Opening Address by the SACP Chairperson, Cde Charles Nqakula, at the 12th National Congress of the SACP
12 July 2007, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University
It is an honour to open this 12th National Congress of the South African Communist Party. You, the delegates to this Congress, are here representing more than 51 000 communists countrywide. This is the largest organised membership in the history of our Communist Party since our launch in 1921. You represent your SACP branches, districts and provinces. You also represent a dynamic new reality, the Young Communist League, banned in 1950 and re-launched since our last SACP National Congress.
We are dynamic and youthful Party, but we are also representatives of the oldest and now certainly the largest Communist Party on the African continent. The grave setback suffered internationally by the socialist struggle in the late 1980s and 1990s impacted on many progressive movements in the South, including in our region. Liberation movements that had once proclaimed themselves Marxist- Leninist, almost without exception abandoned their commitment to socialism in this period.
As the SACP we are proud to say that we have remained steadfast. We are the bearers of an 86- year old unbroken tradition- 86 fighting years of Marxist- Leninist organisation, theoretical development, activist struggle and international solidarity.
We have dynamic and influential, not by clinging mechanically to dogma, but by constantly testing and reviewing our theories, our strategies and tactics in the trenches of working class and popular struggle. We have played a vanguard socialist role within the context of a broader national democratic struggle. We pioneered revolutionary trade unionism and the progressive media in our country. Communists, today, enjoys overwhelming majority support in our country. We have played a vanguard role, but we have also always learnt from the diverse views and traditions of our broader popular movement and people. We are a Party of internationalism, but we are also a Party of patriotism, a South African party.
Since our 1994 democratic breakthrough, while not being the ruling party as such, the SACP has also been a party of active governance. SACP cadres have taken up the challenges and responsibilities of governance. Thousands of communist serve as local councillors, as Mayors, as members of legislatures (both provincial and national), as members of the executive as school principals and heads of hospitals, as members of school governing bodies and community policing forums, as public sector workers, including in the safety and security forces.
As Communists, in the post-1994 reality we have not hung back in the comfort zone of the ivory tower. When we have disagreed with the government policies. We have said so boldly. But we have never stood on the sidelines merely as critical, oppositional spectators.
Above all the SACP has, throughout its history, consistently endeavoured to be a Party with and for the working masses of our country. Over the past five years since our last Congress, we have been with the land hungry and the landless in the struggle for household food security, for a comprehensive land reform and agro-industrial transformation. We have fought for the rights of farm-dwellers and for the 1 million farm labourers and their families evicted from commercial farms in the past decade. We have been with those who are blacklisted by the faceless credit bureaux, and with those redlined by the financial institutions. We have worked with communities and local governments to establish a cooperative movement. And we have campaigned for affordable, efficient and safe public transport for the 7 millions South Africans who have to brave each day the harrowing prospect of unreliable and unsafe commuting.
We have consistently joined our allies in COSATU in the struggle for the decent jobs and against retrenchments and casualisation.
Back in 1996 when government introduced its macro-economic policy GEAR, the SACP said that macro-economic policy without a state-led industrial policy was a mistake- it was abandoning our accumulation path to the market. When, in the late 1990s and early 2000s government attempted to spearhead an accelerated privatisation drive we protested. We called, instead, for a strong, democratic developmental state. Today, there is now consensus within our broad movement on the centrality of these two key requirements a state-led industrial policy and an active developmental state.
In reminding ourselves of the SACPs decades-long legacy and these achievements. Both historical and recent, we are also reminding ourselves, as delegates to this 12th Congress, of the enormous responsibilities that we bear.
Those who are hungry have a right to be impatient. Those who are jobless, those who live without a formal shelter over their heads have a right to be impatient. Those who live in fear in crime infested communities, or as a result of domestic violence, they too have right to be impatient.
As the SACP we must identify deeply with the impatience of our people. But we must not mistake impatience for a strategy. It is our job to organise this impatience, to provide it with a programmatic perspective, to deepen it with a socialist morality, with a sense of collective responsibility- where an injury to one, is understood to be an injury to all.
As Lenin repeated many times, we have to combine the art of decisiveness in the present always with an understanding of our long-range communist objectives. We have to be active and relevant here and now, but we also have to avoid short-termism, narrow pragmatism, the headline driven, and sound-bite opportunism so characteristic of bourgeois parties. We are not here to advance our own individual interests. We are not even here to advance the narrow interest of our Party. We are here to help build the working class of our country into a hegemonic force in our communities, in the workplace, in the economy at large, in the state, in the international struggle, in the battle of ideas and values.
I am sure that, as delegates, we will rise to these challenges and that we will, collectively, chart a clear path for a radical national democratic revolution, - the South African Road to Socialism.
Communist Cadres to the Front!
To build a better, socialist world!
