SACP Special National Congress
eThekwini, 10th April 2005
Resolution on SACP participation in elections
The 2005 National Special Congress of the SACP resolves:
1. An overwhelming election victory for the ANC alliance in the forthcoming local government elections is an essential condition for the ongoing consolidation of democracy and of local transformation and development, not least in councils that have yet to be won, or have only recently come under ANC alliance control. The SACP will throw its full weight behind an ANC-led campaign and victory in these elections.
2. In the coming weeks and months, the SACP will engage actively with its alliance partners to ensure that the election manifesto and local governance programme primarily address the needs and concerns of the workers and the poor, particularly in regard to jobs and basic services. The SACP will engage with the ANC, and with communities, to ensure that the list process, and particularly the selection of ward candidates is a thoroughly democratic process, with the full participation of communities, and grass-roots level alliance structures. The SACP will engage to ensure that the ANC lists are representative. The SACP will also work to ensure that councillors are effectively empowered and capacitated, but also that they are fully accountable to their communities and to the alliance that has put them into office.
3. The SACP will audit the performance of all SACP members who are elected representatives at the local, provincial and national level. SACP members who are elected representatives serve under a broad ANC mandate, but they must never forget that they are also members and representatives of our party, and they must fearlessly defend the party and its perspectives on all occasions. They must never conduct themselves in ways that are in conflict with the principles and morality of our Party. The SACP will engage the ANC around the modalities of Party members who are elected representative.
4. The Central Committee must appoint a commission that will assess the opportunities, challenges and threats to the achievement of our Medium Term Vision of building a Party of power, influence and activism. This must include the development of strategic options with regard to election participation by the Party. The commission must be guided by the fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism, by our Medium Term Vision, approaching an electoral strategic perspective in terms of the working class, state power and the role of the South African Communist Party. The commission should, amongst other things, assess the organisational capacity and readiness of the SACP; canvass the views of the organised working class and workers and the poor in general; engage our Alliance partners and other progressive social formations; assess the extensive electoral and state-power experience, both positive and negative, of our own Party and of Communist and other Left parties world-wide, and of the variety of organisational forms in which the Left is or has contested and exercised power.
5. The work of the Commission must be used to facilitate extensive political education, discussion and debate within the SACP.
6. The Commission must conclude its work in time for a CC report to the 12th Congress of the SACP in 2007.
