25 June 1998

The 10th SACP Congress will be held at Shaft 17 Conference Centre, Johannesburg, between July 1 to 5.

The Congress will be attended by 448 elected branch delegates, in addition to the 30 Central Committee members. Delegations from the ANC, COSATU, the ANC Women`s League, Youth League, the student formations and SANCO will also attend.

The Congress will meet in open plenary on July 1, from 10h00 through until 20h35. The first day will feature the Central Committee Political Report to be presented by General Secretary Charles Nqakula, and a speech by President Nelson Mandela. On the second day the plenary open session will extend from 9h00 to 12h00, and will feature international messages of solidarity, a COSATU message to be delivered by cde Peter Malepe, COSATU
2nd vice president, and an ANC message to be delivered by ANC president, cde Thabo Mbeki.

There are several key political objectives that we have set for ourselves in this Congress.The first critical task is to assess the past four years since April 1994. In our Central Committee congress discussion documents, we argue that we are in the midst of a vast process of social transformation, and that major achievements have already be won, in the short space since the first elections. Insofar as we, as a broad ANC-led liberation movement, have not achieved all that we hoped, this is usually because of external constraints. However, we believe that there have also been strategic shortcomings over this period.

As the SACP we are happy to claim joint responsibility for the huge gains made by our country, but we are also prepared to accept collective responsibility for the strategic shortcomings in our movement`s performance.

The four areas that we believe need strategic strengthening are: 

• A better understanding of global realities, and a better and more robust understanding of what we have to do as South Africans in order to ensure that we do not lose our transformational agenda in attempting to please transnational investors;
• A different macro-economic framework. The SACP has argued over the last two years that GEAR is an inappropriate policy, and that it often throttles the good social and economic transformation that we are, at the same time, endeavouring to embark upon.
• Major struggles to transform the public sector into a more effective developmental state are essential. We have, collectively, often fallen into narrow managerialist ways of exercising state power, and this has sometimes opened up a gap between our mass constituency and our movement in government. We need an active, developmental state to transform society. But we also need mobilised popular forces in society to transform the state, and therein lies the fourth strategic challenge:
• Our grass-roots branch and other structures have often been demobilised in the last period. Where mobilisation occurs, it is often directed by ANC-alliance formations at the ANC in government. We need to ensure a much more coherent strategic convergence of effort between our mass-based formations and our efforts in government.

These are perspectives that we shall be presenting, as the Central Committee, to our Congress. We will be testing these perspectives with our delegates and, above all, we will be seeking action-oriented programmatic resolutions to improve the strategic coherence of our work.

The 10th Congress occurs also in the midst of preparations for the Tripartite Alliance Summit which we hope will convene towards the end of July. While we regretted the postponement last week of the Summit, we also appreciated that the postponement was made for the correct reasons. Indeed, we agreed to postpone. The Summit is not a photo opportunity, or a cosmetic public display of unity for electoral purposes. The preparations for the Summit have been characterised by intensive preparation. We want the Summit to be an effective policy-making process. We intend to use our own Congress to strengthen our collective preparations for the Alliance Summit.

The 10th Congress will also be used by the SACP to give greater practical content to our socialist perspectives. At our last Congress, three years ago, the SACP made an important strategic shift. It was a shift that was captured in our 9th Congress slogan - "Socialism is the Future, Build it Now!".

We have shifted away from the idea that socialism is some distant event, or new Jerusalem. Socialism is certainly a vision and an ideal, but it is something that has to be struggled for here in the present. We believe that it is both possible, and necessary, to struggle for momentum towards, capacity for, and elements of socialism in the present. We will be presenting programmatic perspectives to our 10th Congress to back this approach.

A notable feature of the 10th Congress is the encouraging international interest. We will be receiving over 70 international delegates, from our region, from elsewhere in Africa, and indeed from all continents. Some of the delegates will represent Communist and progressive parties that are in power in their countries, others will represent mass parties that exercise very substantial political influence in their countries. The idea that socialism has disappeared globally is something that we shall be challenging both in our theoretical discussions, and, practically with the evidence of international participation in the 10th SACP Congress.

Issued by: SACP Head Office