Declaration of the SACP Northern Cape 5th Provincial Congress
17 March 2015
We, Communists in the Northern Cape, obliged by the SACP constitution, convened our 5th provincial congress, in Kimberley, Northern Cape Province on the 13-15 March 2015, under the theme "Building Working Class Hegemony in all key sites of struggle".
We are pleased that the congress is the biggest in the history of the SACP in the province, attended by more than 240 delegates from SACP branches, the Young Communist League of South Africa and our alliance partners. Congress welcomes what is a very positive development, the upward growth trajectory of our party membership in both qualitative and quantitative terms.
Our alliance partners the ANC and Cosatu made very constructive and valuable contributions to the 5th congress. Our leadership of the SACP Central Committee attended and addressed our congress. We underline that they brought important lessons for the struggle for social, national, gender and class emancipation of the South African working class, consistent with our political program the `South African Road to Socialism`.
As delegates we are pleased by a contingent of participants drawn from progressive forces from the mass democratic movement and affiliates within the trade union movement.
The depth of our understanding of the provincial political and ideological environment, understanding of the forces of change and their role in the class struggle was in many ways at the behest of their participation. The improved alliance relations in the province are critical in the resolution of the manifold problems in eradicating the legacy of colonialism and capitalist exploitation in the province.
Congress paid tribute to two foundational figures of our strong liberation alliance and trade union movement, our former General Secretary Moses Mauwane Kotane and John Beaver Marks, whose remains were repatriated to South Africa for reburial. We salute them for their magnanimous service to the just cause for liberation and socialism.
The 5th SACP provincial congress also took place in the face of the most acute and endemic world capitalist crisis engulfing virtually every major part of the developed capitalist world, with a magnitude far greater than the late 1920`s great depression.
Although triggered by the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the American housing and financial sectors, the crisis is principally borne out of the fundamental contradiction between the social character of production and the private appropriation of the means of production by a handful of individual capitalist.
The crisis has produced massive systemic problems worldwide. The richest 1% of the world`s population owns and controls about $110 trillion, equivalent to 65 times the total wealth of the bottom 50% of the world`s population. Industrial production has been halved since 2009 with the onset of the crisis. Millions of people are unemployed and the poor and working people have to confront austerity attacks from their reactionary governments.
Despite exaggerated enthusiasm that capitalist bailouts to corporations against insolvency will produce growth, it is an objective fact that there`s only been feeble recovery in global production.
Congress took strong note of imperialism and conflicts it reproduces everywhere through wars of intervention, in Libya, Syria, Iraq and Mali.
With the downward slope in the political and economic position of US hegemony in the world, American imperialism will attempt to thrust humanity back into a cold war paradigm.
We resolved to analyse in detail the newly emerging power blocks including most notably the BRICS phenomenon and the tendency towards decoupling from Western imperialism.
We express serious concern over jihadist movements affecting the African continent. Most of these groups are erstwhile associates of and aligned to powerful imperialist forces. Congress is convinced that Boko Haram is a comprador outpost of Western imperialism, is an aggressor force, fighting in an unjust war.
It is imperative that the SACP continues advancing the international support of Cuba, for the US to relinquish the Guantanamo territory back to Cuba, to abandon the stimulation of illegal migration, to end the genocidal blockade, to reign in the far right and its intelligence subterfuges aimed at subversion of Cuba sovereignty. We condemn American support of counter-revolutionary oligarchy against the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela.
We support the people of Palestine against Israeli Zionism and Western Sahara for self determination. We shall pay greater attention to all struggles of the Swazi people and support efforts to attain their freedom.
We also noted that our government has made remarkable social progress since 1994. However, the solutions to the crisis of inequality, poverty and unemployment within the framework of capitalism can only be limited and underlines the inseparable link of the national, gender and class questions.
As such we resolved to intensify counter-offensive and mobilisation against the authoritarian liberal offensive including against all those who are into burning schools, clinics, libraries and critical social property. We declare that "they will now have to go through the SACP members first", before they can touch social property. The Fascist EFF that has a shared vision with the DA in the superstructure of capitalism should be isolated.
Specifically we must intensify our theorisation of the second radical phase of the national democratic revolution. The NDR must be advanced, deepened, intensified through the second radical phase, and it must be thoroughly defended.
The SACP in the province shall begin henceforth serious mobilisation, geared towards the local government elections in 2016.
Alongside a strong public sector, we shall promote the development of well run, functional, effective, and serious cooperative entities as a priority of our party and the movement. Congress also discussed specific measures to promote local economic development in the province.
Congress agreed that the further qualitative growth in our party is depended on two-pronged strategy of mass mobilisation and campaigning on the one hand and deepened ideological struggles on the other.
Whilst there is no homogeneity of issues affecting women, the proletariat women is invariably the most exploited under capitalist production. We shall convene a Provincial conference of commissars for women and place its outcomes as an important site of our provincial gender strategy and campaigns.
The main strategic and most fundamental task however remains the building of our party into a strong vanguard in the province, through ideological education and mobilisation.
As delegates to the 5th congress, we express utmost confidence on the leadership collective that we elected. Our ultimate goal is to build communism. We declare our commitment to the building of the SACP as a strong Marxist-Leninist vanguard communist party of the working class, to advance the national democratic revolution in its second and more radical phase. The struggle to build socialism, is the most urgent part of this larger undertaking.
Socialism is the future! Build it now!
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