SACP/COSATU Tops: “Reconfiguring” Neo-Apartheid Capitalism

ANC Palace Coup Rattles South Africa

Break with the Bourgeois Tripartite Alliance!

For a Black-Centered Workers Government!

JOHANNESBURG, October 3—The resignation of South African president Thabo Mbeki has touched off the biggest political crisis in the African National Congress (ANC) since the government it leads came to power in 1994, replacing white-supremacist apartheid rule. Two days after Mbeki’s televised announcement that he would resign, ANC general secretary Gwede Mantashe declared that there was no crisis. Two days after that, the front page of the Sowetan (25 September) headlined, “ANC Split Looms.” Now the press reports that a split seems almost certain after the release yesterday of a letter by Mosiuoa Lekota, Defence Minister under Mbeki and former ANC national chairman, denouncing the current leadership’s departure from the ANC’s supposed “democratic culture.” There are reports of plans by Mbeki supporters in several provinces to launch a breakaway party.

Mbeki’s ouster has helped reveal the fault lines in this very unstable bourgeois democracy and in the Tripartite Alliance of the ANC, South African Communist Party (SACP) and COSATU trade-union federation. The Tripartite Alliance is a nationalist popular front—the South African variant of a governmental coalition between a reformist workers party and the capitalist class enemy, in this case through the bourgeois-nationalist ANC. In the name of a “new,” “democratic” South Africa, for 14 years the Alliance has presided over the capitalist profit system, which continues to be based on superexploited black labour and white privilege.

While the mainly black proletariat and the urban and rural poor are ever more ground down by unemployment, disease and wretched housing, a layer of ANC cronies have enriched themselves (more through corruption than through “black economic empowerment” schemes), with some even squeezing their way into the white-dominated capitalist class. A letter to the Johannesburg Sunday Times (28 September) complaining about politicians clawing their way to “self-enrichment and a ride on the gravy train” was aptly titled “New Government: Aloota Continua.”

The inherent instability of neo-apartheid capitalism has been accentuated by the confluence of the government shake-up and the world financial meltdown. The September 23 announcement by South Africa’s Trevor Manuel, the world’s longest-serving finance minister, that he was tendering his own resignation sent the Johannesburg Stock Exchange plunging and the value of the rand spiralling downward. That night, Manuel hastily convened a press conference at the International Monetary Fund in New York to reassure business leaders that he had resigned only out of deference to Mbeki and would continue serving in the government.

The ANC leadership forced Mbeki’s resignation after a court ruling by Judge Chris Nicholson implicated him in a conspiracy to prosecute his rival Jacob Zuma on corruption charges. The charges were levelled at Zuma just days after he defeated Mbeki for the ANC presidency at the December 2007 Polokwane conference. The reformist SACP and COSATU tops had promoted the populist Zuma as an antidote to the “neoliberal” Mbeki, seeking to propel Zuma to the state presidency with the 2009 general elections. A section of the capitalist class also backs Zuma, calculating that his popularity among the dispossessed makes him better able to contain their anger.

The premiers of Western Cape and Eastern Cape provinces were removed in the factional warfare that engulfed the ANC after Polokwane. Now the premier of Gauteng province, which includes Johannesburg and Pretoria, has resigned his post in protest against Mbeki’s ouster. Gatherings of the ANC’s regional bodies as well as of its youth and women’s leagues in recent months have been torn by fighting and even deaths as Zuma’s followers and Mbeki-ites battled for often lucrative posts in the party and government. There is palpable fear that Mbeki’s removal will touch off more violence.

Jacob Zuma may yet be tried on corruption and other charges, as the National Prosecuting Authority has moved to challenge the Nicholson court ruling, which is also being challenged by Mbeki. Whatever the truth of the charges, corruption is inherent in bourgeois politics, and nowhere more so than in imperialist “democracies” like the U.S. We say that the working class has no interest in taking a position on the charges against Zuma. From our Marxist standpoint, the worst corruption is the political corruption of the SACP/COSATU misleaders’ tying the working class to its class enemy through the Tripartite Alliance.

The working class cannot emancipate itself while it is politically chained to its exploiters. What is needed is to forge a Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party that champions the interests of all the oppressed and exploited in the struggle for a black-centred workers government—i.e., a workers government that is not racially exclusive but includes a full role and democratic rights for coloureds (mixed-race, including descendants of Malay slaves), Indians and those whites prepared to live under a government based centrally on the black African toilers. This perspective must be part of the struggle for a socialist federation of southern Africa. Break with the Tripartite Alliance!

Atop the Powder Keg

For decades under racist colonial and apartheid rule and later as part of the “democratic” government, the SACP, a reformist workers party, has been intertwined in its membership and leadership with the ANC. Contrary to SACP mythology, the ANC is a bourgeois party that has always represented the interests of an aspiring black bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie. A key factor in the ANC coalition’s accession to power was the 1991-92 counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union, which for decades had supported the ANC materially and diplomatically. As the Stalinist regime of Mikhail Gorbachev fell apart, and in the context of militant labour struggles in South Africa, the ANC embraced “power sharing” with the racist apartheid rulers, a section of whom accepted that ANC rule no longer threatened the white economic oligarchy.

The SACP derives much political authority from its role in helping build the ANC and in the underground struggle against apartheid, for which it suffered harsh repression. It was necessary to stand in solidarity with the ANC—as well as AZAPO, the Pan Africanist Congress and other nationalist fighters—when they engaged in military confrontations with and other struggles against the apartheid state. But the SACP subordinated the class interests of the proletariat in that struggle to bourgeois nationalism through its political support to the ANC.

The SACP programme is derived from the doctrine of “two-stage revolution,” which the party inherited from the degenerating Comintern under Stalin and Bukharin in the late 1920s. Under this doctrine, first comes the installation of bourgeois democracy and, many years later, a revolution to supposedly institute socialism. Except that the second “stage” never comes. Applied to South Africa, this schema became the “national democratic revolution,” based on the anti-Marxist notion that the class interests of the proletariat and those of the bourgeoisie can be reconciled in a common struggle against white-supremacist rule. In fact, the SACP is committed only to the first “stage,” proclaiming that the bourgeois state under the Alliance can progressively “grow over” into socialism.

The “growing over” we’ve seen is a number of leading SACP cadres becoming millionaires out of their connections in the bourgeois state. In 1995, a number of SACP and COSATU bureaucrats denounced a national nurses strike as “counterrevolutionary.” The strike was broken and 6,000 nurses were dismissed by the Eastern Cape provincial government headed by the late Raymond Mhlaba, who was SACP national chairman at the time. This was followed in 2000 by the crushing of a wildcat strike at Volkswagen in Uitenhage, near Port Elizabeth, with the SACP-dominated NUMSA metal workers bureaucracy mobilising against the strike. More than 1,300 workers were fired, and 200 armed cops occupied surrounding townships to suppress resistance.

The man chosen by the ANC to serve as caretaker president of the country until the elections, Kgalema Motlanthe, personifies the subordination of the SACP and COSATU to the ANC. Convicted by the apartheid regime for “terrorism” in 1977, he spent ten years on Robben Island. After his release, he served as an education officer and later general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), the most powerful component of COSATU. In 1997 he became secretary-general of the ANC while also serving until 1998 on the SACP’s Central Committee, although he later let his SACP membership lapse. Each of the ANC’s last three general secretaries had also served as NUM general secretary, including Cyril Ramaphosa, who went on to get a first-class seat on the gravy train. The current ANC general secretary, Mantashe, is also the national chairman of the SACP. The intermingling of membership in the ANC and the SACP reflects and reinforces how race consciousness, based on a shared history of oppression, obscures the class divide in this society.

An enormous amount of social tinder has accumulated out of frustration that 14 years since the end of apartheid, the abject material conditions of the mainly black working class and urban and rural poor have not changed and in many ways have worsened. The AIDS epidemic that kills at least 1,000 people in South Africa every day has been compounded by deadly strains of drug-resistant tuberculosis. Mbeki’s infamous denial that HIV causes AIDS and the crusade of his health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, pushing beet root and garlic as “cures” for the disease immeasurably aggravated the death toll in a country with the largest number of HIV-infected adults in the world. Tshabalala-Msimang has now been shifted to a different Cabinet position. The labour movement must fight against the government’s starving of health care and demand free antiretroviral drugs for all who need them.

The horrendous death toll in the gold, platinum and other mining operations that are the backbone of the economy is another measure of how cheaply black life is counted under neo-apartheid capitalism. This year miners have been killed on the job at a rate of nearly one every other day. A number of battles are being waged for basic union rights, including a strike for union recognition at the Woolworths food market chain. In Durban on September 29, some 800 bus drivers were fired for waging an “illegal” strike against the Remant Alton company, which had taken over transit operations through privatisation. Durban waste workers went out in solidarity with the fired strikers and to press their own demand to be hired as permanent employees.

With the slowdown in the world economy, layoffs in the domestic auto industry have already been announced. The platinum mining industry, the world’s largest, is due to take a hit with cutbacks in world auto production since a key use of platinum is in auto emissions control. Earlier this year, gold mining companies had to cut production, even as prices for gold rose sharply, because of cutbacks in electricity supplies by the Eskom utility, which also caused a slowdown in construction. Compounding the problems in the economy is the ongoing flight of skilled white labour and professionals (engineers, doctors, etc.) to Australia, Britain and other countries. With “white flight” in mind, Motlanthe told a meeting of Afrikaaner business and farming elites in August that the government should consider phasing out affirmative action programmes.

Added to this picture are daily township protests, often met with police firing rubber bullets, for decent houses and the provision of electricity, water and sanitation. The power of the trade unions, based on labour’s role in producing the wealth of society, must be wielded in defence of the township and rural masses, most of whom are unemployed or only marginally employed. In the absence of a class-struggle fight for their needs, their disillusionment and anger can take starkly reactionary forms. This was seen in the outbreak of murderous violence against immigrants that began in Alexandra in May, fuelled in part by routine cop brutalization of immigrants and government deportations. Sixty-two people were killed in the pogromist terror that month while tens of thousands fled back to Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi. Thousands more were left to barely survive in refugee camps outside Johannesburg, Cape Town and other cities.

Those camps are now being shut down, with a vengeance. On September 23, the Red Ants security outfit, which is infamous for evicting the poor and scabbing on strikes, demolished a refugee camp in Pretoria, leaving hundreds of people to fend for themselves. The head of the Blue Waters camp in the Western Cape has accused the government of deliberately starving out its residents so that they would submit to deportation or forced “reintegration” into the townships. In the Eastern Cape last week, a Somali mother and her three children who had been urged to leave their camp were brutally murdered in their shop.

A May 15 leaflet issued by Spartacist South Africa, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), demanded full citizenship rights for all immigrants and an end to deportations (see “South Africa: Mobilize Trade Unions Against Anti-Immigrant Terror!” WV No. 915, 23 May). The statement noted that the same SACP and COSATU misleaders who sermonized against xenophobia are part of a government that has helped spawn repeated outbreaks of violence against immigrants who are used as scapegoats for mass unemployment, poverty and crime.

The need to unite immigrant and South African-born workers in a struggle for jobs and affordable, quality, integrated housing for all requires a fight for the political independence of the proletariat from the ANC and the bourgeois state. Leon Trotsky, co-leader with V.I. Lenin of the 1917 October Revolution, explained in developing his theory of permanent revolution that national and social emancipation in countries of belated capitalist development, such as South Africa, requires the seizure of power by the proletariat standing at the head of all the oppressed.

As we wrote in “South Africa: For a Black-Centered Workers Government!” (WV No. 911, 28 March), a revolutionary working-class regime “would seize the economy from the fabulously wealthy conglomerates that are the true masters of neo-apartheid capitalism. It would expropriate without compensation the industries, mines and banks.... The expropriation of the bourgeoisie would begin to lay the material foundations for social equality. But this perspective can only be fully realised through the extension of socialist revolution to the most advanced capitalist countries and the establishment of a collectivised, planned world economy.”

Reformism of an Ordinary Type

The victory that SACP spokesmen have claimed with Mbeki’s ouster may come at a high price, as the current ANC/SACP/COSATU leadership will now be viewed as more directly responsible for the privations of workers and the poor. The SACP has called on the new government to enact economic reforms while holding out the prospect of deeper reforms after the elections. But Motlanthe made clear from the beginning that his regime would stay the present course, winning plaudits from South Africa’s business establishment. With the capitalist world entering into recession, the government will come under pressure to cut expenditures on social programmes, not expand them. As for Zuma, the presumed successor to Motlanthe as South Africa’s president, he went on a world tour following his victory at the Polokwane conference in order to assure capitalist leaders that he, too, will play by their rules.

The SACP is what Lenin described as a bourgeois workers party: a party with a working-class base but with a thoroughly pro-capitalist leadership and programme. Key to building a Leninist vanguard party will be splitting revolutionary-minded members of the SACP from their reformist tops by winning them to a genuinely communist programme.

SACP militants should begin by understanding that one’s attitude toward the capitalist state is the dividing line between revolutionary Marxism and reformist betrayal. While acknowledging that the mines and banks that dominate the economy are still in the hands of white capitalists, SACP ideologues claim that in “democratic” South Africa the state is “class-contested” terrain. The role of the SACP, as spelled out in a document issued by the leadership for a party policy conference late last month, is to win hegemony for the working class against “monopoly capital” in such “sites of power” as “the executive, the legislatures, the judiciary, security forces.”

In theory and practice, the SACP leadership violates the fundamental Marxist understanding, verified by all historical experience, that the state is an organ of domination of one class over another, enforcing the rule of the economically dominant class through bodies of armed men such as the police, army and prison system. All the talk in SACP documents about South Africa’s “developmental state” is meant to obscure the fact that this state plays the same role under the Tripartite Alliance as it did under apartheid: violently suppressing the proletariat and the impoverished masses in defence of capitalist rule and profits. The difference is that today, with the ANC/SACP/COSATU alliance at the helm, this bloody work is packaged as “democracy.”

In his 1917 book The State and Revolution, Lenin excoriated the Russian Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary (SR) parties that justified their role in the bourgeois Provisional Government, an early version of the Tripartite Alliance and other popular fronts. Responding to their claim that the state reconciles the different classes in society (or, we would add, constitutes “class-contested terrain”), Lenin wrote:

“Innumerable resolutions and articles by politicians of both these parties are thoroughly saturated with this petty-bourgeois and philistine ‘reconciliation’ theory. That the state is an organ of the rule of a definite class which cannot be reconciled with its antipode (the class opposite to it) is something the petty-bourgeois democrats will never be able to understand.”

Lenin had already waged a fierce struggle in April 1917 against Stalin and others in the Bolshevik leadership who had called for critical support to the Provisional Government, which had been installed after the February Revolution overthrew tsarist rule. In his “April Theses,” Lenin denounced any support to the capitalist government—much less participation in it—as class treason and called for a struggle for all power to the workers and soldiers soviets (councils). Lenin’s fight was crucial in preparing the Bolsheviks to lead the October Revolution. In fact, his work on The State and Revolution was cut short by the outbreak of the October Revolution and was continued with his 1918 polemic, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky.

Lenin explicitly refuted revisionists who falsely lay claim to the heritage of the Communist Manifesto written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1847. He pointed out in The State and Revolution that “the only ‘correction’ Marx thought it necessary to make to the Communist Manifesto he made on the basis of the revolutionary experience of the Paris Communards,” referring to the Paris Commune of 1871, when the proletariat in the city briefly held power. That correction was made in a June 1872 preface to a German editio