SACP Message of Solidarity and Support to the National Conference of MKVA, 28 September 2007
Blade Nzimande, General Secretary
1.0 Introduciton
We are indeed deeply appreciative of your decision to invite the SACP, a party that has been and continues to be a home for many of you as former MK soldiers, to give this short message of support and solidarity. Indeed we are proud of the MKMVA, as the SACP was a co-founder of Umkhonto weSizwe, and many communists served this army of liberation with distinction and full dedication.
We are dedicating this solidarity message to the memory of MK Commander and late General Secretary of the SACP, Cde Chris Hani, and all the heroes of Umkhonto WeSizwe, who laid down their lives in the national liberation struggle. We hope you will support us, through a formal resolution, in our quest for the establishment of a judicial inquest into the full circumstances surrounding the assassination of Cde Hani. We do not have new information on this, but we have old information that was never followed up by the apartheid regime. We firmly believe that Janus Walus and Derby Lewis did not act on their own in committing this dastardly act. We say these murderers must rot in jail, unless they tell us the whole truth as to whoelse was involved in this dastardly and cowardly act.
Our address to this meeting should serve to overcome the unfortunate distance between MKMVA and the SACP, especially since the assassination of our late General Secretary and former commander of MK, cde Chris Hani on 10 April 1993. It is imperative that we use this conference to also identify concrete ways and means, including joint activities, for co-operation between the SACP and MKMVA.
We also wish to congratulate you on the enormous effort you have put into rebuilding the structures of MKMVA in the 9 provinces in recent months, and also hope that the new leadership elected here will focus on strengthening these structures so that they become a formidable force to deepen our national democratic revolution, with and for workers and the poor.
2.0 Our revolution is on trial: The tasks and challenges of the National Democratic Revolution
Let us start by restating some of the main goals of the national democratic revolution. Ours was always a struggle for the liberation of Africans in particular and blacks in general from the yoke of apartheid oppression and superexploitation of black workers. Ours was a struggle to overthrow colonialism of a special type and wipe out its entire legacy.
To achieve this overall goal of our national democratic revolution we characterized the key objective of the national democratic revolution as that of addressing the national, class and gender contradictions in their interrelationship. We said this because we knew that black people can never be truly liberated outside of a thorough transformation of the economic foundations of colonialism of a special type.
We also captured the above objectives by clearly pointing out that, as we said in Morogoro in 1969, that ours was never a struggle to replace a white elite with a black elite, but a struggle for the complete liberation and upliftment of our people as a whole. This was also the injunction of the Freedom Charter and the SACP`s 1962 Programme, `The Road to South African Freedom`.
For the NDR to achieve its goals, the working class must be main motive force of this revolution, as it is the only class with the necessary revolutionary capacity and organization to lead such a struggle; and that it was the only class that had the deepest interest in taking the NDR to its logical conclusion - a transition to socialism in South Africa. Whilst the NDR is not a socialist strategy, but we had always understood the deep interconnectedness between the NDR and the struggle for socialism. This was because, as it is still true today, there was always a broad understanding that the objectives of the NDR can never be fully attained in a capitalist society.
These perspectives remain as valid as ever in characterization of the tasks and objectives of the National Democratic Revolution today. We need to say that the 1994 democratic breakthrough created enormous space and capacity to realize the vision of the Freedom Charter. Indeed our government has led many progressive changes and improvements in the lives of our people: improved access to basic services, outlawing of all racially based laws, passed progressive legislation and created a machinery to promote gender equality, progressive labour legislation and a number of other achievements.
However, the key contradiction facing South African society today is that whilst the movement has access to political power, but the colonial character of the economy has hardly changed. The South African economy is still dominated by large monopolies especially in the mining, finance and energy sector, that continue to strangle our economy, casualising and retrenching the working class, suffocating the growth of the SME sector and co-operatives, and generally holding our revolution at ransom.
Indeed our transition took place in a highly contradictory domestic and global environment. Our transition took place at the same time as the Soviet Union and other eastern bloc socialist countries were collapsing, thus posing very complex challenges on how to deepen the NDR in an increasingly hostile unipolar, imperialist dominated global environment. The major political breakthroughs of the early to mid-1990s were somehow overshardowed by these global developments. There were deep debates about how to confront this reality, but unfortunately our macro-economic policy framework was adopted without adequately taking into account of the full spectrum of these debates within our broad movement.
Our view as the SACP has always been that much as the world had changed with the disappearance of the Soviet Union, however our macro-economic policy framework exaggerated the global constraints and underestimated the potential of the favourable internal balance of forces in pursuing a more radical national democratic programme.
It is partly, though not exclusively, this reality that has created the current problems that we have in our movement today. Hence our theme that indeed our revolution is on trial. Many of our progressive programmes have been hijacked or frustrated by the overwhelming dominance of white monopoly capital. A well-intentioned BEE programme has simply become a co-optation and enrichment of a tiny black elite, whilst the working class has experienced a massive job-loss bloodbath, casualisation, outsourcing and a general decline in the workers` share in the GDP of our country.
I do not have to tell you this since you know it already that the political climate in our own movement is poisoned in a manner that if not decisively dealth with, it can tear our movement apart. Problems and tensions in the ANC inevitably spill over into allied organizations and the broader democratic movement. Our revolution seems to be threatened by the spectre of `palace politics`: backstabbing, smear campaigns, serious signs of abuse of state organs to settle party political differences, the threat of triumph of the politics of money over the politics of serving our people without expectation of personal reward, emergence of money to buy delegates to vote in particular wasy at gatherings of allied formations, patronage, and use of media to smear each other. This palace politics, we must defeat
I am sure that it is these concerns, amongst others, that have seen MKMVA rescuscitating its own structures as part of making a positive contribution towards dealing with the challenges facing our movement. Never again should MKMVA allow itself to lapse, movement is facing such challenges! Our revolution is on trial, it is the working class, acting together with former combatants that can ensure that our revolution remains on course, with and for the workers and poor!
3.0 MKMVA today: Combatants for deepening the national democratic revolution
Much as the MKMVA has an important role to play in looking after the welfare of particularly the unemployed or underemployed former combatants of MK, and to able to generate resources for projects to benefit its members, this surely cannot be the primary role of this organization. We must ensure that we do not reduce
As the SACP (and indeed our movement as a whole) we were always proud of the fact that MK was an army of a special type, not merely trained in army tactics and how to use an AK47, but also was largely made up politically trained and advanced cadres of our movement. As the SACP we are indeed proud that we played an important role in the political education of many of MK soldiers.
Indeed you are not a stratum apart and separate from our movement, much as you have your own distinctive needs, but are an integral part of this movement. It is from this point of departure that MKMVA should locate its role in South Africa today. MKMVA should be in all sites of struggle in deepening and consolidating the NDR. Indeed many former MK combatants are playing an important role in various capacities in the transformation and reconstruction of our country. This therefore means that one of the key roles of MKMVA is to seek to strengthen the role that its former combatants are playing in broader society.
It is also a fact that many former MK combatants are active in all our organizations making up the Tripartite Alliance. As the SACP we need more of former MK combatants to come back home and build an even stronger SACP. Indeed we have many former MK cadres inside the ranks of our Party who have played a critical role in assisting the Party to adapt and effectively engage in the post-1994 political terrain. And that is why we have grown our Party, both in terms of stature and membership.
The SACP`s latest programme `The South African Road to Socialism`, identifies as the key challenge in deepening the NDR as that of building working class hegemony in all key sites of power in society, with a priority focus on the state, the economy, the workplace, the community, the ideological and internationally. Deepening working class hegemony over the NDR still remains our shortest route to socialism.
Indeed it would be wrong to overlook the very real experiences and challenges facing many former MK soldiers post 1994. We are particularly concerned as the SACP at the number of MK cadres who are starving, either unemployed or underemployed, yet they possess vast political knowledge that is vitally needed in our country today. Yes we know that many of these cadres in difficulty did not acquire formal education, but formal education should not be used as an excuse for not having addressed their needs, given their political grounding and existence of facilities to upgrade some of their formal education and skills. We cannot use lack of formal education as an excuse to properly integrate our former combatants into meaningful role in society. Umzabalazo wethu kwakungazange ube owezifundiswa!
We know that our criminal justice system has not seen adequate transformation. We have changed positions on top, but middle management in many of these structures is still made up of former apartheid operatives. This has resulted in, amongst other things, an exodus of former MK cadres from the SANDF, because of the manner in which many of them have been frustrated by apartheid middle managers in such structures. This, by the way, poses some serious security risk for our country and contributes to our inability to effectively deal with crime.
The link between our various terrains of struggle during apartheid - the exile, the underground, the prisons and mass movement - were our MK cadres. It is them who understand all these terrains, some of which are still entirely relevant today.
But communists and former MK combatants must not just whinge. We need to embark on concrete campaigns around deepening the NDR, transforming our criminal justice system and catering for the needs of former combatants. For instance one would have expected that the Community Development Workers (CDWs) would have ordinarily targeted former combatants given their experience and knowledge. This is a campaign we must joint take up.
We also need to ensure that all our organizations, especially the ANC, remains a campaigning organization on the ground and not merely reach out to our people once in every five years during the elections. Former combatants have got an important role to play in this regard. As we go to Limpopo in December we must make sure that we must lay a foundation for rebuilding a dynamic ANC, engaged in campaigns around the daily struggles of our people.
The tasks of MKMVA must be located within the overall objectives of the National Democratic Revolution. All the necessary welfare and the building of the resource capacity of MKMVA must be subjected to these overall political objectives.
It is all the above tasks that will lay the foundation for overcoming the many challenges and problems besetting our movement. But of even more importance is for MKMVA perspectives to enrich these perspectives, the theory and practice in the NDR. It is for this reason that the SACP also supports your call for MKMVA structures to be formally represented in all leadership structures of our movement - from the NEC right down to the branch level - as an important component and repository of the revolutionary knowledge of this, OUR MOVEMENT!
To use your own language, PERHAPS IT IS NOW TIME FOR COMMANDERS, TO POINT THE WAY FORWARD, AND COMMISSARS WILL ONLY COME AFTERWARDS TO EXPLAIN WHY THE COMMANDERS GAVE SUCH COMMANDS - IN ORDER TO SAVE OUR REVOLUTION.
With these words we wish you a successful Conference
Long live the memory of the heroic struggle of MK combatants!