Red Alert:
94th Anniversary of the founding of the first Communist Party in Africa:
The oldest and largest Communist Party in Africa
The second largest and oldest political formation in South Africa after the ANC: the South African Communist Party
94 years ago, on this day, 30 July 1921, fourteen delegates, all English-speaking whites, assembled in Cape Town for the first Conference of a new party. Nine delegates represented the International Socialist League (all of them from the Johannesburg area), four delegates represented the United Communist Party of Cape Town, and one delegate, Harrison of Cape Town was appointed to represent unattached individuals who wanted to join the new organisation. The Marxian Club of Durban and the Poalei Zion of Johannesburg indicated that they had not been able to send delegates but that they were prepared to join the new party.
The success of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the formation of the Third International – otherwise known as the Communist International or Comintern in 1919 had created a climate of hope among militant workers and intellectuals who had just witnessed the mutual slaughter that characterised the First World War. So it was on this day, following protracted negotiations among a number of different groups, that the Communist Party of South Africa was born.
The Conference elected Bill Andrews as General Secretary, C.B. Tyler as Chairman and S.P. Bunting as Treasurer. Other Committee members elected were S. Bunting, A. Goldman, R. Rabb, J. den Bakker, T. Chapman, R. Gelblum. E. Pincus, G. Arnold and H. Lee. One very important person was missing, David Ivon Jones. Jones who was sickly and suffering from tuberculosis had gone to Soviet Russia for treatment and was never to return.
David Ivon Jones was, without doubt, one of the politically most clear of all the early Communists. Jones had come from New Zealand to South Africa in 1909, having left the rainy west coast of Wales the previous year in search of a dryer climate which would help his chest problem.
Jones, who was a clerk, became involved in the militant white labour movement almost as soon as he reached South Africa. As the American academic Sheridan Johns says in his well-researched work, “Raising the Red Flag”:
“The disagreements between the labor and socialist groups of the white workers in the Transvaal over ideology and tactics were offset by their near unanimity on the question of non-white labor. From the beginning the organizations of white workers fought to preserve the established customary and legal position by which relatively well-paid skilled work was reserved for whites exclusively.
The fact that the mine owners, organized together in the powerful Chamber of Mines, continually hinted that they were sympathetic to the advancement of non-white workers to semi-skilled and skilled work lent an added dimension to the antagonism of the white workers to organized capital. The success of the Chamber of Mines in securing the importation of Chinese labor briefly after the Anglo-Boer War further vivified the threat of non-white competition.
In the Transvaal militant labor agitation against capitalism became closely intertwined with militant agitation for the protection of the privileged position of the white worker. In the first decade of the twentieth century only a few lone militant socialists in the Transvaal opposed the majority view to preach the extension of industrial unionism to all workers, regardless of race.”
David Ivon Jones was one of those “lone militant socialists”. When the South African Native National Congress, now the African National Congress (ANC) was formed at the beginning of 1912, Jones wrote a letter to The Starwelcoming the new organisation. This marks the beginning of understanding the linkage between the class struggle and national liberation which has always been at the centre of communist politics and of the politics of the Communist Party of South Africa and its continuity, the South African Communist Party.
In 1915, when the main predecessor of the Communist Party, the International Socialist League (ISL) was formed, in an article for the new ISL weekly paper, the International called Parting of the Ways, (1st October 1915), Jones said:
“An Internationalism which does not concede the fullest rights which the Native working class is capable of claiming will be a sham. One of the justifications for our withdrawal from the Labour Party is that it gives us untrammelled freedom to deal, regardless of political fortunes, with the great and fascinating problem of the Native.”
Today we might see Jones’ language as quaint and out-dated. But the basic concept was there. By the late 1920s the Communist Party had an African majority and was calling for a democratic “Native Republic”. By 1939, Moses Kotane, Chief Architect of the Struggle, had assumed the leadership of the Communist Party and engineered its relationship with the ANC which is still with us today.
In 2015, the relationship between the national struggle against imperialism and the internal class struggle is as important as ever. Deregulation of the banks has increased financialisation of the world economy to the detriment of the national sovereignty fought for so bitterly during the years of apartheid. In South Africa, this has been reflected internally through the casualisation of labour and the unprecedented level of house repossessions and evictions, among others consequences.
At the higher level, the establishment of BRICS means the creation of an alternative banking system to that represented by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The new Development Bank should have its Regional Headquarters established in Johannesburg very soon. It must, however, most of all function like a real alternative! Repeating the policy disasters and despotic behaviour of the IMF and the World Bank will be disastrous.
Imperialism is not taking the threat posed by the New Development Bank to its hegemony lightly; the personal attacks on President Jacob Zuma and the attempts to undermine COSATU are precisely because, from the point of view of Western imperialism, any move which will undermine their control – and therefore their profits must be prevented at any cost – even if it means the funding of parliamentary hooligans dressed in red clown outfits.
Central to the implementation of the SACP mid-term vision which is essentially about building and developing democratic working class hegemony in all terrains of struggle and key sites of power is the Financial Sector Campaign. Without control of the now out-of control South African financial architecture and banking system, the implementation of the second, more radical phase of our democratic transition will remain an empty phrase.
Likewise South Africa has a legal system that is still far from transformed, and has recently demanded that government must arrest a visiting foreign president, something unknown in world history and against the national and continental interests, peace and stability. The legal system that preserves the class privileges attained under apartheid is also daily granting evictions and in many instances contrary to both the laws and the Constitution of South Africa and needs to be completely changed.
We cannot have, in a real democracy, the situation where one hour with a lawyer costs an entire month’s wages for an average South African. We cannot have the situation where the theft of a cellphone is an offence punishable by imprisonment but the theft of a house and the destruction of a family’s entire property is not an offence.
Further, we have a media which is almost completely under the control of the historical enemies of democracy and which, for the most part, has a ‘regime change’ agenda aimed at the ANC and the Alliance.
But things have changed considerably since 14 people met to form the Communist Party of South Africa 94 years ago. The membership of the Communist Party is now at the highest ever – 230 000, the overwhelming majority being Africans. And, very interestingly, following the Special National Congress held from 7-11 July the Party’s membership has grown further, mostly in the Limpopo province with at least 1,000 members between then and now. What would David Ivon Jones think if he could see the developments since his time?
Since the 12th National Congress in 2007, the Party has grown from 50,000 in 2007, membership to 150,000 by the 13th National Congress in 2012 – and now in 2015 that has increased to the present level. This extraordinary growth is the result of the recognition that there can no longer be any significant advance in the living standards of the South African people under the system of financialised capitalism by class-conscious elements of the working-class which have recognised the vanguard role of the SACP and have decided to join.
In order to take our struggle forward further, as we have said in previous articles and as we will continue to repeat, at a time when the struggle becomes more complex and some with big mouths claim to be more ‘left’ than the SACP, the task of political education, first within the party and from there amongst the masses is of essential importance.
The question of understanding the scientific basis of socialism, dialectical and historical materialism and of how the capitalist system really works is not an extra to daily activism. It is an essential. Soccer fans are very aware that for a team to win, it is necessary not only to play but to understand the science and tactics of football. Unfortunately all too many of our people need to understand that the same principle is of even more importance when applied to politics.
Lastly, all Party members must read and understand the Party decisions of the recent 3rd Special Congress and seek to implement them according to the situation in which they live and work.
94 years ago, 14 people met in Cape Town with a vision for the creation of a socialist South Africa as part of a socialist world. It is our job as their successors to carry that vision another step forward, together with the working class and poor of South Africa and together with all progressive forces internationally!
This editorial first appeared in Umsebenzi Online, the online journal of the SACP.
