21 December 2004
2004 ? a year of popular advances and persisting challenges
2004 has been a year of important popular advances in our country. The anniversary of our first decade of democracy in April was marked by an overwhelming 70% electoral victory for the ANC and its alliance partners. This enhanced majority was won on the basis of an intensive, door-to-door campaign in townships and rural villages across South Africa. It was also won on the basis of a progressive manifesto that re-affirmed the ANC?s core commitment to, and rootedness among, the working class and poor.
Over the last year and a half there has been an important and growing convergence among ANC alliance partners on some of the core features of a progressive economic policy. Critical among these is a commitment to building active and strategic state-owned enterprises and shifting economic policy beyond macro fundamentals to detailed, state-led industrial sector policies.
The consolidation of our own mass-based democracy at home is the bed-rock upon which our government and country have, in the course of the year, increased a progressive involvement in the continent and world. The SACP is proud of and salutes the role of President Mbeki and our colleagues in government in their work in the Cote d?Ivoire, the DRC, Burundi, the Middle East and in many other areas of international challenge.
From the SACP?s own more specific organisational perspective, 2004 has been an important year. Our membership has grown by 30% since our last congress in mid-2002. In the first year of its existence, the Young Communist League has signed on 10,000 young communists. The SACP-led financial sector campaign, involving over 50 other formations, has now built real momentum and is impacting on government policy and legislation, and even on the conduct of the private banks with the launch of the Mzansi account. Our Red October campaign of 2004 has highlighted the plight of farm-workers and their families, and the necessity to move ahead with much greater determination with land reform that is biased towards the rural poor.
More and more, the SACP is becoming an active, campaigning formation, providing leadership to a range of mass movements and other formations in the course of popular mobilisation. Indeed, our work since our 11th Congress in mid-2002 continues to contribute significantly in reviving a mass movement based on popular mobilisation around daily needs of the mass of the workers and the poor in our country. In doing this, we believe that the SACP is carving out an important strategic and organisational role, we are neither oppositionist, nor a conveyor belt for the ruling party, our ally the ANC.
In the coming years the SACP will always seek to work with our government, and with thousands of communists and non-communist comrades in government, in legislatures, in the administration. But, at the same time, we will do so as an independent formation with our principal responsibility lying with the workers and poor of our country. Where constructive criticism is required, we will make it. Where popular pressure is necessary, we will mobilise it to correct overly technicist, top-down approaches, or to expose incompetence or corruption. In the coming year, the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Charter, the SACP will actively uphold the vision that the people (and not just their elected representatives or state functionaries) shall govern.
Despite the important consolidation and advances of 2004, there are major persisting challenges. While the worst of the job-loss blood-bath may now be past, unemployment remains at a devastatingly high level in our country. Millions of our people, nearly half our population, are trapped in poverty, there is mass landlessness and extreme vulnerability to disease, including the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The burden of poverty continues to exemplify the intersection of race, class and gendered oppression in our society, with blacks, workers and women bearing the brunt of the crisis of underdevelopment.
In the face of these persisting challenges, it is increasingly clear that South Africa?s largely unreconstructed capitalist accumulation path, with its profits first, capital-intensive, enclave characteristics, is incapable of providing durable solutions. It is, in fact, the primary cause of the crisis of underdevelopment. After a decade of freedom, the promise that market-led growth would solve unemployment, has been exposed for the myth that it is. The same can be said for narrow ?black economic empowerment? deals that shuffle some of personalities in the board-rooms without altering systemic realities.
On an international scale, mainstream economists themselves are now doubting whether the past fifteen years of globalisation is remotely sustainable, based, as it is, on high levels of US consumer indebtedness and ballooning trade-deficits on the one hand, and Asian low-wage export-oriented manufacturing on the other. Whatever this unstable reality holds for the future, it is notable that the African continent has simply been erased from whatever short-term benefits this globalised accumulation process might have brought.
In the coming year, the SACP will continue to advance a strategic perspective of popular mobilisation, the fostering of a strong developmental state, and the imperative of building sustainable working class households and communities.
The SACP takes this opportunity to wish the millions of workers a well-deserved rest. The working class deserves a rest in order to launch the New Year with more vigour and energy to tackle the many struggles that still lie ahead. It is the sweat of the workers that keeps the wheels of our economy rolling, though only a small elite benefits from the fruits of workers? toil. We however know that hundreds of thousands of casual workers, many of whom being women, will be sweating it out in restaurants, hotels and the informal sector, throughout the festive and holiday season.
The SACP wishes its members, its supporters and sympathisers and, indeed, all South Africans well over the festive season.
Issued by
Blade Nzimande
General Secretary
For further information please contact
Kaizer Mohau
Media Officer
Tel: 011 339-3621/2
Fax: 011 339-42446880
Cell: 073 571 7528
Email: kaizermohau@sacp.org.za
Website: www.sacp.org.za