and identity, and the principle of loyalty to the aims and objectives of the SACP remain and must be clearly affirmed and understood by Party members and Alliance partners. Elected public representatives who are Party members have responsibilities to the Party."

- The ANC is the horse, the SACP the rider. The "independent profile and identity" and "loyalty" of SACP members is to the Party first.

* "...no less than any other sector, the defence sector must come under political strategic evaluation, coordination and control."

- The SACP is seeking its own political control of the armed forces of the state.

* "Almost invariably, particularly in developing countries, where there is the suspension of the rule of law (and whatever the initial reasons advanced for its suspension - often ‘anti-imperialist' demagogy), communist parties, trade unions, and other progressive forces soon become the major victims of crack-downs and persecution (from Indira Gandhi's states of emergency to Mugabe's Zimbabwe, Mswati's Swaziland through to the even more horrific cases of brutal communist suppression in Sudan, Indonesia, Iraq, Chile, etc.)."

- These acts of barbarism were real: the massacres of communists and trade unionists in Indonesia (1965, in which at least half a million people were murdered)), Chile (1973, in which President Salvador Allende was murdered), Iraq (1963), and other instances. What the SACP does not do here (and never has done) is account adequately for the suppression BY the Communist Party whenever and wherever it has succeeded in capturing the state power, leading to the deaths of scores of millions in Russia and China alone. This it keeps quiet about, as it does about the history of communist rule in African countries such as Ethiopia and Angola.

* "...the transformation of the Criminal Justice System must, in part, be led from the ground up. This is why the SACP has supported the ANC's call for the formation of street committees to help communities to build cohesion, and to protect and to defend themselves against criminal depredation while working closely with community policing forums, neighbourhood watches ...AND with the police. ..."

- There is no way that the SACP will not use these para-statal, para-legal "street committees", which are already being established as a political power base, to assert its own dictatorial control over local communities, in defiance of law and Constitution. Rival political tendencies, watch out!

* "...our strategy in building street committees and other organs of localised popular power is NOT a dual power strategy. It is not a strategy of building an alternative power with a view, sooner or later, to displacing the present democratic state. It is not a strategy whose objective is a sudden ‘war of manoeuvre' ‘when the time is ripe'. It is a ‘war of position' strategy - i.e. a strategy to progressively transform society and the state, a strategy of building working class hegemony in all sites of power."

-  The SACP realistically could NOT state in a public document that its strategy of "building street committees and other organs of localised popular power" actually is a "dual power strategy". Dual power was the term used by Lenin when the Bolshevik Party, increasingly authoritative within local workers' councils (or Soviets), built up its strength to challenge and overthrow the weak Provisional Government of Alexander Kerensky in the second phase of the Russian Revolution of 1917, soon installing itself as a one-party dictatorship by means of the firing squad.

Gramsci distinguished between a "war of manoeuvre" (seizure of the army barracks, airfields, police stations, radio stations, etc, as in the Bolshevik Revolution of October/November 1917 in Russia) and a "war of position", which was much more like a political guerrilla war in which the Communist Party would create and dispense with all kinds of temporary alliances, accommodations and concessions to the existing reality on the ground. The "war of position" is the slow road to absolute power, by contrast with the quick road of the "war of manoeuvre". In the one case the objective is plain, in the other disguised.

* "The honeymoon of the first decade of our democratic breakthrough is now well and truly over. Important gains have been made. There have also been serious errors and lost opportunities. There is a very wide consensus within the ANC-led movement and beyond that things cannot simply continue as before.  ...[We are] undertaking serious preparations (as outlined above) to ensure that we greatly advance the prospects for deepening working class hegemony over the state...."

- The honeymoon is well and truly over. Marriage breakdown has occurred. As the best organised and best prepared party in the so-called " Alliance ", the SACP now advances its strategy for its own independent "hegemony over the state".

The SACP makes many interesting observations in this document, in which it speaks critically of the Mbeki administration in relation to the arms deal, Aids, crime, corruption, Zimbabwe , and several other matters. Yet during the two terms of the Mbeki administration, this party held a prime position in South African political life, yet it remained substantially silent about these matters before the general public while knowing very clearly what misdeeds were being done. Where was the SACP when Andrew Feinstein and Laloo Chiba, both brave and honest ANC MPs, attempted to hold power to account on the matter of the corrupt arms deal?

"All power to the Soviets!" was the cry of Lenin and Trotsky, in leading the Bolshevik putsch of October/November 1917. In reality, that meant: all power to the Communist Party, and ultimately - all power to Generalissimo Stalin. The SACP has made a very blunt statement about state power. It should be taken very seriously. You have been warned.

Click here to sign up to receive the Politicsweb daily headlines in your email inbox in the morning