Tweedie,+SNC+-+Whats+it+All+About

//The South African Communist Party’s Special National Congress, 8th – 10th April 2005//
=**What’s it all about?**=

By **Dominic Tweedie**, dominic.tweedie@gmail.com, March 27, 2005.

The SACP’s forthcoming Special National Congress has attracted considerable attention. It is known that the Congress will discuss, and attempt to resolve, the question of whether the party should stand its own independent candidates in elections.

Before it was banned in 1950 the Communist Party used to put up candidates in local and national elections whenever possible, and did win many contests. But in South Africa’s first universal franchise election in 1994 the SACP contented itself with the fact that many candidates on the African National Congress list were SACP members, and did not field candidates under its own emblem.

This arrangement has remained through three national and two local authority elections, but now there is pressure from inside the SACP to stand its own independent candidates again.

This is a deep question that will have profound effects upon the Party and strong knock-on effects upon the ANC and the South African body politic as a whole, especially Parliament. We shall return to the question of elections, but first consider what else the Special Congress is going to deliberate upon.

“Medium Term Vision”
//7.1 The highest authority of the SACP shall be a National Congress which shall be called every 5 years. The Central Committee may convene other special Nationa**l** Congresses which shall have the same power as the main National Congress except for the provisions relating to the election of office bearers and members of the CC. Such a National Congress may, however, decide on elections by a 75% majority.//
 * //SACP Constitution//**

Following the 2002 SACP National Congress the Party’s Central Committee decided that its perspectives under the heading of “Medium Term Vision” should be carried forward for “enrichment, further elaboration and adoption”. Seven discussion documents have accordingly been published on the SACP’s web site at http://www.sacp.org.za/. Only one of these relates directly to the question of independent SACP candidates in elections. The other six relate to the party’s overall political programme and the original intended purpose of this Special Congress.

For Communists these debates around the programme as a whole should be more crucial and divisive than the question of elections. The Party’s leadership is trying to carve out a new definition of its way forward. Exactly what this new way is, and how to describe it in simple terms, is the strategic task in front of the Special Congress, whereas the election question is only a matter of tactics for a communist party.

The official discussion documents are somewhat elaborate and circumspect. They will be looked at below in a little more detail. Two semi-official essays have also been published. They characterise the new path as “hegemonic revolutionary reform”[|[1]] or, quoting Antonio Gramsci, as a “war of position” as opposed to “taking power at the centre”[|[2]].

Debates of this kind have been taking place in Communist Parties for more than thirty years. At times, Communist Parties have split (e.g. Britain, Italy) as a result. No split is expected in the SACP, but the difficulties attendant on the debate are certainly serious.

The problem begins with the powerful literary heritage of the Communist Party. From at least the “Communist Manifesto” of 1848, and through the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin (who died in 1924), and in many writings of the past 80 years including those of South African Communists such as Jack Simons, the message received through communist political education was clear and strong. This heritage cannot simply be repudiated.

As the “Manifesto” says:

//“////The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”//
 * //The Communist Manifesto (1848)//**

Of course there is more to it than this. Capital, Vol. 1 was only published in 1867. But the body of thought developed by the communists is reasonably easy to teach and learn, not least because of the remarkably powerful quality of the writing, especially that of Karl Marx and of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

Gramsci’s work is not nearly so familiar. Incarcerated by the Italian fascists for the last 11 years of his life, he died in prison at the age of 46, in 1937. His fragmented “Prison Notebooks”, written between 1929 and 1935, are the works relied upon by the supporters of the new line in the SACP. More recent writings along the same lines exist, but they do not compare in stature and reputation with Gramsci’s, let alone with Marx and Lenin. It is even arguable that Gramsci himself was not a “Gramscian” at all.

Gramsci supported the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and opposed the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie of his day.

On the other side of the balance stand prodigious works like Marx’s “Poverty of Philosophy”, “18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” and “The Civil War in France” (about the Paris Commune), Engels’ “Socialism, Utopian and Scientific”, and Lenin’s “What is to be Done”, “State and Revolution”, and “Left Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder”. Such works have been revived through the Internet (see [|www.marxists.org]) and are popular among young Party members. Pejorative words like reformism, revisionism, gradualism, and economism, used in these classic volumes, are ready weapons in their defense.

The rank and file of the Party has to be convinced, against this tide of revival. The organised working class, the wider public, and journalists of the mass media must also be brought to comprehend the “Gramscian” idea.

In this over-riding controversy the question of elections sits awkwardly. Some of the Gramscians want to stand independent Communist candidates. Others do not. Some of the “Bolsheviks” want candidates. Others perhaps do not. For nearly all of them it would seem that the general direction of the Party, i.e. Gramsci or not Gramsci, is the more important matter.

There is no published programme as yet but it is expected that the three-day Special Congress will hear speeches from fraternal delegates. It will mark the anniversary of the death of Comrade Chris Hani with respectful ceremony. It will launch a new “Know Your Neighbourhood” campaign. Of the remaining time, it is expected that the majority will be taken up with commissions based on the seven discussion documents, and then there will be a plenary where decisions will be announced and acclaimed.
 * How will the Congress be managed?**

Points at issue in the documents include the following:

The titles of the seven official discussion documents are as follows:
 * Priority of a “Medium-Term Vision” over revolutionary ends in the long term and trade union struggles in the present.
 * Whether the SACP is a mass campaigning organisation or whether it is a vanguard, generalist political party of the organised working class.
 * The extent to which the party prioritises the petty-bourgeoisie (Co-ops & SMMEs) in its work over the struggle between organised labour and big-scale monopoly finance capital.
 * Whether the Party is organised in a new way from its centre (in “Sectoral Units”, “Party Discussion Forums”, and “Workplace Units”), or alternatively revives its Branch, District, and Provincial structures.
 * Whether a Communist cadre is a trooper for the Party’s centralised campaigns, or alternatively an officer of the Party capable of organising among the working class without day-to-day direction.
 * Whether Communist political schooling will be indoctrination in the new programme, or be based on the “classics” as before.

1. Our Medium-Term Vision: What kind of Communist cadre do we need and…what kind of Party are we building? 2. Should the Party Contest Elections in its own Right? 3. Class Struggles in the National Democratic Revolution (NDR): The Political Economy of Transition in South Africa 1994-2004 4. SACP Campaigns: Building a Vanguard, Campaigning and Activist SACP to realise our Medium Term Vision 5. Towards a Marxist approach to the struggle for “sustainable livelihoods” 6. Towards an SACP and Working Class Mid-Term Vision: A Discussion Document 7. Class Formation, Class Struggle and the Liberation of Women: the Interrelationship of Class, the National Question, and Gender in the NDR

Back to the question of elections
ANC comrades are now asking whether the proposal for the SACP to have its own independent candidates is a sign of an ulterior motive or some secret agenda. But the fact is that it is the present situation that is abnormal, both in bourgeois democratic terms and in terms of international communist practice down the years. Communists have normally taken part in elections.

The groundswell for independent candidates is strong. What is also clear is that there is very little backing in the Party for the breaking of the tripartite alliance between the ANC, SACP, and COSATU. If the SACP decided in principle to have its own candidates its first move would be to approach the ANC for a negotiated electoral pact.

There are many possible models for such a pact, but it is also quite possible that the ANC would refuse to negotiate any deal that is different from the present arrangement whereby Communists in Parliament only speak for the ANC.

If that were to happen the SACP would have to stand its candidates against ANC candidates and seek a coalition following the election. In that case the ANC might withdraw dual membership, weakening itself considerably, and thereby also “coming out” as an openly bourgeois party.

Historians may in due course question the wisdom of the 1994 decision of the SACP not to stand its own candidates. In those critical days it may have been expedient to combine forces. The result, however, is an increasingly uncomfortable position from which there does not appear to be an easy escape.

We wish the delegates well and look forward to the outcome.

[|[1]] “Has the ANC Failed?: the South African Communist Party and the Struggle for Socialist Democracy in South Africa”, Vishwas Satgar, SACP Gauteng Provincial Secretary, March, 2005 [|[2]] “An independent electoral path for the SACP?” Richard Jewison, article for “The African Communist”, March, 2005.