The South African Communist Party is not a shadow of what it used to be up to 20 years ago, and even 15 years ago, or even ten years ago, yet it has never exercised more blatant power over events in South and southern Africa .
Over more than fifty years, the SACP was always extremely careful to cover its tracks - both over its increasing control of the African National Congress and also over its ultimate aim of establishing a Stalin-type dictatorship of the proletariat, as in its beloved German Democratic Republic. That cautious restraint, like the GDR, is now a thing of the past.
At the same time, the sclerotic arrogance of elements of the former SACP leadership which controlled government in South Africa under Presidents Mandela and Mbeki led ultimately to such isolation from the general membership of the ANC that they were swept away like dust on the floor at the conference at Polokwane last December. They were replaced in a single sweep of the broom by a new and generally younger body of SACP leaders without the caution and restraint of their predecessors.
It is this new SACP leadership, with none of the practical wisdom of its heroes of 50, or 30 or even 20 years ago, which directed the march of Cosatu members against the presence of the human rights criminal Robert Mugabe at the conference of the Southern African Development Community in Johannesburg on Saturday [16th August] and which proposes an economic boycott both of Zimbabwe and of Swaziland (because of the autocratic rule of King Mswati III).
Simultaneously, while the former SACP leadership within the Party and the ANC of the Mbeki period was hugely formed in its thinking and responses by its absolute autocratic rule during three decades of exile, when it ruled over the ANC almost as a one-party state, the new SACP leadership of today (and tomorrow) generally emerged from within the ranks and from inside South Africa during the years of turmoil of the Eighties and early Nineties.
The ANC conference at Polokwane last year was a bit like the French revolution, only in reverse order: the old Party aristocrats from the ancien regime got their heads chopped off, and having conquered the ANC from within, the sans culottes (the trouserless ones) now aim to storm the Bastilles of power - political, economic and cultural.
Mark Gevisser's biography last year of Thabo Mbeki - so long, so long awaited, and so quickly rendered almost obsolete by the insurrection of the masses at Polokwane - rightly shows that Mbeki was the Dauphin of this Stalinistic court of Versailles as far back as 40 years ago. How are the mighty fallen! Where, where are the Ronald Suresh Roberts of yesteryear? Polokwane showed just how little the arrogant elitists of the smoke-filled rooms of exile actually understood their "own" party, and still more, how little they understood South Africa : the country which they claimed, of right, as theirs.
South Africa Belongs to Us - that actually was the title of a pathetic so-called history of the ANC published in exile in the 1980s by one of their former number, the late Dr Francis Meli (Wellington Madolwana), commissar of troops of Umkhonto weSizwe in southern Angola, editor of the ANC exile magazine Sechaba, bright star of the SACP, and ultimately brought low through alcoholism as an agent of the apartheid regime. The World that was Ours, the title of the memoir by the veteran SACP leader, Hilda Bernstein, first published in London in1967, carries just a hint of that same sense of proprietorial entitlement too.
Every single member of the leadership of the ANC and Umkhonto who was sentenced to life imprisonment in the Rivonia trial of 1963/64 was, or in only one case had very recently been, a member of the SACP. (The single exception was Nelson Mandela, whose membership of the Party was confirmed to Professor Padraig O'Malley towards the end of her life, very much later, by Hilda Bernstein. With agreement of the Central Committee, however, Mandela abandoned his formal membership of the CP, probably in mid-1962, as a tactical response to expressed hostility from leaders of then newly independent African states to its close alignment to the ANC).
It is true, there were major programmatic differences between the SACP and the ANC. The ultimate objective of the SACP was the establishment, as in Russia , of a dictatorship of the proletariat to be carried out by means of the proletarian or socialist revolution. This would then nationalise all the major means of production, including the land, with the supposed end of creating a socialist society on the ruins of capitalism.
This was in no wise at any stage a formal, programmatic, stated aim of the ANC, though the Freedom Charter adopted at the Congress of the People at Kliptown in 1955 - heavily influenced and even formulated in its phrasing by the CP - contained strong, uber-Keynesian, statist economic provisions. This stated difference in ultimate goal between the two parties was no problem for the SACP, since as early as 1928 it (and its predecessor, the CPSA) had been ordered to pursue a two-stage revolutionary strategy by Stalin and his then ally (later victim) Bukharin, with their programme for South Africa of an "Independent Native Republic" - the so-called "Black Republic" slogan.
The SACP made no bones about this "two-stage" programme. It made a virtue of it. This permitted the CP over several decades to capture effective leadership of the ANC - especially while in exile - while proclaiming insistently its attachment (for the time being) to the goal of the bourgeois democratic or "national democratic" character of the first phase of the revolutionary process, which it stated over and over that it shared in common with the ANC.
This "two-stage" strategy, the strategy for "national democratic revolution", formulated by Stalin and Bukharin, permitted the SACP in exile to enchant all classes in England and gain access to the most privileged sacred heights of British society (bar the military and the secret services). Who was not charmed by the presence of a Ruth First at the dinner table? How else was South Africa's still-serving Intelligence Services minister, Ronnie Kasrils - trained by KGB and Stasi - invited while in London to edit, with his SACP colleague Barry Feinberg, the private papers of Bertrand Russell, the philosopher scion of a noble house of the realm?
There should be no mistake. The Communist Party from the Forties and into the Nineties was a quality, high-grade act. There was no better political Brains Trust in South Africa (whether members were actually in the country or in exile). Weight for weight, the party of a Moses Kotane, a Joe Slovo, a JB Marks, a Dr Yusuf Dadoo, a Bram Fischer, a Ruth First, a Mac Maharaj, a Chris Hani, a Walter Sisulu, a Govan Mbeki and a Thabo Mbeki was head and shoulders above the quality of any other political party in the country, the government of the National Party included, whether with the Broederbond thrown in or not.
No other party combined such determination, such intellectual calibre, such ability to reach huge numbers of the people through the trade unions and civic associations, such access simultaneously to the universities and to the slums. Funded, trained and armed by a world superpower, the Soviet Union , and on first-name terms with the highest echelons of London society, this was a formidable force that prepared itself for conflict over the long term and recovered from the hard knocks inflicted on it, every time reaching higher following each blow delivered to it.
But this is not the SACP of today. The Communist Party of today is of very inferior calibre. Not one of those formidable political animals named above remains a member. Most are dead. The two who are still alive cut their ties with the Party even before the ANC became the party of government and they assumed their offices as Ministers of State.
There are very, very few shreds still lingering between that formidable, compact force which weathered the storms of banning, the inauguration of armed struggle against a very powerful state, imprisonment (for life, in the case of three of that aristocracy of revolution), exile and, ultimately, negotiation of the transfer of state power. It is no exaggeration to say that without the SACP, especially in exile, the ANC would have been almost as weak and powerless as its rival, the Pan Africanist Congress, which broke from it in 1958/59 precisely over the issue of this presence within it of the CP (there were other issues too, related to this).
Now the Communist Party is a rump. It is not a sign of strength but of weakness that it has captured power in the ANC so blatantly, following the debacle at Polokwane of the sclerotic relics of that once formidable old Nomenklatura. Those clever, long-range thinkers never sought to appear as powerful as they always really were within the ANC, and never ceased to cultivate a very wide spread of liberal well-wishers and fellow-travellers, Lenin's "useful idiots".
The crudity with which a chairman of the Communist Party now occupies simultaneously the post of secretary-general of the ANC, having previously been secretary general of the National Union of Mineworkers (Gwede Mantashe), and utters threats to the Constitution crafted in 1994 by Slovo, Maharaj, Thabo Mbeki and others, displays none of the cunning of that supreme Realpolitiker and pragmatist of the SACP, Joe Slovo. It was not for nothing that that old grey wolf of the CP, Brian Bunting - the son of a founder of the Party - despaired of the overturn at Polokwane in the months before his death last June. In his eyes, a lumpen mob had taken over the Party, and with it the ANC, and would lead both organisations - and South Africa - to ruin.
Julius Malema, he of the "kill for Zuma!" epithet, is no JB Marks. Arthritis of the brain has caused Mbeki's government to leave it to the trade unions to organise a democratic mobilisation against the Mugabe tyranny in Zimbabwe (and to the royalist autocracy in Swaziland ), but for all that Zwelinzima Vavi is no Moses Mabhida. Poor Jeremy Cronin is no Slovo, and the Communist University of the internet is no equal of Professor Jack Simons.
With exceptions such as in their opposition to Mugabe, these heroes of the phrase have the capacity to destroy, but not to build. In their rant against the Constitution and the judiciary they are an insult to the political intelligence of black South Africa, which they treat with the same contempt as did the architects of Bantu Education. Clumsy, over-ambitious, schooled abysmally in the marxism they purport to profess, it will not be long before they show themselves as the wreckers of what they claim to represent - opportunists with no internal unity, who will fall out with each other at the first squall.
As Hegel pointed out long ago, history repeats itself, but first as tragedy, then as farce. If the long struggle against the tyranny of apartheid contained many episodes of tragedy, these antics by its epigones (second-raters, or hangers-on) appear to be intended to update Hegel by the creation of a category he had not foreseen: the tragic farce. To have brought the proudest traditions of the ANC and of the SACP to this low fate is not something for which they will be forgiven, and by black South Africa least of all.
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