65TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE SOUTH
AFRICAN COMMUNIST PARTY
Speeches by Alfred Nzo,
Secretary General of the African National Congress,
and Joe Slovo, Chairman of the South African Communist Party,
at the 65th Anniversary Meeting of the South African Communist Party,
London, July 30th, 1986
Message of the National Executive Committee of the African
National Congress
Delivered by Secretary General Alfred Nzo
London
July 30th, 1986
Comrade Chairman
Comrade Chairman of the South African Communist Party,
Comrades and Friends,
It gives us great pleasure to convey to this meeting, convened to mark the 65th
anniversary of the South African Communist Party, the fraternal greetings of the National
Executive Committee and the entire membership of the African National Congress. On this
day we congratulate the Central Committee and all the members of the South African
Communist Party and salute them for the sterling contribution they and their Party have
made during six and a half decades to the common struggle for the national and social
emancipation of our people.
The anniversary of your Party is taking place at a time when events of great historical
significance and importance are taking place in our country, South Africa. Breaking
through the stifling barrier of illegality, imposed on them by the fascist apartheid
regime, both the ANC and the SACP are emerging as defiant standard-bearers marching at the
head of the militant formations of the democratic movement engulfing the length and
breadth of South Africa. The banners of our two organisations constantly flutter defiantly
at the head of the revolutionary columns proclaiming the imminent demise of the hated and
dying apartheid system.
The struggle in South Africa continues to mount. The general crisis confronting the
apartheid system is deepening without stop. The day of liberation draws ever closer. And
yet, comrades, exactly because the common enemy realises that our victory is in sight, the
period ahead of us will be one of the most intense conflict between the forces of progress
and of reaction, a conflict which will be very costly in terms of human lives.
During the testing times in front of us we are certain that the experience and maturity
which the South African Communist Party has accumulated and achieved over the period of
its existence will stand our broad movement for national liberation in good stead.
Constituting an important component part of that movement, the SACP is called upon further
to heighten its contribution to the common cause as we march side by side towards
the destruction of the apartheid system of white minority rule.
Comrades, the imperialist domination of our country has produced one of the most
abhorrent social systems every known to mankind. It is no accident that apartheid has,
like Nazism, been solemnly categorised and denounced as a crime against humanity. To this
system, as to Nazism, belong the theory and practice of the denial of the very humanity of
an entire people, resulting in the veritable daily commission of the crime of genocide
against our people.
The struggle inside and outside South Africa to destroy this system has drawn into
action-literally hundreds of millions of people of all races and nationalities, of
different classes and peoples of various ages and ideological, political and religious
persuasions. The African National Congress is proud of the contribution it has made to the
achievement of this truly remarkable united front against racism and apartheid, both at
home and abroad.
Outside the ranks of this front are to be found some of the most backward elements in
world politics, including racists of varying hues, neo-nazis and those who seek world
imperialist hegemony. As we get nearer to our goal, so do these forces including, of
course, the Botha regime itself, work more feverishly to undermine and break this unity
down; to immobilise as many anti-racist forces as possible; to reduce the international
isolation of the apartheid regime and to weaken our movement by dividing and severing its
links, especially with the Soviet Union and other Socialist countries.
As did its Nazi progenitor, the Pretoria regime, supported and echoed by its allies,
relies on the use of anti-communism as its principal ideological weapon. The focus of
attack of those who seek to keep us in servitude is today centred on the role and position
of the SACP in the South African struggle, the extent and depth of the influence of
communists within the ANC - to the point of questioning the independence of the African
National Congress, the veracity of our own leadership and the honesty of our
publicly-declared intentions, policy and programme.
This counter-offensive has gone so far that detailed studies are published which
purport to identify the ideological positions of each one of the members of our National
Executive Committee. Each one of us, members of the leadership of the ANC, find ourselves
confronted insistently and with great persistence, with the task of having to explain
whether we are or are not members of the Communist Party.
Many a South African democrat was faced with the question as the decade of the Fifties
began. In terms of the Suppression of Communism Act, people were asked to pronounce
themselves as opponents of communism or face the consequences of being banned and
prohibited from being quoted by the mass media. It was surely no accident, and is
instructive in terms of what is happening today, that these developments in South Africa
occurred when MaCarthyism in the United States, and the Cold War globally, had reached
great heights - all of them fuelled by an hysterical and maniacal anti-communism.
As the Suppression of Communism Act was passed in 1950, the memory of Nazi tyranny was
still fresh in the minds of our people. When they were asked to purchase a circumscribed
freedom by denouncing communism, all true South African democrats refused. They refused
because they remembered that the denunciation, persecution and murder of communists would
be but a prelude to the suppression of our entire democratic movement. Today we have once
again returned to that position.
There are members of our National Executive Committee who have been singled out for
assassination. According to the plans of the enemy, it will be said that these have been
killed by anti-communist nationalists within the ranks of our movement.
The hope which the forces of reaction entertain is that if they can sell this story,
they can then persuade the bulk of humanity to accept as legitimate an intensified
campaign of terror directed against the national liberation movement of our country. The
most recent statement by the President of the United States, Ronald Reagan, serves exactly
as encouragement to the Botha regime to go all out to try to smash the African National
Congress. As we know the US special services and those of Britain and of other imperialist
countries, including Zionist Israel, are supplying the Pretoria regime with the
information it needs in order to carry out well-planned and precise murder operations
against leaders of the African National Congress. With this scenario as a background, the
Botha regime is offering an 'olive branch' to those within the ranks of the African
National Congress it characterises as moderate nationalists, asking them to return to
South Africa to participate in the constitutional, evolutionary process aimed at the
solution to the South African problem on its own terms. Needless to repeat here that these
reactionary and divisive manoeuvres will not succeed. The African National Congress is
solidly united, as was graphically demonstrated by the Second National Consultative
Conference held last year in Zambia. It shall not at any time be persuaded to forgo its
alliance with the South African Communist Party as the history of our struggle has
unmistakably demonstrated that it is the unbreakable unity of all the democratic and
progressive forces that will successfully mobilise and rally all sections of the oppressed
masses of our people to speedily destroy the hated apartheid system. It is appropriate to
recall here the statement of our President, Comrade OR Tambo, who said, on the occasion of
the 60th Anniversary of the South African Communist Party, when referring to its alliance
with the ANC, that 'ours is not merely a paper alliance, created at conference tables and
formalised through the signing of documents and representing only an agreement of leaders.
Our alliance is a living organism that has grown out of struggle'.
Dear Comrades,
The African National Congress is a committed detachment of the international
anti-imperialist movement. Were it to rise as it did in 1936, we would defend the Spanish
Republic. Were it to break out again, we would support the struggle of the Vietnamese
people against US aggression. Today, we must defend the Palestinian people as we do those
of Namibia under the leadership of our ally, Swapo, Nicaragua, El Salvador, East Timor,
Afghanistan, Mozambique and Angola. We must denounce the invasion of Grenada as we must
condemn the attacks against Libya, and even more vehemently condemn the
imperialist-supported South African aggression against Front Line African states. National
self-determination and independence, the right of every people to freedom, equality among
the people - all require that we must condemn all attempts to limit that freedom. Humanity
has a right to peace and life. This right must be defended by all who oppose the bellicose
policies of international imperialism, first and foremost American imperialism.
Comrades, the African National Congress will continue to defend the right of any South
African who so chooses to belong to the South African Communist Party. So shall we respect
the right of any of our compatriots to belong to any party of their choice as long as that
party is not a vehicle for the propagation of racism and fascism. Our democratic
perspectives impose these obligations on us.
Faced as we are by a common enemy, so shall we also continue to maintain our relations
with the SACP and all political and other formations that genuinely strive for an end to
the apartheid system and the victory of the struggle for a united, democratic and
non-racial South Africa. To take any other position would be to condemn to failure the
very struggle which the ANC is waging for the realisation of these objectives.
Indeed, comrades, we shall continue to work to activate all national groups and social
forces in our country to be involved in the struggle to destroy the apartheid system. We
want the working class to be involved in this struggle as a leading force while we also
seek to ensure that the capitalists, as well, act against the apartheid regime of national
oppression. Religious people and atheists must join hands against the common enemy. By
their participation in the struggle, all these forces place themselves in a position to
participate also in determining the future of our country.
What we have said strikes terror into the hearts of those who are opposed to our
liberation, including some who proudly proclaim themselves as democrats. The fact of the
matter is that imperialism is opposed to a democratic order in South Africa. Imperialism
is afraid of democracy because it is unwilling that the people of our country should, in
their entirety, determine their destiny. It seeks to ensure that its local
representative in Southern Africa - the Botha regime - should continue to rule the roost,
in its own name and in the interests of international reaction.
It is obvious enough that to achieve this objective our adversaries must work to
destroy the ANC, its allies and the democratic movement as a whole. The recent
disclosures that the US and British intelligence services have been passing information
about the ANC to their South African counterparts does not come as a surprise. The fact of
the alliance against democracy in South Africa demands that this and other forms of
cooperation must exist between the fascist regime in Pretoria and the right wing
establishment in the Western countries whatever its democratic pretensions.
Fifty years ago it took mass popular pressure to compel the ruling group in this
country to break its relationship with the Hitlerites. Churchill, Roosevelt and De Gaulle
emerged as giants because they stood on the shoulders of millions of ordinary Britons,
Americans and French people who would not appease Nazism. Today, the peoples of these
countries and others, such as the FRG and Japan, are called upon once more to break the
immoral alliance which their governments have formed with the offspring of Nazism in South
Africa.
Dear friends, the duty of all those who hate apartheid racism, national oppression,
aggression and war to join with us in the struggle against this system does not in any way
imply any right on the part of these forces to transform the nature of our movement or to
define its objectives. Thus we reject entirely and will always oppose the efforts of the
Reagan Administration to recreate the ANC into a creature of their liking, a product of
the wishes of governments which are allied to the Botha regime and no longer an instrument
created by our people to realise their fundamental aspirations.
Similarly, we will continue to reject all efforts to impose on us a definition of
democracy which entrenches racism and the continued exploitation of our people. To talk of
white minority rights is to propagate an anti-democratic principle. The government of our
unitary, non-racial, democratic state will be based on the will of all our people
exercised through one person one vote. To categorise the population of South Africa in
racial or ethnic terms and advance a perspective of a federation of such entities is to
seek to perpetuate apartheid and deny our own people a democratic system.
To question the right of our people to share in the wealth of our country is to
circumscribe our democratic rights and to prepare for a situation in which it will be
impossible radically to change the material conditions of millions of our people. It is to
seek to create the circumstances in which it would be impossible to secure the equality of
all our people, both black and white.
Comrades, the masses of our people are, in their millions, engaged in struggle
precisely to achieve these objectives. This struggle has not only plunged the ruling class
in our country into an enormous general crisis from which it becomes increasingly
impossible to extricate itself; it is winning an increasing array of allies both inside
South Africa and internationally. No states of emergency, massacres, assassinations,
arrests and detentions will stop the movement forward towards the transfer of power to the
people. Three and a half centuries of colonialism are now coming to a close. The rudiments
of people's power are beginning to emerge even now, thanks to the enormous sacrifices that
our people are making to establish a democratic order in our country.
The democratic movement heading our people's onslaught against the apartheid system has
grown tremendously in strength in terms of mass following. But, more importantly, it has
fully absorbed the lessons necessary to defend and protect its underground political
formations that form the bedrock of the people's thrust forward. The indestructible unity
and the growing capacity of this movement is graphically demonstrated during these days
characterised by the most brutal fascist onslaught of the apartheid regime. The black
working class, the backbone of this movement, has raised its struggle to a high point
marked by a series of political strikes defiantly demanding the end of the state of
emergency and the release of the detained leaders. The newly established Congress of South
African Trade Unions towers at the head of the workers revolutionary actions.
Our glorious people's army, Umkhonto we Sizwe, has intensified its military campaign
against apartheid in pursuance of the programme charted by the leadership of our movement,
marking 1986 the year of Umkhonto we Sizwe. It has sunk its roots deep among the masses of
our people whose combat formations it is leading to confront the military machine of the
apartheid regime.
Thus comrades, on many fronts, millions of our people, in their various formations, are
at war with the apartheid regime in pursuance of our strategic objective of seizure of
power.
We are happy that the communists in our country are to be found among these millions,
side by side with religious people, with people of other ideological persuasions,
nationalists and others, all united by a common perspective of a united, democratic and
non-racial South Africa. We are greatly strengthened by the fact that the Soviet Union,
the German Democratic Republic, Cuba, China and other socialist countries stand with us in
the struggle to accomplish the noble objective of the national and social emancipation of
our people. These countries, too, share the anti-apartheid ranks with the non-aligned
states and many countries in Western Europe such as Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Greece and
others, and above all with the African Front Line States and the Organisation of African
Unity in general.
The National Executive Committee of the ANC takes this opportunity to pay warm tribute
to the British Anti-Apartheid Movement for its consistent leadership of the British people
in opposition to the connivance of the ruling circles of this country with the genocidal
apartheid regime of South Africa. Your movement, acting in concert with the rapidly
expanding 'Free South Africa Movement' in the United States, has fully exposed the
bankruptcy of the policies pursued by the Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan
Administrations designed to protect the Botha regime from effective international
isolation, including the imposition of comprehensive, mandatory economic sanctions. Yet
this remains the unshakeable demand of our people.
We must maintain constant vigilance to defeat the deceitful manoeuvres of these
imperialist administrations and of groupings such as the EEC, as reflected in the just
concluded visits by the British Foreign Secretary to South and Southern Africa.
Dear Comrades,
As we congratulate the South African Communist Party on its 65th
anniversary, we call on all democratic anti-racist forces at home and abroad, committed to
fight for the destruction of the criminal apartheid system, to unite as never before. The
road we still have to travel may be difficult and bloody, but it will be made shorter
exactly by the fact that we will proceed along its length as a united force.
Long live the SACP!
Long live the anti-fascist alliance between the ANC and the SACP!
Long live the unity of all democratic, anti-racist forces!
65TH ANNIVERSARY OF
THE SOUTH AFRICAN COMMUNIST PARTY
Speech by Joe Slovo,
Chairman of the South African Communist Party
When South African communists met in Cape Town 65 years ago they planted the first seed
in our continent of Africa of a class party of the working people guided by
Marxism-Leninism .
The founding congress of the African National Congress had already taken place in
Bloemfontein nine years earlier than ours. It brought into existence the first modern
national liberation movement in Africa. Over the years the mood and thinking of this
representative of the most nationally oppressed and degraded section of our people has
exercised a considerable influence on the mood and thinking of our Party.
Thus, class exploitation and national oppression - the two most salient and
interdependent realities of South Africa's socio-economic structure - became the sources
of two complementary streams of revolutionary consciousness and revolutionary
organisation. In our conditions these streams constitute the main tributaries which swell
the river of struggle, accelerating its flow towards a meaningful victory.
Our anniversary happens to occur in a year punctuated with important Jubilees which, in
combination, form a mosaic of a large slab of a people's history of South Africa.
The 200th anniversary of the birth of King Moshoeshoe in 1986 and the 80th anniversary
of the crushing of the Bambatha Rebellion in 1906 highlights two patriots who form part of
the pantheon of heroes who led the unending struggle by the indigenous people against the
foreign conquest.
The 40th anniversary of the 1946 passive resistance campaign and the 25th anniversary
of the formation of Umkhonto we Sizwe in 1961 symbolise both the divide and the continuity
of the phase of militant mass non-armed defiance and the inevitable evolvement of a
strategy in which organised, revolutionary violence became an essential ingredient of the
political struggle.
The 10th anniversary of the Soweto Uprising in 1976 reminds us of the emergence of
organised youth - the young lions - as one of the major social forces in the revolutionary
line-up.
The 30th anniversary of the famous women's march on Pretoria in 1956 emphasises the
indispensable role of those who carry the unique burden of triple levels of exploitation,
as workers, as black workers and as black women workers.
The 1946 black miners' strike, whose 40th anniversary is being commemorated this year,
has been described by Toussaint as a distant clap of thunder' which told South Africa that
storms of a new kind lay ahead. It signalled a new beginning to the rise of organised
black workers' power which has come into its own as part of the people's offensive. And
our Party's 65th anniversary underlines the fundamental link between mass revolutionary
trade unionism and the long-term political aspirations of our working people towards a
society free of exploitation.
Thus, these 1986 anniversaries symbolise the traditions of early resistance, the
changing strategies of our struggle and the main social forces in the revolutionary camp -
the workers and the organised youth and women.
When our Party was born, the back of the centuries-old tribal armed resistance to the
foreign conquest had only recently been broken. The new forces of change - especially the
black working class - were not yet fully developed. Today, 65 years later, the years of
growth and struggle have moulded a working class which is the main pivot of the social
forces moving inexorably towards the overthrow of the tyranny.
Anniversaries are notorious as occasions for self-adulation. They tend to encourage
uncritical appraisals of the role played during the lifespan being celebrated. I don't
want to present the history of our Party as an uninterrupted chronicle of unerring
political interventions. We are a product of history and, mistakes apart, the varied
phases of our growth reflect also the objective limitations imposed by the different
phases of South Africa's socio-economic development. It took some time for us to shed the
baggage of our origins in the white labour movement with which we began our journey in
1921. Like many Communist Parties, we also experienced moments when the dead hand of
bureaucratic elitism, and a less than perfect application of Leninist principles, led to a
few serious departures from internal democratic norms. It was to take some years for the
strategic implications of the relationship between class and national struggle to be more
adequately synthesised as, we believe, was achieved by our 5th Congress meeting in
Johannesburg in underground conditions in 1962.
A constructively-frank examination of certain phases in our growth and development
(discussed in books by the Simons', Bunting and Harmel) would undoubtedly uncover a few
more self-critical insights. But, on this occasion, let me not overdo the meae culpae
either. For it is abundantly clear that the main thrust of our role and contribution over
the 65 years has carved out for our Party an honoured position not only as an independent
representative of the class aspirations of our working people, but also as an
indispensable constituent of the broad liberation front.
It is not out of place on an occasion such as this to remind ourselves that certain
positions which are now regarded as commonplace in both the working class and national
movement were pioneered and fought for by our Party. For many decades after our foundation
we stood alone as a non-racial political party embracing every section of our people. The
very concept of majority rule was propagated first by our Party. This was in 1929 (under
the slogan of a Black Republic) at a time when authority regarded the mere mention of
voting rights for blacks as the worst treason and when the national movement itself had
not yet reached out for this objective. From the middle of the Twenties to the late
Sixties communists stood virtually alone in the endeavour to build a trade union movement
as an instrument of economic struggle and as a key sector of the mass revolutionary
alliance. And, in a country in which raw nationalism is a natural response to unending
racist barbarities it has been our Party which first raised the perspectives of
internationalism which linked the mass democratic struggle with movements in all parts of
the world working for democracy and for national and social emancipation. And we can claim
the dubious honour of being the first political organisation to be driven underground in
1950, two years after the present regime came to power.
But perhaps one of our most signal achievements in the 65 years of our existence has
been a truly indigenous elaboration of the theory of the South African revolution. This
theory has increasingly informed revolutionary understanding in the ranks of the broader
working class and national movement. It has also helped sharpen revolutionary practice.
Traditionally, imperialist teaching tends to place Africa outside history until it is
'discovered' by outsiders. We in South Africa were, in that sense, certainly not
discovered. We had to discover ourselves. We had to find a South African path.
The search for a path which leads to revolutionary understanding does not end with a
religious vision, illuminating eternal truths. It is a process which is never completed
because our starting point, the theory of Marxism-Leninism, is a tool and not a
mathematical formula. It belongs to no one people. It is as much native to Africa as to
every other continent. And if this tool is to do its job properly, it has to be shaped and
moulded to the objective conditions of struggle which, in tum, are continually on the
move.
Lenin, in his famous address to the young communists of the University of the Peoples
of the East, said: 'There is no communist book in which you will find all the answers to
your problems'. He did not mean that Marxism contains no universal framework. He was
insisting that its specific application has to be unendingly elaborated by revolutionaries
who combine a grasp of its essence with a profound study of their own concrete situation
and their struggle experiences. If, today, the South African Communist Party can look back
with pride at its contribution to the struggle, it is precisely because its history, with
all its ups and downs, is a reflection of this process. It is a process which did not
unfold in a vacuum, and, more especially, it is one which cannot be separated from the
emergence and growth of the African National Congress and the relationship which developed
between the communist and national movements.
What explains the special intensity with which the relationship between our two
organisations is now being savaged by Botha and his friends? It is partly because even the
most pig-headed of our opponents have begun to realise that, sooner or later, they will
have to reckon with the ANC which, in the eyes of the greater part of the black
population, has little, if any, competition as the alternative power in our land. Since
there is no way in which the ANC can be put aside, the only remaining option is to divide
it, to change it from within and to blunt the edge of its revolutionary nationalism. The
device used is as old as the comic book itself; a crude projection of foreign-controlled
'reds' (some of them naturally colonels in the KGB!) manipulating so-called nationalists.
And in their book, of course, a true nationalist is someone who, even when faced with a
gun, never gives up his begging bowl; one who is ever-ready to provide a docile black face
as a front for maintaining the kind of Western interests and values which have for so long
ravaged our continent.
Since our Party, and more particularly its relationship with the ANC, has become the
spectre which, more and more, appears to haunt our ruling class and its external allies, a
few words about this relationship are appropriate.
The alliance between the Communist Party and the ANC has no secret clauses. Only those
who have other axes to grind or who are victims of the stereotype image of communists and
Communist Parties, see in this relationship a sinister white-anting process. It is
precisely because it has always been based on a complete respect for the independence and
integrity of the internal democratic processes of both organisations, that the alliance
has continued to flourish despite unending onslaughts against it from many quarters.
A speculative numbers game is now being played, whose objective is to spot the
communists in the National Executive Committee of the ANC. It is instructive to note that
inside the country exactly the same game is being played by the regime, but this time in
relation to the ANC allegedly using mass organisations such as the UDF and Cosatu as a
front. This is clearly directed against these mass organisations just as the communist
bogey is exploited in an attempt to weaken the major force of our liberation alliance -
the ANC. Ominous inferences are invited because of our refusal to join in this game of
which the late Senator Joe McCarthy was such a staunch apostle.
Those who know something of our history will also know that co-operation between the
ANC and the SACP began long before they were both driven underground. During the days of
legality neither communists who were also active in the ANC nor ANC members who were
active in the CP, had reason to hide their political identities. Subsequent demands of
clandestinity closed this chapter on open membership inside the country both for the Party
and the ANC; an approach which, for obvious reasons, has been adopted by all illegal
movements, communists or otherwise.
Unlike the ANC, our Party has no external diplomatic presence requiring an exposure of
a collective leadership face which, in our case, would undoubtedly become a main target of
the enemy's extended murderous arm.
But, at the end of the day, it is not our anonymity which they fear but rather our
publicly proclaimed policy positions on the main content of our struggle, the forces which
need to be gathered to bring it to fruition, and the beacons we have illuminated of a
South Africa which is liberated in the true meaning of the term. This is their real
nightmare with the graphics provided by the workers and youth who are defiantly unfurling
the Party's red nag next to that of the ANC in most of the centres of conflict, thereby
expressing their approval of the alliance and the policies which underpin it.
In general, capitalist exploitation and race domination are not symbiotically linked.
But the historically-evolved connection between capitalist exploitation and racist
domination in South Africa creates a natural link between national liberation and social
emancipation; a link which is virtually too late to unravel. An increasing awareness of
this link by more and more of our working people is evidenced by the growing popularity of
our Party. It was also dramatically emphasised in a recent poll (reported in the Financial
Mail 20.9.85) in which 77% of urban blacks expressed themselves in favour of socialism.
In South African conditions you don't have to be a doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist to
believe that a liberation which deals only with a rearrangement of the voting system and
leaves undisturbed the white race monopoly of 99% of our major productive resources, is no
liberation at all. All you have to be is an honest black nationalist to understand that
political domination has been the device to protect economic privilege and domination.
This perhaps explains why, in our conditions, it has been such a short hop from black
nationalism to communism for some of the greatest figures in our national movement, among
them revolutionary giants like Nzula, Nkosi, Marks, Kotane, Mabhida and Dadoo.
We believe that the kind of victory to be aimed for in the coming struggles must
provide a launching-pad for the creation of conditions which will make it possible to work
for a socialist future. But this is a process which is too often over-simplified by the
rhetorical flamboyance of a number of our critics on the far left who want to take us back
to the days when our Party's simplistic sloganising of 'class against class' kept it in
splendid isolation from the national movement and the black working population.
The main thrust and content of the immediate struggle continues to revolve around the
Freedom Charter which provides a minimum platform for uniting all classes and groups for
the achievement of a non-racial, united democratic South Africa based on the rule of the
majority. Implicit in such a democratic victory will be the immediate need to begin
directing the economy in the interests of the people as a whole. This must obviously
involve immediate state measures on the land question and against the giant monopoly
complexes which dominate mining, banking and industry. As things stand we have the
astonishing position of four companies (Anglo American, Sanlam, SA Mutual and Rembrandt)
between them controlling 80% of the companies quoted on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.
Partial measures to redistribute wealth - a step which even the Anglo American tycoon
Gavin Relly thinks might be necessary, albeit in a truncated form - do not in themselves
point to a socialist direction. In expressing support for the Freedom Charter our 1962
Programme states that it is not a programme for socialism but rather a 'common programme
for a free, democratic South Africa, agreed on by socialists and non-socialists'. At the
same time, the Programme insists, the Freedom Charter will also provide a basis for an
advance to a socialist future. In practice, the question as to which road South Africa
will begin to take on the morning after the liberation flag is raised over Union
Buildings, will be decided by the actual correlation of class forces which have come to
power.
But we are not there yet, and the most important task facing us all - communists and
non-communists - is to complete this part of the journey. Today, that road certainly looks
shorter. But, for all that, its complexities have multiplied. A brief look at some of
these complexities will show that at least on the surface there are some ingredients which
stand in contradiction with one another.
It is imperative to create the broadest possible front of struggle against the racist
autocracy. And a front, by definition, contains disparate forces. The ANC-led liberation
alliance, representing the main revolutionary forces, is clearly the key sector of this
front. But, particularly in the recent period, the crisis has thrown up a variety of other
groupings (including recent defectors from the white laager) which favour a far-reaching
shift away from apartheid, but which do not necessarily share the ANC's more radical
objectives. Although these forces for change are not part of the revolutionary forces,
they obviously contribute to the weakening of the main enemy and some of them are clearly
part of the opposition line-up.
At the same time there must be no ambiguity about the primary place which the ANC
occupies in this line-up and, broadly speaking, the immediate future can only be
positively determined under its umbrella. We therefore reject the oft-repeated claim by
Botha and some of his Western allies that, in relation to those who represent black
aspirations, the ANC is merely one among equals. This is a device designed to weaken the
main propellant of the coming transformation so as to ensure that a form of power sharing
will be apportioned in a way which will not lead to a real loss of control by those who
wield it at the moment.
Even within the narrower confines of what could be described as the main revolutionary
force, we should not overlook the fact that it represents an alliance of different classes
and strata (overwhelmingly black) which suffer varying degrees of national oppression and
economic exploitation. And although they may all subscribe to the slogan of People's
Power, they cannot be expected to share exactly the same vision about its content and the
future.
The slogan of People's Power must therefore be accompanied by an awareness that we are
not dealing with an undifferentiated black mass. The most consistent guarantor of genuine
liberation is the black working class, which has the smallest stake in the status quo and
the least motivation for substituting black faces for white ones in the seats of
exploitation. It is for this reason that both the ANC and the Party emphasise the dominant
role of the working people in the coalition of class forces which constitute the
liberation front.
But unlike the ANC, which does not and should not commit itself exclusively to the
aspirations of a single class, the Party owes allegiance solely to the working people. And
it is our prime function both as an independent Party and as part of the alliance to
assert and jealously safeguard the dominant role of this class whose aspirations we
represent. In our book this does not imply that the Party itself must seek to occupy the
dominant position in the liberation alliance. On the contrary, if correct leadership of
the democratic revolution requires the strengthening of the national movement as the major
and leading mass organisational force, then this is precisely the way in which a party
exercises its vanguard role in the real and not the vulgar sense of the term.
It should also be stressed that the participation of workers (whether communist or
non-communist) in the national movement itself and the role played by an independent
radical trade union movement like Cosatu are very much part of the process of asserting
the role of the workers. But we reject the organisational populism of those who see the
shop floor as the only terrain of class struggle and who counterpose the Party and the
trade union movement as competitive organs for the political leadership of the working
class. We are at one with Jay Naidoo, General Secretary of Cosatu, when he said:
'Organised workers (in the trade union movement) are not representatives of the working
class as a whole, but they constitute its most powerful weapon'. (South African Labour
Bulletin, April 1986, p39). The representative of the working class as a whole is a
political vanguard which we claim to be; a title which is of course earned by the calibre
of leadership on the ground and not by mere proclamation.
A question which is intimately connected with all this is the hardy perennial - the
so-called 'two stage theory' of the South African revolution. Our detractors claim that
our preoccupation with the national democratic objectives of the immediate anti-racist
struggle has led to an abandonment of socialist objectives. We are alleged to believe that
in the interests of the popular alliance, the working class should not assert its primacy
and should forget all about socialist perspectives until apartheid has been overthrown; a
scenario which would leave the way open for the revolution to be hijacked by exploiters
with black faces who will ensure that it is stopped in its tracks.
It seems to be the unfortunate fate of a party such as ours (to which, I suppose, by
now we should have become accustomed) to be at one and the same time accused by the Bothas
of taking over the ANC in order to drive it towards communism, and, by other critics, of
being taken over by the ANC which is driving us towards nationalism.
Revolution is a continuing process. Although it inevitably goes through strategic and
tactical phases, there is no Chinese wall between them; the ingredients of the later phase
must already have begun to mature in the womb of the earlier. This is our approach to the
relationship between the national democratic and socialist objectives of our revolution. I
have already touched on the dominant role of the workers in the present alliance of class
forces and on our continued devotion to the spread of socialist perspectives and more
particularly an understanding of the ultimate link between national liberation and social
emancipation. But this does not imply that the motor of the immediate struggle can be
effectively fuelled by the slogan of a socialist republic. The emphasis on the struggle
for a democratic transformation along the lines of the Freedom Charter is deeply rooted in
present reality.
The speed of recent events has made it more urgent to address a number of issues
connected with this democratic transformation which are arousing public discussion. I want
to touch briefly on a few of these issues.
The fate of the minorities (by which is really meant the white minority) looms larger
than ever in the pronouncements of those who for so long had been impervious to the fate
of the majority. Our policy and, more importantly, our practice, has been consistent with
the opening words of the Freedom Charter that 'South Africa belongs to all who live in it
- black and white'. We believe that this can only be assured in one united South Africa
based on the will of the majority. This is our irreversible starting point.
Equality must be between individuals (if need be, safeguarded by a constitutional
mechanism) and not between race or ethnic groups as such. Ethnic parity is a recipe for
ethnic domination. The concept of group identity based on race (which trades under various
names such as federalism, consociation, etc) is an apartheid formula for the perpetuation
of race and ethnic exclusiveness.
The emphasis on the single source of sovereignty based on the will of the majority
democratically expressed, is not in conflict with the delegation of certain powers to
regional authorities. This occurs in every unitary state. The emphasis on one united
democratic South Africa is certainly no threat to the historically-evolved cultural and
linguistic heritage of the various groupings which constitute the South African nation in
the making.
Unity does not exclude diversity. The regime has used tribal ethnicity and even
Afrikaner-English differences to make a ladder of ascendancy over a divided people. The
founding-fathers of the ANC in 1912 declared that its primary task would be the creation
of a common African consciousness. This process, which has already come a long way, can
only be completed in a united democratic South Africa. Such a South Africa will, at the
same time, be enriched by all that is healthy in the cultural and linguistic heritage of
the different groupings, including that part of the Afrikaners heritage which is not
rooted in racism.
Among the projections being debated in the economic sphere, is the relation between
private and social property in the phase immediately following majority rule. How do we
reconcile two imperatives; the need to begin bringing about changes in the relations of
production in the direction of economic egalitarianism, and the need to meet the people's
economic requirements and expectations? We believe that, in the long term, there is
harmony between these two imperatives; indeed the one is a necessary condition for the
other. But enough experiences have been accumulated of disastrous great leaps forward to
teach us to be wary of baking slogans rather than bread during the transition phase.
Let me be explicit. For some while after apartheid falls there will undoubtedly be a
mixed economy, implying a role for levels of non-monopoly private enterprise represented
not only by the small racially oppressed black business sector but also by managers and
business people of goodwill who have or are prepared to shed racism. It can only be an
indigenous representative of the disastrous Pol Pot philosophy who can project a
pole-vault into socialism and communism the day after overthrow of white rule. If the
political domination of the old ruling class is ended and the new state apparatus is
constructed within the framework envisaged by the Freedom Charter, the
existence of a mixed economy 'controlled' in the words of the Charter 'to assist the
well-being of the people', will facilitate rather than hinder the continuing drive towards
a socialist future; a drive which, within a truly democratic framework, could well be
settled in debate rather than on the streets.
In the meanwhile, mass political struggle coupled with an intensification of
revolutionary violence remains the imperative. We have never relished the path of
violence. But it is plain for all honest observers to see how tightly closed have been all
other avenues for meaningful change. Howe's empty-handed retreat from Pretoria has
underscored how tightly these avenues continue to be closed. And let me emphasise this: if
a real possibility emerges of moving towards the total abolition of apartheid, without
escalating violence, there is no sector of our liberation alliance which would reject such
a path or refuse to talk to people of goodwill about how to get there. In present
circumstances to expect of the ANC-led liberation alliance to unilaterally abandon
violence is to ask it to abandon the people's aspirations. The absence of violence is
dependent on the presence of democracy. In any case, it is difficult to think of an
example in history of a movement going to the negotiating table having abandoned the very
tactic which has played such an important role in getting the enemy to sit around it.
It is the ANC and its allies who have faith in the democratic process and not Botha. It
is we who want a political framework in which the will of the majority can express itself
through normal democratic procedures. It is Botha who bans political opposition, keeps the
people's leaders in gaol and threatens bigger and better massacres and emergencies to
prevent the attainment of democracy which he clearly equates with a form of national
suicide. And it is apartheid's Western allies who are increasing the prospects of massive
blood-letting by standing in the way of effective action by the international community.
The argument is advanced that a wounded economy will be an obstacle to peaceful reform
of the system; a process which they claim will be more assured in conditions of economic
stability and growth.
If anything, our experience of the last twenty years proves the exact opposite. South
Africa's most dramatic period of economic advance between 1967 and 1976 was also a period
during which more was done than at any other time in our history to implement the worst
features of apartheid and a period when the mounting repression reached its climax in the
1976 Soweto Uprising. Conversely, it has been during the last ten years of the most severe
and long-lasting recession in South Africa's history that the regime has been constrained
to move away from at least some of the fringes of apartheid.
There can be little doubt that the catalyst for this has been mounting internal action
and increasing external isolation, and has nothing at all do so with the economic
arguments advanced. Indeed, these economic arguments are really moving in a bizarre
direction; from the same political stable which prophesied that punitive sanctions would
lead to a state of chaos which would hold back reform, we now hear that sanctions ought to
be opposed because they will strengthen the economy by forcing self-sufficiency on
Pretoria.
In the further alternative, we are also told by those who constructively engage on the
side of the regime, that their opposition to real sanctions is motivated by a desire to
avoid inflicting suffering on the very blacks whom they wish to help. As we know, the
objects of their so-called concern are overwhelmingly in favour of sanctions and, in any
case, are heartily sick of being told yet again, what is good for them by those unable to
shed an imperial mentality. Can there be any doubt that the people whom Reagan and
Thatcher would really like to help are the Bothas? Their stance has nothing whatsoever to
do with the balance of suffering, but everything to do with the balance of profit.
These, then, are the self-proclaimed champions of 'human rights'. They never stop
whining about Soviet influence in our struggle. Let me emphasise (however much it might
stick in their gullets) that we in South Africa share the experience of virtually every
other liberation movement in the world, of the most consistent and generous support from
the Soviet Union and the other socialist nations. Today our cause is becoming more
fashionable and we are gratefully gathering more friends. But neither we nor our people
will forget or allow themselves to be separated from those who have been consistently with
them from the very beginning. This includes our African brothers who have sacrificed so
much in support of our struggle.
And among those who also always stood in the front line of support for our cause, were our
comrades in the communist and workers' parties in all parts of the world, more especially
those who are today sharing our platform.
The uninterrupted upsurge, which can be dated from August 1984, is not a passing
phenomenon. It undoubtedly holds out the promise of some really basic transformation. The
interrelated economic and political crisis of South Africa's ruling class is not
diminishing; in important areas it daily grows more acute. And the factors which usually
combine to set the scene for a revolutionary advance are beginning to come together.
Firstly, the ruling class has virtually conceded that it can no longer rule in the old
way. The divisions within the power bloc are deepening, as racist politicians and white
businessmen thrash about in a desperate search for a way to share power without giving up
control. Secondly, it is crystal clear that the people are no longer prepared to be ruled
in the old way. By their actions they have already rendered ungovernable most of the urban
levels of administration and replaced these with embryos of popular power. Botha's
nine-day wonder, the Tri-cameral parliament, has sunk into virtual oblivion. Even more
important, growing numbers of our workers and youth are showing a readiness to sacrifice
even their lives in the struggle for an end to racist tyranny. Thirdly, the ANC and the
liberation front which it heads, is regarded by friend and foe alike as the vanguard which
occupies first place in the allegiance of the overwhelming majority of the mass of the
oppressed.
In addition, the massive build-up of international revulsion against Botha's Hitlerian
tyranny is reaching one of its highest points. It has its roots in the heroism and rising
intensity of our people's resistance. In this day and age there is no struggle which can
be separated from the international context, but in the case of South Africa the
international factor plays a unique role; because the evil of apartheid, like no other
issue, cuts across the world ideological divide. The international isolation of South
Africa can therefore make a special contribution towards a less painful and speedier
outcome.
We do not discount the enemy's virtually irreversible trench mentality which Botha once
again exposed in his response to the EPG and now to Howe's useless effort. Nor should we
underestimate the internal and external resources which the regime can still muster in an
attempt to keep the majority from opening the gates of political power. But, at the same
time, the possibility of a people's breakthrough is growing stronger by the day. It
follows, therefore, that while continuing to focus our sights on a protracted conflict we
must also prepare and be ready to adjust them to a much swifter transformation involving
insurrectionary ingredients.
Comrade Chairman,
Looking back on our 65 years we can be proud of the impact our Party has made. But this
impact has not been just as a stimulant for the elaboration of theoretical perspectives
for the South African revolution.
Our Party and individual communists have won their political place by dedication and
sacrifice to the revolutionary cause in the actual arena of struggle. There is no phase of
our struggle which does not have its communist heroes and martyrs; revolutionaries who
watered the tree of freedom with their very blood. Today on our 65th Anniversary we dip
our red banner for these communists and other revolutionaries who gave their all in the
cause of freedom, in the cause of socialism.
Today, on the 65th Anniversary of our Party - described by Oliver Tambo as one of the
great pillars of our struggle - the South African masses are on the move as never before
in our history. We pledge and vow to help finish the job.
PUBLISHED BY INKULULEKO PUBLICATIONS,
39 GOODGE STREET,
LONDON W1P lFD
