Declaration of the SACP Strategy Conference - May 2000

This strategy conference commits the SACP to engage with our Alliance partners, the ANC
and COSATU, to ensure that the Alliance more boldly reaffirms political control over the
strategic trajectory of the ongoing South African transition.

Together, let us ensure that our NDR is advanced, deepened and defended. This is the
key line of march to emerge from this Conference.

In our deliberations at this strategy Conference, we have been guided by its slogan
– “Consolidate Working Class Power for the Eradication of Poverty”.

We have met against the backdrop of major advances in our society over the last six
years, but also against the backdrop of a jobs crisis, persisting mass poverty, and a
society that remains amongst the most unequal in the world.

While there has been moderate growth, and while the so-called fundamentals are said to
be in place, the prospects of sustained growth and development remain uncertain. It is
against this background also that there has been sustained working class mobilisation over
the last months, culminating in the massive May 10 general strike involving 4 million
workers.

This strategic Conference has provided the SACP with an opportunity to reflect upon all
of these realities, and to elaborate, concretise and reaffirm our fundamental strategic
perspectives.

This conference has resolved on the need to shift the focus of economic policy and
debate away from macro-economic issues and towards the productive economy.

We have resolved on advancing the perspective of a coherent industrial strategy that
embraces the manufacturing sectors, but also mining, agriculture and services – this
will, of course, have implications for macro policy, which must be aligned with such an
industrial strategy.

The elaboration and implementation of this industrial policy requires, critically, an
active National Democratic State with a developmental orientation that intervenes actively
in the economy through the coherent developmental use of the budget, and parastatals, and
through planning, regulation and the use of incentives and disincentives.

A sustainable industrial policy depends centrally on the capacity of the state to
mobilise domestic resources – both publicly owned capital, social capital, and
privately owned capital.

The transformation of the public service and the restructuring of public enterprises
and state assets are central to building the National Democratic State that will ensure
that the objectives of the NDR are achieved.

The party will ensure that its mobilises its members and structures to make this a
priority focus. Party members and workers in the public sector are the foot soldiers that
the NDR needs to ensure that our society is transformed and poverty is eradicated. The
party will engage the ANC and COSATU to ensure that the Alliance develops a common view on
the ND state and particularly on managing the transformation of the public service and the
restructuring of state assets in such a manner that jobs are created rather than lost,
that services and goods delivered through the public sector improve and are extended.

The party sees no need for downsizing, outsourcing, privatisation and the reduction of
labour standards that flow from these actions. There is also no evidence that the poor
benefits from this. On the contrary, they pile misery on top of existing poverty.

The emphasis on this transformation and restructuring should be on building the public
sector and socially owned wealth, including through the development of public-public
partnerships. The Party and its cadres will play an active role in challenging the
encroachment of private capital in the ND state and on rooting out the corruption that
flows from this tendency.

This Conference focused on developing detail on a socialist approach to the current
process of local government transformation. The conference resolved to call on branch and
other structures to ensure that a strong local state is created. The state must take
active initiatives to ensure local economic development is biased towards co-operative and
community based development; to ensure that municipal services for basic needs are
provided in such a manner that they are increasingly free as lifeline services and that
primarily public-public partnerships are undertaken where restructuring of municipal
service delivery is necessary.

We believe that these general perspectives, and much of their detailed elaboration in
our working papers, commission discussions and Conference resolutions are endorsed, not
only within the SACP, but also widely within the ANC, COSATU and more broadly in South
Africa.

But for these perspectives to be realised in practice requires a struggle led by the
ANC itself to reaffirm political strategic command of the trajectory of the South African
transition.

Together we have to counter tendencies for major strategic decisions to be driven by
senior managers in government and parastatals, often advised by private sector-aligned
consultants.

These tendencies run the risk of hollowing out the state and parastatals, of weakening
our liberation movement´s capacity to implement its vision of reconstruction and
development in the context of advancing, deepening and defending the NDR.

Together, as the alliance and in unity with the great majority of South Africans, let
us boldly reaffirm our commitment to ensuring the strategic direction of the transition is
guided in detail and in depth by our shared vision of a thorough-going NDR.

This strategy conference has also devoted significant time to the ongoing task of SACP
party-building. The high levels of participation, the quality of debate and the
exceptional degree of consensus that have prevailed at this Conference convince us that
consistent recruitment and cadre development by the SACP over the ten years since its
unbanning has produced a high-level cadreship throughout our country, and present in
government, legislatures, local councils, in schools, hospitals and factories, in the
trade union movement and other progressive social movements.

With over thirteen thousand active, fully paid up members, the SACP´s membership is
now, in fact, larger than it has been in its 79 year history.

We are building a cadre-based, quality party in the context of a strategic alliance
with a mass ANC and a mass COSATU. Over the last few years, the SACP has achieved higher
levels of popularity, profile and rootedness, particularly within the progressive trade
union movement, than ever before.

This strategy Conference has laid great emphasis on ongoing party building, on
implementing our programme of action, and, above all, on building an SACP, based on our
communist morality that is exemplary in its incorruptibility, its principled approach to
politics and its selfless devotion to working people and the poorest of the poor.

AMANDLA!