Chapter 9: The SACP`s Programme of action to advance the goals of "The South African Road to Socialism"

"The South African Road to Socialism" is the SACP`s strategic approach to the struggle for socialism in our country as endorsed by the Party`s July 2007 12th National Congress. Based on this programmatic vision, the 12th National Congress of the SACP also adopted a five-year programme of action whose main features are:

1. A working-class led programme of radical political and socio-economic transformation inspired by the Freedom Charter

Core elements of this pillar of our programme of action are:

• Advancing the Freedom Charter demand that "The People Shall Govern" through the ongoing transformation of the state, the strengthening of legislatures, ensuring transparency and answerability from state functionaries and political representatives, strengthening the democratic organisation and developmental role of public sector workers, including those in the safety and security apparatus, advancing participatory democracy, and strengthening the active role of communities in governance, including through participatory planning and budgeting;
• Advancing a state-led, developmental industrial strategy, including state-led investment in infrastructure; the transformation of the financial sector; breaking the private monopoly character of the CST economy; and the nationalisation of key strategic sectors (like SASOL and Mittal Steel).
• Ensuring increased access to basic services, including free and compulsory quality public education; an affordable and accessible public health system; the provision of housing and other basic services, including water, sanitation and electrification.
• Accelerated land and agrarian transformation, as part of a comprehensive rural and urban development strategy and the struggle for food security.
• The transformation of "black economic empowerment", so that it empowers the overwhelming majority of the workers and the poor as part of the overall strategy to abolish the CST capitalist accumulation path.

2. Strengthening the SACP as a vanguard party of socialism

Core elements of this pillar are:

• Strengthening the independent identity and capacity of the SACP within the context of a strategic national democratic alliance.
• Ensuring the effective and sustained resourcing of the SACP.
• Enhancing, elaborating and continuously assessing the relationship of the SACP to state power and governance structures in the context of our commitment to building working class hegemony in all key sites of power.
• Building the policy capacity of the SACP.
• Supporting and strengthening the capacity of SACP cadres in the widest range of deployments including in government and in the liberation and trade union movements, while at the same time ensuring accountability and answerability to the Party.
• Restructuring the SACP`s base structures to effect greater organic links to working class communities.
• Devoting special attention to the recruitment and development of women comrades in the course of our campaigns and by correcting institutional and organisational practices that hinder the fullest participation of women comrades.
• Developing a more portfolio-based approach to leadership collectives.
• Intensifying work to establish SACP work-place branches/units and communist sectoral work.
• Intensification of SACP-led campaigns.
• All of the above will require intensification of our cadre-development work.

3. Transforming the ANC and the reconfiguration of the Alliance

Based on our strategic vision of the NDR as the South African road to socialism, the SACP has a strategic duty to contribute to the strengthening of the ANC and the strategic Alliance the ANC leads. This will require:

• Re-building the ANC as a mass-based, radical, working class-led, campaigning organisation. We must help to re-build an ANC that is rooted amongst the mass of the people of our country.
• Strengthening the working-class bias of the ANC.
• Ensuring effective ANC and Alliance strategic oversight over governance.
• An intensified, Alliance-wide, cadre development programme.
• A re-configured Alliance that helps to strengthen the independent capacity of each of the components and that ensures a clear relationship between allied formations and decision-making and governance processes.

4. Ideological Work

The struggle for socialism critically involves the contestation over ideas and values. Over the next five years, the SACP will:

• Intensify our ideological work within the Party and the broader movement, informed by the radical perspectives and values historically associated with our national liberation struggle.
• Undertake meaningful engagement with and contribute to the transformation of the public broadcaster.
• Support and deepen our relations with community radio stations.
• Struggle for the restructuring of school and higher education curricula in line with the progressive, developmental agenda of our society
• Strengthen internal SACP media, ideological and political education work.

5. Internationalist work

The SACP benefits from and has responsibilities for consistent internationalist work. Over the next five years, the SACP will:

• Play an active role in building a Southern African and continental left network;
• Enhance our information distribution capacity, notably our website, to act as a prime source for progressive, left-wing information for the continent and the world`s progressive movement;
• Deepen our work with all left, socialist and communist forces world-wide - including learning from and popularising within our own country left advances elsewhere.
• Track, assess and seek to impact upon our government`s bilateral and multi-lateral engagements and agreements.

In adopting this five-year programme of action, the 12th Congress of the SACP has committed itself to undertaking a wide range of practical tasks that begin materially to roll back all forms of class, national and gendered exploitation and oppression.

Communists to the front to build

A Better, A Socialist South Africa and World!