Mass+factor,+Suttner+and+Schmidt,+Saturday+Star

Saturday Star, February 24, 2007 //Edition 1//
=Mass factor=

//How the ANC deals with its succession crisis will determine whether it remains a unified force, argues veteran ANC and SACP leader// **Raymond Suttner**//, as edited by// **Michael Schmidt**

'The ANC's rise to be the dominant political force was by no means preordained. For many periods of its history it was close to dormant and its existence was not manifested in patient organisation, as seen in the Communist and trade union movements.

The existence of the ANC as an organised force is a relatively late phenomenon, from the 1940s, just prior to the emergence of the ANC Youth League. The ANC had a very short period as a legally structured and managed organisation due to the disruptions caused by the Treason Trial of 1956-1961 and its banning in 1960.

Prior to the ANC's unbanning in 1990, it now appears (though many activists and even leaders were not fully aware of this at the time) that there were divergent expectations over how the transition would unfold. On the one hand, from the mid-1980s, the ANC called on people to "make apartheid unworkable and South Africa ungovernable". They also called for the displacement of apartheid institutions by organs of popular power and such organs were established in many parts of the country.

The sense that the apartheid government wasn't able to re-establish governability, its own incapacity to successfully defeat or counter the resistance forces, was coupled with encouragement from the ANC and SA Communist Party (SACP) to develop an insurrectionary climate. In fact, Operation Vula, mounted in the mid-1980s, was aimed at connecting internal and external forces more effectively. It was an underground operation with a degree of sophistication that hadn't previously been seen.

There was then within the country an insurrectionary mode of operation with mass activity of a variety of kinds, MK activities and the building of underground machinery. This co-existed with legal activities of the United Democratic Front (UDF) facing increased repression.

In 1989, the SACP adopted an insurrectionary programme at a congress held in Cuba, chaired by Thabo Mbeki. In other words, the Communist delegates, like many ANC soldiers, believed that the overall goal was to seize power by revolutionary means.

Yet at the same time, without the knowledge of most of these delegates and even most members of the ANC leadership, negotiations were beginning, parallel processes between former president Mandela and his jailers inside the country and outside the country, through the facilitation of the intelligence services, meetings between certain government figures and ANC leaders such as Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma.

That there had been these talks without the knowledge of the membership of the ANC and its allies resulted in a degree of disunity after 1990. Many people who had been preparing for an insurrectionary seizure found themselves in a situation where the same leaders who had encouraged them to overthrow the apartheid regime were talking to "the enemy". In fact, within a few months they were making concessions that rocked MK, especially when the leadership suspended armed action.

Justifiable as it may have been, the steps taken to manage the transition after 1990 did not take account of the sense of betrayal and anger felt by many. Some of that bitterness continues. There was a widespread, if misguided, belief that the liberation forces could have defeated the apartheid regime militarily. And that the attempt to do so had been shut down prematurely. That ANC Deputy President Jacob Zuma can evoke great emotions when he sings //Umshini Wami / Bring me my machine gun//, speaks to this sense of frustrated militarism.

The reconstitution of the ANC [from 1990] was a much more difficult task than was understood by its leadership at the time and some of the consequences of that process that were not adequately confronted may be part of the reason for divisions that are currently surfacing. In the first place, the organisation that constituted itself as the ANC, was not simply the re-establishment of what had existed in 1960.

A number of different strands, some of which only came to exist after 1960, were brought together, each embracing different cultures of political work. I refer here to those from exile and MK, underground within the country, open politics such as the UDF and those from prison. These differences were a source of tension and often not seen as mutually enriching. Those who foresaw running a semi-conventional parliamentary democracy were less inclined to engage in mass struggle. Yet others who may not have had this vision, some of whom still harboured insurrectionary tendencies, may have been inclined towards aggressive demonstrations of mass power.

The marches on Bisho, the capital of the Ciskei "independent" Bantustan, where troops killed more than 30 people in 1992, also entailed elements of insurrectionism. In fact, some of the conduct of ANC cadres was aimed at the overthrow of the Bantustan. I must confess to being one of the participants that had this in mind.

With the establishment of the ANC as a legal organisation, a number of different processes involving the creation of organisational structures were embarked upon. On the surface, this may appear to be of narrow practical concern. But how they were or are to be organised will in fact decide the extent to which the ANC remains a popular organisation, or is converted into a conventional political party whose only reason for existence is elections.

With the onset of negotiations [in the early 1990s], the massed who had until recently been mobilised and organised to overthrow the regime or to establish their own popular structures, became primarily spectators or, at best, recipients of complicated reports handed down from level to level with very little contribution going upwards and timeously to the highest structures where decisions were made.

During this period the conception of the organisation as an active force, driving what continues to be described as the revolution, started to change. This is not to say the masses were never involved. In fact there were many situations when the masses were involved and their activity broke logjams in the negotiation process. But as has been remarked, they were often treated as a tap to be turned on and off, as the leadership needed their activity or passivity.

Thus conditions were set in place where the organisation - as the masses - rallied behind the ANC [leadership], started to see the membership cede its judgment or agency to its leaders. They were there to commend, or invited to criticise to some degree, what was done on their behalf. They were generally not to be self-acting on the political stage, as they had been in the 1980s.

What had not been adequately addressed prior to [the 1994] elections, was simply swept aside in the pre-election process. It established patterns that tended to solidify a top-down and centralising tendency, though the mass element has never been totally removed.

It is fairly common in this writer's experience to brush aside an issue or problem by branding it unthinkable and then removing it from the agenda of discussion forever. This happened in the case of [SACP leader] Jeremy Cronin, referring to the possible "Zanufication of the ANC", that is, the progressive degeneration of the organisation, in an internet interview [in 2002], leading to his being forced to apologise. The issue of Zanufication never came to be discussed.

[Suttner then describes a shift in which government leaders - including cabinet ministers - in being appointed by the South African president, were "made" leaders of the ANC in contradiction of the traditional process whereby rank-and-file members ascended to leadership.]

In the public eye, the ANC as organisation and ANC as the leader of government became conflated. The pronouncement of an ANC cabinet minister was treated as an ANC policy, even though such a policy may never have passed through any ANC structure.

In some cases this leads to great controversy, as for example, in the announcement of the government's conservative macro-economic policy, Growth, Employment and Redistribution (Gear) in 1996, where the policy was announced to the public without having passed through constitutional structures of the organisation or in consultation with allied organisations.

//If the ANC has wanted to create a new ruling bloc, it has not displaced the importance of the most crucial element of the previous one, that is, white capital// [emphasis in original]. What it means is that there is a co-existence of political power, elected by mass support, and economic power (except for a minuscule black bourgeoisie), which remains in the hands of forces of the past.

The ANC entered government with little conception of how bureaucracy under democracy should differ from apartheid or any other authoritarian bureaucracy. The ANC had its own bureaucratic experience, though this was on a relatively small scale and the values may have been predominantly hierarchical rather than democratic.

The South African people are not passive or easily containable nor do they readily consent to passivity if they have their own ideas of what issues are important for an organisation. This can be seen in the grassroots rejection at the [ANC] National General Council held in 2005 of top leadership ideas, which were interpreted as an attempt to turn the organisation in a Blairite [neo-conservative] direction. That is why, whether or not some people may have intended to turn the ANC into an electoral machine and run down its popular aspects, the membership will not simply lie down and die.

At the time of writing (August 2006) the ANC may be in the midst of its biggest crisis ever. Jacob Zuma was fired as deputy president of the country only to unleash popular anger that has at times appeared uncontainable. It manifested itself in the burning of images of President Thabo Mbeki and in populist demagoguery, which depicted Zuma as the custodian of a radical socialist programme and Mbeki and symbolising reaction. In fact, there is little political difference between the two.

The [Zuma rape] trial has left the organisation and the alliance divided. On the one hand, while the president, Thabo Mbeki, has appeared relatively paralysed, Zuma and his supporters have used demagogic approaches to brush aside scrutiny of Zuma's fitness for office and have also alleged a conspiracy against him. There are others outside of either camp, though sensing that plotting to avoid Zuma becoming president was a possibility, nevertheless believe that the ANC in particular faces a deep moral crisis which is exacerbated by the SACP and Cosatu treatment of Zuma as a messianic figure.

What is lacking at the moment is a leadership connection with this mass upsurge, which is able to turn it into a constructive force. It is not clear that any section of the leadership has a clear desire to invoke the masses to realise concrete programmes. Zuma and his supporters clearly involve the masses for reasons of presidential succession, but there is no counter-force raising the reconstruction and development programme vision of a people-driven programme. That is partly because the ANC organisational link has been run down and the top leadership has not always shown the degree of respect for the masses they deserve in an organisation whose rise to power has been dependent on popular support.

The whole period is one of de-ideologisation and that strengthens the belief that it will not be programmatic questions that will ultimately lead to one or other decision, but questions of top jobs and patronage. The manifestation of de-ideologisation as one of the features of the current crisis, is not something to be welcomed by those who wish to see South Africa transformed into a more equitable society. It plays into the hands of those who wish to blur issues, reducing politics to questions of personality and displacing programmatic questions and transformation and democratisation.

On the side of the SACP and Cosatu, and many members of the ANC who do not like this "domestication" of their mass role, there is a failure to acknowledge fully the terrain under which politics is currently conducted. The state was not smashed and capitalism was not destroyed. Consequently the terrain has become one of constitutional government and reform. Neither side is monolithic and neither is able to implement its programmes without hitches.


 * From: http://www.thestar.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=3698855**

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