The Guardian 27 April, 2005
SACP:
"With & for the workers & the poor"
A Special National Congress of the South African Communist Party was held over the weekend of April 8-10, 2005. About 600 communist delegates, the great majority directly elected by Party branches from all nine South African provinces were joined in the discussions by the President and Deputy President of the African National Congress (ANC), the Secretary General of the ANC, and the General Secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and other delegations.
The Congress was preceded by extensive debate within the Party of several discussion documents that sought to analyse the first decade of freedom, and to chart a strategic path forward for the second decade. The basic analysis of the main features of the first decade since the 1994 democratic breakthrough showed that there have been many important gains — the consolidation of non-racial democracy, the enshrinement of basic worker rights and the transfer of significant resources to workers and the poor (including low-cost housing, water, electricity, health-care and social grants).
A declaration adopted by the Congress said that the SACP “takes pride in the role that we have played, with our alliance partners, in winning these achievements in and through ongoing struggle”.
The declaration went on to say that “our society continues to be dominated by a brutal and inhumane capitalist accumulation regime. It is an accumulation path that has remained fundamentally untransformed, notwithstanding our democratic breakthrough. Indeed, this accumulation regime has seen a significant and ongoing growth in the relative share of GDP going to the bosses and a declining share going to the working class. More than a million formal sector jobs have been lost. Some new jobs have been created in certain sectors, but as we meet, tens of thousands of jobs are being lost in the mining and clothing sectors. Hundreds of thousands of other workers are exploited in sweat-shops or in casualised insecurity.”
Devastating lives
“The impact of the capitalist accumulation regime has been devastating on the lives of millions of South Africans, particularly working class blacks and women. Capitalism daily reproduces gendered and racialised inequality. In the face of this working class crisis, our Congress has agreed to throw the full weight of the Party behind COSATU’s jobs campaign.
“Our Congress has noted President Mbeki’s invitation to the SACP to actively contribute a conceptual analysis of the situation in which we find ourselves. This is an invitation that the Party will energetically pursue. In a nutshell, the challenge of the second decade of freedom is to ensure that we use democratic state power and mobilise working class and popular power to transform the capitalist accumulation regime in our country, and indeed, to the extent that it is in our power, in our region and continent. The second decade of freedom must become the decade of the workers and the poor.
“To achieve this strategic objective, there are three key sites of contestation and class struggle: the state, the point of production and our communities. We must ensure that working class aspirations, interests and power assume hegemony in all three sites.
“Our Congress debated the strategic options of the SACP in regard to these challenges, and has resolved that the Central Committee must establish a Commission to take this work forward.”
The Special National Congress reviewed the SACP’s financial sector, cooperatives, basic needs and land and agrarian reform campaigns. The Congress noted the many important victories that have been scored in the course of these campaigns, and it also noted the capacity of the SACP to build campaigning fronts with a wide range of progressive community, sectoral and faith-based formations in the course of these struggles. The Congress resolved that the SACP must play an active role in building a women’s movement, particularly in the context of our alliance “Know your Neigbourhood” campaign.
Overriding lesson
“There is one overriding lesson that we draw from our experience in these campaigns — it is not possible to win in the negotiating forum, or policy conference, or legislature what you have not won through active campaigning on the streets and in our communities.
“The gains that we have won remain provisional and partial. We must intensify and interlink our campaigns. On the financial sector front this Congress calls for a general debt amnesty for the poor. We have given amnesty to apartheid-era torturers and killers. We have given amnesty to the wealthy who illegally transferred money out of our country. The time has come to declare a general amnesty for all those, the poor specifically, who are trapped into penury by credit bureau blacklisting. Those who are blacklisted are, overwhelmingly, the victims of poverty and of ruthless loan shark operations that were left unregulated for far too long. We also call for an end to compound interest charged by the banks on housing for the poor.
“The work of our Congress was largely focused on our own national situation. However, Congress noted the important gains made by Left forces internationally, not least in a number of major Latin American countries. These gains reflect a growing popular rejection of neo-liberalism and its devastating impact on the majority of citizens, especially in the Third World.”
Progressive role
“Our Congress noted with appreciation the selfless, progressive role that our democratic government has been playing in many zones of serious conflict and instability in our continent — among them the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi and the Cote d’Ivoire. Congress has resolved that the SACP must pursue much more actively its engagement with our continental crisis of underdevelopment. The progressive and democratic agenda of our government in Africa will not be sustainable and gains will not be durable, unless workers, peasants and the poor become active motive forces in the societies of our continent.
To commemorate the 12th anniversary of Comrade Chris Hani’s assassination on April 10, the delegates of Congress together with alliance partners launched a joint-tripartite alliance campaign called “Know Your Neighbourhood”. It will be launched with door-to-door visits in the Glebelands Hostel, housing some 20,000 people. A local rally will also be held where the residents will conduct an ox-slaughtering ceremony to honour Chris Hani who, they remember, had been due to visit Glebelands on Tuesday, April 13, 1993. It was a visit that never happened owing to his fateful shooting.
“Our Congress has been rich in discussion and debates. Our Congress has underlined to us the enormous challenges and responsibilities confronting the South African Communist Party. We have taken many resolutions and we have committed ourselves to intensifying our campaigns. But none of this will be possible unless we cherish the unity of our Party and our Alliance. It will not be possible unless, through study and discussion, through active campaigning, through loyal organisational work, we continue to build and renew ourselves as tens of thousands of cadres of this battle-hardened red detachment — the South African Communist Party.”
COMMUNIST CADRES TO THE FRONT!
WITH AND FOR THE WORKERS AND THE POOR!