CHAPTER 6

THE ROLE AND CHARACTER OF THE SACP

The role and character of the SACP need to be based on our analysis of the strategic and tactical challenges confronting communists in South Africa, outlined in the previous sections of this document.

In the first place, the SACP has been, and remains, an active participant within a long-term strategic alliance, led, not by the SACP, but by the ANC. The leadership role of the ANC in the context of our NDR is not something imposed upon an otherwise reluctant SACP, "because the ANC happens to be larger or better resourced". The leadership role of the ANC (along with its size and resourcing) is something for which communists (with many others) have struggled - in the case of communists since the late 1920s. It is a leadership role to which thousands of communists still daily contribute.

In the present political reality, the leadership role of the ANC includes the fact that it is as the ANC that we contest elections, and it is under an ANC direct mandate that thousands of SACP members (along with other ANC comrades) participate in national and provincial cabinets and legislatures, and in local councils.

The role of the SACP is, essentially, to be a party of strategic influence and activism, to play a vanguard role in consistently representing the immediate and long-term interests of the working class and the poor, within the context of a multi-class liberation movement and NDR. The Party seeks to play this consistent class role by, amongst other things, propagating socialist values, a socialist perspective, and programmes of action that are capable of building momentum towards, capacity for, and elements of socialism.

The character of the SACP derives directly from these strategic roles. After the Party emerged in 1990 from 40 years in the underground, there were many internal SACP debates about whether the newly legalised Party should surface as a "vanguard" or "mass" party. Participants on both sides of the debate often confused role and character. We believe that, over the past decade, we have begun to answer this debate, both in theory and practice. The role of the SACP is, indeed, to act as a vanguard within the NLM and NDR. However, in order to play this role effectively, the SACP needs to have a relatively mass character.

In building the SACP as a vanguard party with a relatively mass character, some of the key considerations we take into account are:

• developing capacity to effectively unite and provide leadership to the
  working class and the urban and rural poor;
• developing and deepening the presence and influence of the Party in key
  sectors of power;
• fostering a capacity to have a wider influence within society;
• having a capacity to play an international role, engaging with counterparts,
  learning from and contributing to the international defence and renewal of
  the socialist project;

Targeted recruiting

The SACP cannot play a vanguard role if, in its character, in its membership and profile, it is not rooted amongst the classes and strata it seeks to represent and influence.

This means that the Party’s profile should, in the first instance, reflect the class we seek to lead. To this end we need targeted recruitment into COSATU and its affiliates, based on our assessment of our strength and presence within each of the COSATU affiliates. Secondly, we need to extend our recruitment into affiliates of other federations, in NACTU and FEDUSA. Such a presence will help to contribute, amongst other things, to our goal of a single union federation in our country. In this regard we need also to consciously place high on our organisational agenda the issue of recruiting more women cadres from the trade union movement. The Party needs, also, to build on its experience of uniting African workers and Indian, Coloured and (progress is being made on this front too) white workers.

The working class is much broader than unionised workers, although this sector is critical. What is more, due to mass retrenchments, casualisation, feminisation, and the growth of survivalist work in the "informal" sector, the working class in South Africa (and internationally) is undergoing major (often painful) restructuring. In the coming years, the SACP needs to target work and recruitment more effectively into all of these strata of the working class, paying particular attention to the super-exploited – including street vendors, spaza shop owners, farmworkers, domestic workers and the unemployed.

In the coming years, the Party needs more actively to take forward our experiments with different forms of grass-roots organisation. The fluid restructuring of the working class means that we need to be extremely creative with both residential and work-place based organising.

If we are seriously to take forward the Party’s struggle against patriarchy, we need to extend our overall recruitment of women cadres. We need to ensure that our organisational work, and basic Party life is conducive to, and meaningful for women cadres. This means paying particular attention to the character of meetings, the style of discussion and debate, the development of male cadres, ensuring that they, too, are gender conscious.

Further attention needs to be given to our relationship to various other class and social forces in society – including the youth, intellectuals and cultural workers, black professionals and small business-people and emerging black sections of the bourgeoisie. Neither should we rule out engagement with traditional leaders, something that is happening with some positive impact in certain provinces. Our ideological orientation and many of our campaigns, like the financial sector campaign, strike a chord with a wide range of class forces and strata, and we need to build on this.

In order to unite the working class as a whole we need targeted recruitment into the informal and super-exploited sections of the working class, including street vendors, spaza shop owners, farmworkers, and domestic workers, including the unemployed. The informalised sector is increasingly made up of women, which requires a strategy that combines organising around both immediate economic issues as well as empowerment of women. It is critical that over the next four years particular attention be focused on these sections of the working class, as part of our overall responsibility to unite the working class as a whole.

Our experience of the last few years confirms powerfully what we have always known. Party-building and recruitment are closely connected to mass campaigning and mobilisation. The biggest percentage growth in Party membership, since our last Congress in 1998, was between October 2000 and the end of 2001 – clearly related to our Red October financial sector campaign.

At the end of the day, our principal organisational watch-word must be: "WITH AND FOR…THE WORKERS AND THE POOR’.

The challenge of answerability to the Party for communists deployed in other structures

The SACP is very proud that thousands of communists serve in many leading positions in government, in legislatures, in local councils, in parastatals, in trade unions, in the ANC, in social movements, in NGOs, and in various social institutions. Activism by our members in the work of government, our mass organisations, and our communities is a critical communist task.

At all times, communists must be loyal and exemplary members of these various formations. Communists must not act in high-handed, or factionalising, or entryist ways. Insofar as they are acting under the discipline of these other formations, they are bound by the mandates and policies of these formations. Elected communist cadres in governmental executive and legislature structures are, without exception, all elected as ANC members. The SACP has deliberately and consistently thrown its full weight behind the ANC electoral platform and campaigns.

It is, however, also important to ensure that elected communists in government and legislatures, and that communists in other deployments, always act in a manner that is not fundamentally contrary to Party principles and general policies – even though the immediate mandate is not that of the SACP. It is also important that communists seek to influence the broad perspectives of government and of other allied formations, without being manipulative. This is not always an easy challenge, but it is a critical communist task.

We believe that there are at least two important ways in which we should seek to meet this challenge:

• In the first place, the Party must, to the best of its ability, greatly
  enhance its own policy-development and evaluation capacity, especially in
  areas of strategic importance to the SACP and its core constituency. The
  sense of general accountability to the Party by those deployed outside of
  the Party is sometimes weakened by the inability of the Party to provide
  helpful strategic orientation.

• However, the Party will only consolidate and deepen this capacity if,
  at the same time, all Party members, irrespective of their other deployments,
  fully participate in the inner life of the Party, including in the implementation
  of its programmes.

Consolidating financial sustainability

Over the last several years, the SACP has made major strides, particularly through our Debit Order campaign, in building a basis for effective financial sustainability.

This remains one of the most challenging questions facing the SACP. Financial sustainability is essential for the implementation of our strategic objectives and programmes, and for improving our capacity for tactical flexibility.

We need to use the next four years to attain financial sustainability, improving,
in particular, the capacity of Party structures at all levels to raise funds.
The more the Party is reliant on our own mass-base, the more we are able to
fulfil our strategic watch-word: "WITH AND FOR…THE WORKERS AND THE POOR"

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