Johannesburg - It can’t have happened often that an SACP discussion document opens with a quote from the rather unrevolutionary Chambers English dictionary.
But these are interesting times for the left and a “fancy-dress” parade of self-styled radical formations is on the march, all claiming to be the true custodians of revolution.
As a party whose senior leadership is deeply invested in the government, the SACP is easily identified with the tangled web of influence that sometimes blurs the line between government behaviour and big-capital interests, with Marikana a vivid marker in the popular imagination.
The SACP says new “anti-ANC and anti-state” tendencies prefer the “comfortable purity” of standing outside the state.
By implication, the SACP is willing to suffer the “impurity” of operating within the government. But this begs the question of what it has achieved in the process, and what it hopes to achieve by remaining in this necessarily compromising relationship.
This is where the Chambers dictionary comes in, defining the contested term “radical” as an adjective “relating to, constituting, proceeding from or going to the root”.
SACP deputy general secretary Jeremy Cronin spoke at the document’s launch in Cape Town this week. He said that being radical was not about “posture, fancy dress or rhetoric”, but “getting to the roots of an issue”.
Hence the discussion document’s title: “Going to the Root: a radical second phase of the National Democratic Revolution – its context, content and our strategic tasks.”
The document – intended to feed into discussions leading up to the party’s special national congress and the ANC’s national general council next year – seeks to explain why, 20 years later, liberation has made so little impression on levels of want, unemployment and inequality.
It says this is a task that has been glossed over for too long.
It argues that South Africa naively imagined that in ending apartheid and returning to the family of nations, it was leaving behind its “abnormality”. But, 20 years later, “normality” looks uncomfortably like that which went before.
The SACP says this is because the focus has been on redistribution that – while it has taken some of the sting out of poverty through social grants, free housing and services – has left the structural features that characterised apartheid and colonialism largely intact.
The economy, dominated by a few monopolies, is mostly geared to rip valuable stuff out of the ground and get it onto ships bound for faraway industrial capitals as cheaply and efficiently as possible, with scant regard for local human and environmental costs.
Everything that doesn’t have a direct role in this process, from rural communities to neighbouring states, has been kept at arm’s length from the core and its development.
At the same time, the South African economy has remained a bit player in the global system, contributing its raw material (and much of its wealth) without adding or extracting much value.
Worse, whereas isolation forced South African firms to reinvest their profits in secondary activities, in the process nurturing the beginnings of a diversified economy, the lifting of sanctions and exchange controls, and trade liberalisation has resulted in large-scale capital flight and deindustrialisation.
“We’ve practised unprotected globalisation, it’s an unwise thing to do and we’re bearing the costs,” said Cronin.
No matter how enthusiastically the state redistributes, it will always be too little for as long as this system continues to reproduce the same patterns, the document says.
Meanwhile, the state has drawn the fire of community anger by portraying itself as, and attempting to be, the provider.
SACP general secretary Blade Nzimande said this “wheelbarrow” approach of dumping things on communities set up the government as a “sitting duck” as it inevitably failed to keep up with demand.
Because individuals, households and communities are fighting over scraps from the government, they see themselves as being in competition.
This sows factional divisions, which infect political formations in a negative feedback loop that invites corruption as the “middle man” steps in to control who gets how much of what.
To break these cycles, the SACP proposes a “relative delinking” – of the South African economy from the imperialist core and of the poor from labour-market “predations”.
For the country, this means rebuilding an industrial base, with the government’s infrastructure programme, local procurement requirements and manufacturing incentives acting as a catalyst, the reintroduction of exchange controls to limit capital flight and prescribed assets to direct investment to areas of need.
Focusing on regional development and leveraging its Brics membership will also make South Africa more independent of “the north”.
For the poor, it means enhancing some of the measures that allow them to live independently of employment in the private sector – like public employment programmes – and linking them to co-operatives, micro enterprises, street trading and non-profit and community organisations to foster an alternative “social economy”.
The “top-down” delivery model also needs to be replaced by an empowered and active citizenry engaged in and responsible for its own development.
All of this explains what the SACP sees as the advantage of being in government.
It says, presumably thanks to its influence, many important elements of these ideas are already present in policies and programmes – including the New Growth Path, Industrial Policy Action Plan, infrastructure build programme and local procurement measures that go with it, along with the public works employment programmes.
But it is clearly a case of winning some and losing some.
For one thing, Nzimande noted, there were those who interpreted a “second radical phase” of transition to mean “more radical and quicker enrichment of particular sectors of the capitalist class”.
Aspects of the National Development Plan, now the official lodestone of government policy, especially the chapter on the economy, advocate steps at odds with the SACP vision.
Nzimande lamented the fact that a task team set up to iron out the differences was “not moving fast enough”, but he said the party was not going to be “infantile” and reject the NDP altogether – a veiled reference to Numsa and others who have done so.
It’s also clear from the drift of recent pronouncements on the economy – by Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene and President Jacob Zuma in his engagements with business – that deeper state involvement in the economy and a change in macro-economic policy are off the table for the moment, if only because there is no money.
Nene has taken a fairly conservative fiscal stance and, if anything, has signalled there will be some privatisation rather than the renationalisation of Sasol Nzimande called for.
This highlights one weakness of the discussion document – a dearth of detailed proposals for fixing some of the weaknesses of the state that are at least serious contributors to the crisis, even if they are not the root cause.
Renationalising Sasol would make sense only if the government was able to show it had found a solution for its miserable track record in running state-owned companies.
And it’s unclear how closing, or partially closing, the barn door now that the horse has bolted (in the form of big South African companies listing abroad, among others) would solve the immediate problem of our budget and current account deficits, which raise our borrowing requirement and reliance on foreign capital inflows.
Also, if you’re going to complain about the amounts that have left our shores, you are probably obliged to weigh these against what has come in, and ask and attempt to answer the question of whether the positive can be separated from the negative and, if so, how.
Somehow we have to reduce our exposure to the “casino economy” the document describes of volatile capital flows – preferably by saving more ourselves – but there isn’t much practical detail on how to do this.
Nzimande said more clarity would emerge through the dialogue the party would now begin, with the discussion document serving as the catalyst.
The SACP may shun the beauty pageant of the radicals (probably wisely), but more plain language wouldn’t go amiss.
Independent Media