Editorial Note
The SACP will be holding the 13th National Congress from the 11th to 15th July 2012 in University of Zululand. We release here the first chapter of our Draft Political Report for engagement with our readers
Socialism is the Future!! Build it now!!
Red Alert
Why Socialism?
Karl Marx: "the real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself...and capitalist production continually overcomes its immanent barriers only by means which again place these barriers in its way on a more formidable scale." Capital, vol.III
Never before in history has the need for a different, a humane world based on the socialist value of putting social needs before private profits been more desperately required. For thousands of years people have worked collectively to build homes and communities, to gather food, herd animals, to harvest crops, to manufacture, to paint, to dance and to sing.
Today, as never before, the collective achievements of human civilisation are threatened with potential extinction.
Of course, the past thousands of years of human history have themselves not been idyllic. The history of human societies has been one of collective endeavour, but also of many variants of brutal patriarchal, colonial, racial, class and other oppressions. If the history of all hitherto existing societies has been one of progressive if uneven scientific and technical advance, it has also been a history of class struggle. It is a struggle that, in short, everywhere pits the direct producers against those who seek to maximize their own narrow class accumulation interests, regardless of the needs of society at large.
Today, a single world economy is dominated by a tiny minority of exceedingly powerful transnational corporations, buttressed by imperialist state power. After several centuries of breath-taking expansion and world-wide accumulation, the global capitalist system, as we know it, is now approaching a series of systemic, perhaps conclusive, limitations. These limitations include physical, biological, human, social and economic dimensions.
CAPITALISM AND THE DESTRUCTION OF OUR ENVIRONMENT`
Profit driven production is spewing its waste into our atmosphere. Global temperatures are rising, threatening large parts of the world, including most of Africa, with unprecedented floods, droughts, famines and epidemics. Avaricious logging is destroying millions of acres of virgin forest - the green lungs that replenish the air we breathe. Most commercial fish stocks have been reduced by over 75%, with the capitalist-driven industrialization of fishing fleets. This dangerous collapse of fish stocks is further compounded by chemical pollution of the sea, mostly from commercial agricultural fertilizer run-offs, and by real estate developers clogging up estuary spawning grounds with golf estates and tourist resorts. How do we halt these depredations?
For a century, a non-renewable natural resource -oil - has fuelled headlong capitalist expansion. Some time in our present decade, oil production will have peaked and demand will outstrip supply. The major oil corporations and their political backers are already scrambling to grab control of remaining reserves with greater ruthlessness than ever. Oil is being pumped out of ever more expensive and challenging deep-sea reserves with all of the attendant risks of accidents and devastating oil spills. wars and chronic social instability have flared across the globe, from Central Asia, the Middle East, to the bulge of Africa and Sudan, everywhere there is the whiff of oil. Regional gendarme states in strategic localities, like Zionist Israel, are supported by imperialist circles.
With oil prices spiking, many of the arteries of modern capitalist society are threatened. The futures of middle class car based mobility, sprawling cities with freeways, containerised, long-distance international trade, together with international tourism, and large-scale agro-industry with its oil-based pesticide and fertilizer dependency all have an uncertain future.
Collectively, as human civilisation imprisoned within the present global capitalist accumulation path, we are now on a road to potential extinction. The present capitalist accumulation path is recklessly unsustainable. But the powerful global capitalist forces that dominate this reality are incapable of recognising the crisis, still less are they able to take the decisive measures that are required to provide sustainable resolutions.
The struggle for a different world, for sustainable societies based not on profit but on social need, is about natural resources, it is about bio-diversity, the plants and animals with which we share our planet. But it is also a struggle for human civilisation itself against the barbarism of profit maximisation.
CAPITALISM AND THE DESTRUCTION OF RURAL LIVELIHOODS
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the case of farming and food production. At the beginning of our 21st century, the World Trade Organisation, dominated by imperialist forces, declared war on nearly half of humanity - that is, on the remaining three billion Third World peasant farmers and their families. The dominant forces in the WTO plan to eliminate small-scale, largely survivalist farming through fast-tracking global agricultural liberalisation in the coming decades.
The processes under-way in our own country-side with the liberalisation of agriculture and the agro-industrial sector, import-parity pricing, monopolisation of the food production chain and of seed stock, mass farm-worker retrenchments, forced removals off farms, the closure of many productive farms or their conversion into game farms, all side-by-side with a seriously challenged and slow-moving land reform programme - these local realities reflect the impact of a neo-liberal approach to land, food-security and the "transformation" of agriculture and the agro-industrial sector.
The global agenda to transform all farming into capitalist production integrated into a single global accumulation path is advanced in the name of greater productivity and modernisation. We are told that this is how Europe modernised in the 18th and 19th centuries. We are told that a capitalist agrarian revolution will greatly improve productivity and bring down food prices for all.
So what`s the problem? The problem is that in Europe the capitalist agrarian revolution took over one and a half centuries, not a matter of decades in the way in which the capitalist agro-conglomerates are now proceeding in the Third World. What is more, many of the millions of European peasant farmers who were made surplus by the capitalist revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries were absorbed in labour-intensive factories of an earlier period of capitalism. Millions more "surplus" impoverished Europeans, thrown off the land in previous centuries, migrated as economic refugees to the Americas, to Australasia, some came to South Africa.
But now, under the strictures of global competitiveness, the factories of the Third World, are themselves considerably more capital intensive. They are unable to employ the existing mass of unemployed, let alone absorb billions more newly uprooted peasant farmers. What about the prospects of mass migration from the South to the North? Everywhere, the walls are going up, fences are being reinforced, the border between a wealthy United States and its poorer Mexican neighbour is militarized. The Mediterranean serves as a defensive moat before a European castle. For the billions of poor of the South, the imperialist North is a gated community. The wealthy enclaves of the imperialist world are branded like benches in the apartheid-era - "Whites Only".
Capitalist modernisation has no sustainable answers to the new agrarian question. In fact, a capitalist agrarian revolution on a world-scale has genocidal implications.
CAPITALISM AND URBAN SLUMS
Related to all of this, some time in the past decade, for the first time in human history, the urban population of the earth outnumbered the rural. As market pressures, droughts, famines and social instability have pressed down on rural areas, the world has urbanised much faster than was being predicted in the bravest calculations just a few decades ago. The present urban population (over 3,5 billion) is larger than the total population of the world in 1960. This huge wave of accelerated urbanisation has been unlike any preceding it, not just in scale, but in its very character. It is urbanisation largely without industrialisation.
Fully one-third of this now urbanised half of humanity is eking out an existence in the great sprawling slums of the towns, cities and megacities of the South. They have different names in different places - the bustees of Kolkata, the kampungs of Jakarta, the shammasas of Khartoum, the bidonvilles of Abidjan, the baladis of Cairo, the favelas of Brazil, the villas miseria of Buenos Aires, the umjondolos of eThekwini. They have different names, but everywhere it is the same basic reality - millions upon millions of rural people and villagers uprooted from their land by a global capitalist accumulation process, cramming into cities, there to join their earlier urbanised brothers and sisters, many of them retrenched workers, or evicted households, or unemployed teachers and health-care workers "down-sized" and structurally adjusted into poverty.
These are the uprooted victims of an era that has invented the Internet and unraveled the secrets of DNA, but which has taken away from more than a billion people their ability to earn a basic livelihood, offering little in return. In a previous century, Marx referred to these de-classed strata of the urban poor as a "lumpen-proletariat". Many of the features of these strata noted by Marx remain valid. Their relative marginalisation from mainstream production, their fragmentation and their precarious situation make them available to all manner of mobilisations, sometimes by reactionary, demagogic, fundamentalist or xenophobic forces. But the sheer size and enduring presence of these strata today mean it is no longer possible to think of these one billion people as simply flotsam and jetsam tossed up by a temporary transition to capitalism.
Besides, the boundaries between the urban and rural poor and the active proletariat are blurred. The working class and the poor are connected by a thousand household and community ties. The wage of a single proletarian in the South or of a migrant worker from the South in the North typically supports numerous extended family members some still back in rural areas. Conversely, the daily needs of much of the proletariat are increasingly supplied by a web of semi-formal activities. As waged employment becomes precarious throughout the South, with casualisation and retrenchments, and in conditions where formal social security is minimal, working class households adopt numerous survivalist strategies, engaging in a myriad of petty entrepreneurial and cooperative activities - spaza shops, minibuses, backyard repairs, cooperative savings clubs, home-based gardening, or clinging on to a small family plot in a rural area. These are not just South African realities, they are to be found in differing ways throughout much of the world.
If socialism is to be an answer to the barbarism of capitalist profit maximisation, then it will have to be a socialism that embraces the aspirations, survival skills and community know-how of the hundreds of millions of urban and rural poor of our era. It cannot just be a socialism of modernization, of catch-up, of a South mimicking the West, of uncritically emulating capitalism, of simply being capitalism without capitalists. Capitalist forces of production have themselves become unsustainable. If we are to save the world, then we have to roll back capitalist relations of production, whose profit maximising logic drives us incessantly deeper into crises and contradictions. "Modernisation" for its own sake, "growth" de-linked from development all have to be replaced by another logic in which we put social needs before profits, in which household and community sustainability and local economic development form important parts of an overall social and economic programme.
CAPITALISM`S ECONOMIC CRISIS OF OVER-ACCUMULATION
The world capitalist system is now visibly in the midst of its worst economic crisis since the late 1920s and the Great Depression. That previous major crisis ran right through the 1930s and into World War 2. It was only after the colossal destruction of World War 2 that, from 1945 through until the early 1970s, global capitalism under the hegemony of the United States experienced a period of relatively sustained growth and stability.
From around 1973, the year of spiking oil prices, global capitalism began to enter into another period of prolonged stagnation and deepening crisis. At first the epicentres of crisis were pushed to the margins of global capitalism. This was most evidently the case with the so-called "Third World debt crisis" which began from the late-1970s. The immediate cause of this "Third World debt" was unwise lending by the major private financial institutions in the developed "First World". In particular, European banks were awash with petro-dollars from the post-1973 oil bonanza. Billions of dollars were loaned to developing countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia - often for hugely expensive, vanity projects that had no positive impact on sustainable development.
By the late-1970s it was increasingly clear that many of these loans were unpayable by the impoverished recipient countries. It was in this context that two key Bretton Woods institutions, the IMF and World Bank, were dusted off and given a fresh mandate. The IMF and World Bank were originally established towards the end of World War 2, with the strategic objective of funding the reconstruction and development of the devastated capitalist economies of Europe. In the late-1970s their new mandate was to rescue the dominant capitalist financial sector by squeezing dry Third World societies through sadistic, enforced Structural Adjustment Programmes.
Over the past four decades there have been several serious regional capitalist crises - among them Mexico 1982, Japan 1990, and East Asia 1997/8. They are all part of an ongoing global reality in which the dominant trend in the major centres of developed capitalism is prolonged and deepening stagnation. This long-term trend towards stagnation has been relieved temporarily by speculatively-driven bubbles, only to be followed by their inevitable bursting. From 2007, with the sub-prime housing and banking sector crisis in the US, the character of the crisis was to dramatically intensify. It was no longer displaced to the margins, its epicentre was now in the core zones of capitalist accumulation and historic dominance - the US and then rapidly Japan and particularly Europe. Moreover, it struck at the heart of the dominant monopoly capitalist sector - the financial sector. Its knock-on impact across the world has, therefore, been profound. Given the intensified global interconnectivity (compared to the 1930s), the speed and reach of the knock-on impact has also been greatly enhanced. While some economies have continued to grow (notably China) but at a much lower rate, large parts of the world entered into recession, or prolonged stagnation. Tens if not hundreds of millions of jobs have been lost, homes repossessed, and businesses liquidated and value destroyed.
Will there be some short- to medium-term global capitalist recovery? To answer that question it is important to understand the systemic underpinnings of the crisis.
Marx was the first to provide a scientific analysis of the boom-bust cycle in capitalism, which he showed to be endemic to this mode of production. Crises in capitalism can occur as a consequence of factors external to the accumulation process -wars, natural disasters, social upheavals. However, under capitalism (and in contrast to earlier forms of production) wars, natural disasters or social upheavals are more likely to be the consequences of internal crises WITHIN capitalism rather than the fundamental causes of its crises.
The cyclical pattern of booms and busts is linked to the fact that capitalism - unlike socialism or earlier forms of production - is essentially production for private profit through exchange, and not for social use. In other forms of production (not least socialism) over-production of goods would, in principle, usually be a cause for celebration, but under capitalism "over-production" (that is, more than the market "demands", that is can pay for, that is, more than can profitably be sold) triggers a break-down in the system - a crisis of over-accumulation.This, in turn, requires a massive wave of destruction of productive capacity (in the form of retrenchments, factory closures, liquidations, and stock exchange collapses), in order to "clear the ground" for the next round of capital accumulation through growth. It must be stressed that under capitalism "over-production" is not the over-production of products that the mass of the world`s population often desperately needs. It is "over-production" relative to "market demand", i.e relative to what can profitably be sold.1 Capitalism, for all its dynamism and robustness, is a profoundly irrational system.
This cyclical, boom-bust tendency, systemic to the capitalist system has further been compounded by the growing and inter-related trends of FINANCIALISATION, MONOPOLISATION and GLOBALISATION. Over the past three decades these three inter-related trends have accelerated on a vast scale. The global economy is dominated by a few hundred transnational monopoly corporations that reap huge profits through ever shifting investments in low wage economies, the domination of the global supply chain networks, and hegemony over key financial institutions. As we have already seen, this monopoly-finance sector domination of the global economy helped, at least for a time, to displace its own internal crises into the global peripheries. Unsustainable financial engineering (that has now resulted in the multiple banking and sovereign debts crises) served for a time to delay, to disguise, but then ultimately to compound the inevitable global recessionary shock.
As recently as early 2007 prominent international mainstream economists were boasting that capitalism had overcome its boom-bust tendencies and was now launched on an endless trajectory of upward growth.
To understand the current global capitalist crisis it is also necessary to understand the central role of the US economy in it. For around 100 years (1870 to 1970) the US witnessed an unprecedented trend of rising productivity and rising real wages for the working class. This economic reality lies at the basis of the "American dream", and of the "consumerism" and relative passivity of the US working class - a car and a suburban home being the epitome of the American "way of life".
From the early 1970s, the US`s uncontested economic domination of the global capitalist system, and particularly its productive dynamism was beginning to be challenged by Japan, the early Asian Tigers (Taiwan, South Korea) and some key European economies - leap-frogging in terms of technological and industrial plant investments, rendering US industrial plant (fixed investments) increasingly unprofitable. This has led to increasing globalisation, as US capital has moved to other locations of higher profitability because of greater technological productivity, and also and increasingly because of cheaper labour. In the 1960s, 6% of US corporate profits came from abroad, in the last decade this figure had risen to 21%.
This increasing globalisation has also seen the runaway development of "financialisation", the shift of capital into speculative activity of literally trillions of dollars traded daily across the globe, more and more disconnected from any direct relationship to productive investment. At the same time, the US has used its political, military and especially financial muscle (the dollar being the global currency) to prop up domestic mass consumerism, kept afloat through increasing credit, despite declining real wages since the early 1970s.
Export-oriented Asian (especially Chinese) manufacturers and Third World oil producers became the core production sites while US consumption propped up global market demand. The US has been running huge current account deficits (an indication of the difference between import costs and export profits) as a result. By 2006 the US current account deficit was at $800bn (or 6% of GDP). On the other hand China, or rather massive wage repression in China (referred to as "savings"), has played a crucial role in financing this US deficit, and therefore US consumption. China has now accumulated the world`s largest foreign exchange reserves (over $2 trillion, some $1trillion of which is in US treasury bonds). In theory, China could therefore pull the plug on the US economy, but a move to sell these assets would further damage China`s own post-1979 low-wage, export-oriented growth strategy. This has resulted in a situation which some economists have described as a "mutually assured economic destruction" capacity between the US and China.
With the onset of the crisis in the US, China has sought to lessen its export dependency on the US, to stimulate domestic demand, and also to challenge the global currency role of the dollar. Currently, some two-thirds of international trade is settled by the US dollar, but the value of the dollar is not controlled multi-laterally, but by the US Federal Reserve, which can simply print dollars to serve narrow domestic requirements - as has been done in recent years with so-called "quantitative easing".
US domestic consumption was further propped up by a variety of "creative" financial instruments. Among these were "sub-prime loans" - housing loans to those who basically could not afford them, in which the initial interest rate was sub-prime, but with the interest rate escalating over the duration of the mortgage on the assumption that as the borrower progressed career-wise so there would be an increased capacity to pay instalments. (Note that this is not very different from many BEE deals - in which black "investors" acquire shares on loan, on the assumption that the shares will always go up and they will be able to repay the loan). These sub-prime loans were then "diced and sliced" (i.e. mixed up with other more viable loans) and sold on by the direct mortgage institutions to banks and other financial institutions.
The collapse of the sub-prime market was to be the catalyst of the 2007/8 crisis, the Great Recession. It was to see one of the top four investment banks in the US, the 100-year old Lehman Brothers collapsing, and other banks and the mortgage lenders (Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac) having to be rescued, often through temporary "nationalisations" (i.e. at public expense). The dicing and slicing of sub-prime and other toxic loans meant that major financial institutions in the US and Europe, in particular, had no idea of what they were sitting on. This led to a reluctance of banks to lend to each other, and liquidity in the real economy dried up, which then impacted upon the productive economy and on consumer demand. This, in turn, impacted heavily on major global manufacturers, like China where there have been millions of retrenchments.
Faced with its systemic economic crisis, globalised monopoly-finance has no coherent strategy for surpassing the crisis. It is torn between two contradictory capitalist imperatives - saving the banks on the one hand, and stimulating capitalist growth on the other. It seeks to rescue its hegemonic financial institutions through various publicly financed rescue packages and soft-landings for banks by imposing, for instance, tough austerity measures on national governments - even suspending elected governments (recently in Italy and Greece) and replacing them with unelected, budget-cutting "technocratic" cabinets drawn from the finance sector. On the other hand, these austerity measures and other rescue packages for the banks stifle demand and undermine the prospects for capitalist growth. Moreover, the austerity measures are meeting with stiff rejection from the electorates of the developed capitalist societies, resulting in many cases in the shake-up of a previously cosy electoral alternance between centre-left and centre-right political parties. However, the simple rejection of the austerity packages WITHOUT advancing a post-capitalist alternative - in short, a SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVE - will not enable the current global economy to surpass its current turbulent and threatening dead-end.
A MULTI-DIMENSIONAL, SYSTEMIC CRISIS
Many of these features of the current global economic crisis were analysed at the SACP`s 12th National Congress in July 2007. At the time, certainly inside South Africa, we were virtually alone in pointing out the interconnected and SYSTEMIC features of this crisis. We were also virtually alone in arguing that:
There would not be any significant short-term recovery.
Other key features of our 2007 prognosis, whose validity has been amply underlined in the last five years, included:
Notwithstanding its multi-dimensional crisis, it would be naïve to assume that capitalism will simply collapse, or that the crisis will spontaneously give birth to a better world;
The relative decline of US economic supremacy (which has been slipping since the mid-1970s) has now been greatly accelerated but the US will remain the hegemonic capitalist power for some time. However, the world will is becoming significantly more multi-polar.
While multi-polarity offers possibilities, potentially more breathing space and alternatives, for the global South, it is the people of the South who will bear the burden of the crisis. For instance, as the core capitalist economies focus on their own crises and their own stimulus packages, already paltry development aid is diminishing; trade protective barriers are going up; FDI is pulling out of much of the South; premiums on international loans have increased; and portfolio investments are even more disinclined to bet on the South.
It is possible that dynamic developing economies like Brazil, India and China may be partially de-linked (de-coupled) from the recession, but none will escape its impact. China, with its US oriented, export-led growth strategy will face very serious challenges
A BETTER, A SOCIALIST WORLD IS POSSIBLE - A LUTA CONTINUA!
The world capitalist system is faced with and simultaneously it is provoking a series of interlinked crises that threaten natural, biological and social sustainability. Will these crises prove terminal for capitalism? Or for human civilisation? Will a socialist world begin to emerge from these crises? Nothing is guaranteed. The crises can be surpassed, but only with concerted social mobilisation of the great majority of humanity.
The only hope for a sustainable world lies in a radical transition to socialism in which an increasing part of human activity including production comes under social control, in which we finally create the objective conditions for placing social needs before private profits.
In the course of the 20th century great hopes were stirred around the world, including here in SA, by the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. In the course of World War II, the inspiring role that the communist movement played in the defeat of Nazism, fascism and Japanese militarism greatly added to the prestige of the world communist movement. After 1945, socialism extended to a broad bloc of countries led by communist and worker parties. This socialist bloc inspired and provided invaluable assistance to radical national liberation movements in the South. The strategies and tactics of many progressive movements in the South were premised on the existence of this seemingly powerful counterweight to imperialism within a two bloc world system.
The collapse in the late 1980s and early 1990s of the socialist bloc should not detract from the many important gains and progressive advances achieved. Nor does the collapse in any way detract from the imperative of an ongoing socialist struggle. The collapse certainly did not mean that capitalism and its imperialist system had suddenly become "better" - on the contrary imperialism became even more arrogant, more unilateral in its actions and more genocidal in the implications of its ongoing accumulation path.
But, at the same time, it is imperative that progressive forces, not least communist parties, conduct an honest and self-critical review of the factors that led to the collapse of what we used to call "actually existing socialism". Many of these factors were external to the socialist bloc, especially unrelenting destabilisation and the crippling Cold War arms race that the imperialist powers imposed on the socialist bloc. But there were also many grievous systemic errors and subjective mistakes - dogmatism, intolerance of plurality, and above all the curtailment of a vibrant worker democracy with the bureaucratisation of the party and state. Millions of communists were among the victims of Stalin`s purges.
As the SACP we are determined neither to throw away the communist achievements of the 20th century, nor to become denialist about the grave errors and crimes committed in the name of "communism".
HOW DO WE RE-BUILD INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY?
Through much of the 20th century communist parties sought to build international solidarity and coordinate strategies through the Communist International (formed in 1919) and later through somewhat less formal international conferences of Commmunist and Workers` Parties, and similar multi-lateral and bi-lateral communist initiatives.
Many important achievements were registered, but there were also negative tendencies - the danger of subordinating the strategic and tactical imperatives of local struggles to the conjunctural requirements of the "centre"; dogmatism and sectarianism in national parties often provoked by attempts to assert a particular factional perspective as the anointed "Comintern approved" line; or, contrariwise, clumsy interference from the centre in national dynamics. Later, many serious divisions opened up in the world communist movement, the most serious being the Sino-Soviet "split" in the 1960s.
Today, there is a wide diversity of communist, workers` and left political formations in the world and the SACP works to forge fraternal links with them, to share perspectives, and to co-ordinate struggles around key themes, among them - for climate and environmental justice in the face of a destructive capitalist accumulation process; for world peace against imperialist militarism; in solidarity with the Cuban revolution against the US blockade; in solidarity with the Palestinian people against Zionist aggression in the Middle-East and for an end to Israel`s apartheid occupation; in solidarity with the people of West Sahara and for an end to Moroccan occupation of their territory.
In deepening international communist solidarity it is no longer possible to repeat old assumptions and patterns of behaviour. In some countries there is more than one significant communist party, in others, former communist parties have coalesced into broader formations, in still others, they have all but disappeared.
In southern African, radical national liberation movements formally adopted "Marxism-Leninism" in the 1970s. Without exception, they have all moved away from this formal position - which is not to say that the influence of Marxism has entirely disappeared, or that the SACP should abandon ongoing efforts at engagement. Conversely, international communist and left formations from around the world are not only interested in meeting with the SACP in South Africa, they are all keen to engage with the ANC. This is something that the SACP greatly welcomes.
In short, in our internationalist work, the SACP neither claims a South African monopoly, nor do we engage externally as if there were necessarily "unique" counterparts elsewhere. We respect the sovereignty of countries and their governments, and we respect the integrity of all fraternal parties and formations.
The SACP has a very rich experience of working with (and within) both a broad national liberation movement and a progressive trade union movement. But in the course of our anti-apartheid struggle we have worked over many decades with a wide range of progressive formations - religious formations, social movements, community based organisations, NGOs, and, of course, one the world`s most successful global solidarity struggles - the Anti-Apartheid Movement.
This experience is of great value to the challenges of re-building international solidarity in the present. There is a wide array of broadly progressive forces in the world many focused on the critical challenges of our epoch - environmental sustainability, peace, human rights, women`s rights, the Third World debt, the democratisation of international multilateral institutions, etc. There are also many diverse localised struggles including the cultural and land struggles of oppressed nationalities. Wherever possible, the SACP should support these struggles and learn from them. We should seek, as best as possible, to make conscious and practical linkages between these many different fronts of struggle and the overall objective of rescuing human civilisation and the natural world from the depredations of capitalism.
THE AFRICAN REVOLUTION
The SACP has a particular interest in (and responsibility for) the continent in which we are located, and particularly our region, southern Africa. Africa continues to be the most brutally oppressed region of the world. Having been ravaged by colonialism and slavery in previous centuries, Africa continues to suffer the most oppressive immiseration within the present imperialist accumulation process. Africa, the poorest continent in the world, exports more capital by way of debt repayments and profit repatriation to the North than it receives in aid or investment! Millions of Africans have been rendered landless, and millions are without employment. In many African countries life-expectancy rates are amongst the lowest in the world, while infantile mortality is amongst the highest.
As we have already noted, global economic dynamism has been shifting quite dramatically over the recent period. This dynamism has been notable in China, India and a range of other Third World societies, including many in Africa. Between 2000 and 2010, six of the ten fastest growing economies in the world were in Africa. For the coming five years, seven of the ten fastest are predicted to be in our continent. Taking Africa as a region, then it is the fastest growing region in the world after China and India.
But what IS this African growth? How sustainable is it? Will it be growth that underpins structural transformations within our continent and between our continent and the global economy, laying the basis for sustainable social and economic development and political stability? Or is it growth that is still locked into the same enduring pattern that has lasted for some five centuries, in which Africa has been plundered for its labour power (the dismal centuries of the slave trade) and its natural resources (both mineral and agricultural)? This five-centuries pattern of extraction has fuelled human and social development and economic industrialization, but always somewhere else in the world, leaving Africa under-developed (which is not the same things as undeveloped).
When we speak of the current surge of "growth" in many African countries, it is always important to remember that it is very often off an extremely low base. It is also no secret that much of Africa`s current growth is fuelled by the commodities boom driven, in particular, by spectacular growth in China and India.
There are two main challenges with this reality. In the first place, it is not clear how long spectacular growth in Asia in particular will be sustained, and therefore how long the current levels of demand for Africa`s primary commodities will last. Secondly, and more importantly, there is a very real danger that the commodity boom "growth" will simply reproduce the same patterns of historical underdevelopment - enclave-style infrastructure investments that are simply pit-to-port, or plantation-to-port, designed to expedite the unprocessed export of primary commodities to distant markets. There are also the related dangers of commodity bonanzas:
* the so-called "Dutch disease", in which wealth generated by a natural resource bonanza appreciates a country`s currency and undermines the competitiveness of that country`s often infant tradeable (manufacturing) sector; and
* the "Resource Curse" - a related but wider set of more political and social problems, in which resource abundance can trigger corruption, distributional conflicts, growing inequalities, and all manner of rent-seeking behaviour.
Across Africa, and indeed in South Africa itself, we need to leverage commodity boom related investments to achieve our own developmental objectives - including job-creation and skills development; industrialisation anchored around our mineral and agricultural endowments, through upstream and downstream related production; and much greater attention to building infrastructure that services not just a distant global market, but also our local, national, regional and continental markets.
But this will also require collective political will and social mobilization. In this regard there is a considerable diversity within our continent. Over the recent past, there have been some important democratic and social gains - but in many African societies, with hollowed out economies, and impoverished populations - development is non-existent, and politics is reduced all too often to the comprador parasitism of competing neo-colonial elites, which often provokes political instability and even violence.
The SACP believes that, fundamentally, the present strategic task within our own country - to advance, deepen and defend our national democratic revolution - is also the key strategic task throughout our region and continent. The African revolution of the 21st century has to be a national democratic revolution. This means consolidating democratic national sovereignty and nation building (including the infrastructure that is the objective underpinning for any national consolidation). It means deepening democracy so that the urban and rural working people of our continent have the conditions in which they are able to act as the key motive force of emancipation. And it means a revolutionary struggle to transform the skewed dependent-development patterns that constantly reproduce African underdevelopment.
Which is to say, the African revolution will have to be an anti-imperialist revolution directed against the predatory agenda of the global capitalist corporations buttressed by imperial state power and global multi-lateral institutions dominated by these powers. The anti-imperialist struggle includes the struggle to remove all foreign military bases in our continent, to expose and eliminate the deliberate destabilisation of democratic states, the manipulation of debt and of "aid", and the fostering of all manner of corrupt comprador and parasitic neo-colonial elites.
There is no single, "exportable", "made-in-South Africa" formula for each and every African country`s ongoing national democratic struggle. Progressive forces elsewhere in Africa have their own rich experience of struggle, including the challenges of post-independence, from which we can learn. The key catalyser for progressive national democratic struggle in different African societies will vary according to local circumstances. It may be the state and ruling party, it may be opposition parties, it may be the trade union movement, or other social movement forces. Respecting each country`s sovereignty and the integrity of different formations, the SACP is committed to forging ties of friendship and solidarity with all progressive formations in our region and continent.
Since the 1994 democratic breakthrough, South Africa has played an important but uneven role in our continent. In particular, our government has been active in major peace and democratisation efforts in a number of African countries and regions. It has also been active in the struggle for African socio-economic reconstruction - although these efforts have often been compromised by being located outside of a deeper understanding of the role of imperialism on the continent.
Our 1994 democratic breakthrough and our government`s regional and continental initiatives have also opened up many new investment possibilities for South African private capital. While South African investment in the continent can, potentially, play a progressive role, there is a grave danger that South African capital will simply constitute itself as a sub-imperial power, perpetuating the largely predatory role it played pre-1994. All these considerations underline the importance of SACP and progressive linkages to the continent, and the role of popular mobilisation rather than relying solely on inter-state-driven reconstruction efforts
Given the diversity of national realities, advancing the African revolution requires that, as South Africans, we ensure that we work closely as the ANC-led alliance, together with our democratic state, so that our work is cohesive and that we maximise the respective advantages of our different formations in the interests of advancing, deepening and defending the African national democratic revolution.
WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE!
The key motive force of the struggle for the African revolution, and for a different socialist world remains the working class. No matter how many millions are retrenched, or casualised, or made redundant, millions upon millions of workers are still daily on assembly lines, at the furnaces, down the mines, in the mills and sweat-shops, at the tills and stacking shelves, in the power stations, or punching in data , driving trucks, buses, trains. Others work on farms, in hospital wards, in school class-rooms, or repairing roads.
We must not romanticise the working class. It, too, is often battered down by oppression, exhausted by the crime-infested communities within which it has to live, dazzled by the allure of the commodity market, or mobilised demagogically by narrow sectarian forces.
Above all, the international working class is fragmented and stratified, perhaps more than ever before. Apart from the traditional industrial working class, there is a burgeoning "service sector" with, at the one end, highly skilled and globally mobile workers largely in the knowledge service sectors. Relatively small in number, this stratum of the international working class is crucial in that it occupies strategic positions in the cutting edge of the modern capitalist forces of production. While they are generally well paid, their aspirations and the global social knowledge networks in which they work increasingly underline the irrationality of the world of global corporate private profit taking and short-termism within which they are constrained.
On the other end of the service sector are millions of under-resourced and poorly paid public sector workers (teachers, health-care workers, municipal workers, security workers) and alongside them a mass of even more poorly paid, often casualised private sector service workers, many of them in small micro-businesses, or own-account workers.
The great revolutionary struggles of the 20th century - whether in Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam or South Africa - were never "pure" working class struggles. In every case a proletarian cadre, schooled in Marxism-Leninism, played the critical vanguard role. But equally, in every case this cadre was able to forge close organic links with the great mass of peasant and (especially in the South African case) urban and peri-urban poor. The relative (but never absolute) marginalisation from the global capitalist system of the Third World peasantry and urban poor is both a source of impoverishment AND a potential revolutionary asset.
In all of the major revolutionary struggles of the 20th century, the marginalised countryside of relatively independent peasant farmers and the marginalised communities of the urban poor constituted the core revolutionary bases of struggle. It was here that revolutionary forces operated, recruited, replenished, mobilised and drew strength from the cultural traditions of collectivity and struggle. And it was here, in the course of struggle, that organs of popular power emerged as people threw off the shackles of oppression and made themselves "ungovernable" by the old order.
Today, in the struggle against the barbarism of global imperialism, more than ever, the task is to build the unity of the international working class and the unity of workers with the great mass of the urban and rural poor.
The working class alone has the capacity to lead the battle to transform the world and itself in struggle. Despite everything, it is steeled in a thousand daily struggles for survival and against the unceasing attempts to roll back whatever rights it may have won in bitter struggle.
Above all, life teaches workers, like no other social force, that an injury to one is an injury to all; that solidarity is the only true weapon.
Which is why, as the SACP we say:
WORKERS TO THE FRONT TO BUILD
A BETTER, A SOCIALIST WORLD
[1]Cf. Marx: "The word over-production in itself leads to error. So long as the most urgent needs of a large part of society are not satisfied, or only the most urgent needs are satisfied, there can of course be absolutely no talk of an over-production of products - in the sense that the amount of products is excessive in relation to the need for them. On the contrary, it must be said that on the basis of capitalist production, there is constant under-production in this sense. The limits to production are set by the profit of the capitalist and in no way by the needs of the producers. But over-production of products and over-production of commodities are two entirely different things." Marx, Theories of Surplus Value.
Source: Umsebenzi Online, the online newsletter of the SACP.
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