Spectator's Journal / Red Hills of Africa
Radosh, Ronald
When State President F. W. de Klerk pushed through his referendum on ending apartheid last March, he strengthened his support among the 40 percent of whites who back him, and struck a blow against a...
...Joining them is a small group of New Leftists, like student leader Jonny Steinberg, who favors multi-party democracy and pluralism...
...This interim government will be one in which "the ANC must have real authority...
...That may have been true at one point, but as Richard L. Sklar, former president of the African Studies Association, writes in Dissent, the party has rejected "a fundamental ideological shift from Leninism to democratic socialism," and as a result, virtually no left force in South Africa "upholds [democratic] socialism as an ideal...
...Yet Slovo had not adequately responded, since, as Jordan put it, "it is not sufficient for the SACP to say 'terrible things happened.— Socialism could be democratic but it had developed "in an authoritarian and totalitarian fashion...
...Business Day, South Africa's Wall Street Journal, regularly prints the views of Communist leaders alongside those of corporate CEOs...
...Their literature seemed inspired less by Karl Marx than by Michael Harrington, and they seemed to have forgotten what the Bolsheviks' view of a Constituent Assembly was in 1918...
...But he also cited the Marxist heretic Rosa Luxemburg's polemic against Lenin: that freedom had to mean freedom for those against the government and for those who thought differently...
...But with Communism fallen and apartheid falling, why should we care that a powerful Communist party still holds forth in South Africa...
...While the Slovo center of the SACP sees an interim government as the only way forward, the hardliners do not...
...The SACP would plant "the first building blocks" of socialism during the first free government, Chris Hani assures us...
...Gwala, a party chief in Natal, declared that Lenin had answered all basic political questions almost ninety years ago—and he warned his comrades of the dangers of Browderism, Menshevism, and Titoism...
...Humanitarian Communists, The American Spectator September 1992 45 they say, would not make the same mistakes...
...In June, after scores of killings of Zulus by ANC sympathizers in townships, Zulu-speaking raiders rampaged through a migrant hostel in Boipatong, shooting and hacking to death forty-two squatters...
...Typical is the recent action following the the Boipatong massacre in which SACP chief Chris Hani led 40,000 members of the party-controlled National Union of Metalworkers singing and toyitoying through downtown Johannesburg...
...In particular, the SACP didn't have to applaud the Prague Spring of 1968 or the Jaruzelski coup against Solidarity in 1981...
...Slovo has downplayed talk of nationalization, and had stated publicly that only a mixed economy can guarantee economic growth...
...Does the SACP have a future...
...T he toughest campaign waged against the SACP comes from within the ANC leadership, in the form of a determined attack waged by the ANC's dynamic minister of communications, Pallo Jordan, who lived for decades in exile in London and other Western capitals...
...At the time of civil war in 1918, he argued, Lenin was correct to oppose Luxemburg...
...According to Cronin, the models for South Africa's future are Cuba and Vietnam—whose revolutions, he says, were indigenous revolts in which these nations moved from campaigns for national liberation to a second stage of social revolution...
...You cannot let us down...
...Indeed, according to Thomas Lodge of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, by the end of the eighties, the party had recruited scores of top trade union leaders...
...Opposing these hardliners are middle-aged Marxist-Leninists who believe Stalinism and bureaucracy destroyed "true socialism...
...A self-styled elitist group with secret membership, the SACP has maneuvered for control of the ANC for years...
...The PLO's example, he said, was the one he hoped the SACP would emulate...
...In case there is confusion, Slovo explains that the SACP has already won its place "as a vanguard force by superior efforts of leadership and devotion to the cause of liberation...
...Slovo created a storm with his 1990 essay, "Has Socialism Failed...
...In the new South Africa, the once-underground Communist party (SACP) has become legal and is in the midst of a reRonald Radosh, professor emeritus of history at the City University of New York, is co-author of The Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth and a staff member of the American Federation of Teachers...
...hence their invincible alliance...
...At present, the SACP is hanging on, and there is no clue that its influence or control of the ANC is waning...
...Long live the Cuban Revolution...
...Under Slovo's helm, the SACP proclaimed a new banner—towards "democratic socialism...
...If Lenin's approach is affirmed, Steinberg argues, the SACP will end up "reproducing the Stalinist legacy...
...A re- spected political scientist at the University of Cape Town, David Welsh, notes its strong support in the unions, among radicalized black youth in the townships, and in intellectual circles...
...Mandela has not yet commented on Hani's vision, although even he hails Castro as an ally...
...Having sacrificed much of his life for the movement—along with his wife, who was killed in exile by a letter-bomb—Slovo enjoys considerable prestige...
...Calling for a "new terrain of struggle," the SACP leaders accuse the ANC of failing to exploit the "crisis of the regime" that caused de Klerk to move against apartheid, and of accepting unnecessary compromises: "[To gain] a transfer of power to the people, we need to see mass struggle as a permanent feature of South African life...
...The answer is put 44 The American Spectator September 1992 succinctly by the leading Western scholar of South African Communism, Heribert Adam of Simon Fraser University: "Because SACP members are the major force that dominates the theoretical debates and strategies within the broad apartheid opposition, its own practice of [or lack of) internal democracy influences the style of the entire movement...
...Thus, they call for an interim government with "real powers"—e.g., "a new people's army and people's police force," along with a state-controlled press...
...part of the process of transfer of power to the people...
...Hani recently praised the PLO for leading the way via the Intifada, even though it had not succeeded in gaining territory or capturing power, like Castro in Cuba or the North Vietnamese in Saigon...
...Socialism, he says, "does not become less [scientific] because of some malpractices...
...Slovo nonetheless reaffirmed his belief in "the future of socialism," holding that an "ideological offensive" by capitalists against socialism had to be challenged, and condemning "unilateral ideological disarmament," by which he meant the conclusion of American economist Robert Heilbroner and others on the left that democratic capitalism in practice had proved itself superior to all socialism...
...Jordan is obviously highly influenced by libertarian elements of the British New Left, as well as by his time in the early 1960s at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he first made contact with Communists, Marxists, and independent leftists...
...Party membership has quintupled since 1989 to 25,000, and most of the new members are 25-to-30-year old militants from the township underclass—"street Jacobins of the 1970s ghetto revolts," to use Lodge's phrase...
...in which he admitted that what destroyed East European socialism (the USSR was still intact) was the revolt of the population against regimes whose anti-democratic legacy had destroyed socialism's appeal...
...By identifying that system with socialism, the Communists had in fact discredited socialism...
...He was until 1990 the party's secretary-general, and once led Spear of the Nation (MK), its military-wing-in-exile...
...the ANC and the SACP still espouse nationalization, and take every opportunity to point out that Mandela speaks only for himself...
...Leading this group is Jeremy Cronin, whom Business Day wrote was "fast becoming the most prolific party theorist in town...
...Hani stresses that any new parliament and government "must reflectthe input of COSATU and the party...
...T aking over the top office was Chris Hani, a hardline militant whose base was in the MK...
...cruiting drive...
...In a long article published in the South African magazine Transformation, Jordan proclaimed that Slovo had given no coherent explanation for what had gone wrong with socialism: he had merely "identified the symptoms of the illness but not its basic cause...
...Slovo admitted that their own policies had "discredited the cause of socialism," and that the only way forward was "thoroughgoing democratic socialism...
...These debates go beyond internecine quarreling: the future society envisioned by the ANC leaders depends on their outcome...
...Indeed, Slovo claimed that "the theory of Marxism . . . remains valid," as did the Leninist concept of "dictatorship of the proletariat...
...He had not asked Slovo to "leave the Marxist tradition," he wrote, but he had confronted him with "a long tradition of Marxist opposition to Stalinism...
...When State President F. W. de Klerk pushed through his referendum on ending apartheid last March, he strengthened his support among the 40 percent of whites who back him, and struck a blow against a resurgent Afrikaner Conservative party...
...And public opinion polls among blacks indicate most are ready to support the SACP program of full nationalization...
...But Slovo quickly backtracked...
...When, precisely, critics asked, and who decides when that moment has arrived...
...F or decades, the SACP—perhaps with only the French and American Communists as competition—was the most Stalinist of all the European Communist parties...
...Both de Klerk and Nelson Mandela had to tread a thin line between enraging hardline Afrikaners and alienating the anti-apartheid movement, but it appeared that the African National Congress, in meeting with those it once condemned as racists, had finally recognized the de Klerk government as a legitimate body...
...And on the two central issues facing the new South Africa—the economy and the political system—the recent SACP Congress gives little ground for hope...
...The SACP would not want to run agriculture and education...
...But in the modern world, socialism could not be built if it opposed democracy...
...The problem, according to Pallo Jordan, is that the tensions within his country "could cause us to move in a Stalinist one-party direction...
...At the recent SACP Congress, Slovo and his moderates found themselves out a power...
...according to the SACP majority, socialism is inherently democratic...
...Upon taking power, the SACP hopes to lay the foundation for a revived Communist International, in which a wealthy South Africa could provide the aid to save Castro's revolution...
...Hani toured the U.S...
...Militants appeared wearing new T-shirts: "SACP Demands an Elected Non-Racial Constituent Assembly . . . Forward to Democratic Socialism...
...Far better to share power at first with moderate whites, and thereby avoid blame for a failure to come up with quick solutions...
...And since the ANC is controlled by the SACP, one cannot imagine a situation in which they would suddenly take away their endorsement...
...Central Committee members such as Brian Bunting, Govan Mbeki, Harry Gwala, and Mac Maharaj realized that it was impossible to defend Leninism while calling for programs that would undermine it...
...Of course, it was all going too smoothly...
...Jordan followed up with a short piece in the Johannesburg Sunday Times...
...No longer is the party journal printed in a false cover (in 1988 it was called the Good Food Guide, in 1989 Landscape Gardening...
...You are our demonstration that Communist parties and socialism are historically relevant," Davis told them...
...To read their internal debates was to be swirled back to the 1930s and '40s...
...Coming to the party from the COSATU trade union movement, whose former head Cyril Ramaphosa recently took over leadership of the ANC, this group would subordinate the party to workers' interests...
...Slovo was stacking his deck: the ANC has consistently stated that the SACP's vanguard status has been truly earned in struggle...
...Party propaganda still calls the de Klerk government an "illegitimate regime," and the SACP accuses the State President of trying td protect "the accumulated privileges of whites...
...Without democracy, he warned, Communists could institute "a political tyranny over the whole of society...
...The Communists control three-quarters of the ANC's 35-man National Executive Committee, and the party controls major posts in the ANC's policy-making divisions, including the offices of the president general, the secretary-general, and the treasurer-general...
...At the January 1991 SACP Party Congress, the first held openly in South Africa, the comrades deleted all Slovo's references to "democratic socialism" from the party's program...
...All SACP members are members of the ANC...
...The SACP's political culture has "produced a spirit of intolerance, petty intellectual thuggery and political dissembling...
...There may be moments in the life of a revolution," he wrote, "which justify postponement of full democratic processes...
...In all Communist parties, Jordan noted, those who sought to explore reality had been branded traitors and spies, and then framed up and executed...
...ANC candidates would have to guarantee party members a percentage of spots...
...Any regular reader of SACP publications," Jordan wrote, "can point to a persistent pattern of praise and supportfor every violation of freedom perpetrated by the Soviet leadership, both before and after the death of Stalin...
...One can find the African Communist or Umsebenzi at local newsstands, and the latter is now published within the country—not in East Germany...
...Cronin condemns the idea of a mix as "reformist" and "social democratic...
...His answer was to look anew at Bukharin and particularly Trotsky for Marxist alternatives to Stalinism, in order "to rediscover the true meaning of [Communism...
...But he stresses that its viability rests, ultimately, on its close ties with the ANC, and he thinks that these will wither as the ANC grows in strength...
...The SACP views CODESA not as an arena of constitutional negotiation but as a "site of struggle," forthrightly calling for "seizure and control of state power through a series of incremental steps...
...On the contrary, the ties with the unions have increased with the election of scores of COSATU activists to party leadership...
...How ironic that asCommunism collapses everywhere, the former liberation movement of that nation's blacks is poised to implement a Marxist economic system within their nation, threatening to erode the basis of freedom and prosperity on which a new South Africa could be built...
...At a November J991 press conference, Hani announced a campaign of support for Cuba, a campaign that originated with the effort begun by their American Communist allies...
...Rejecting bureaucratic state control along Soviet lines, Slovo favors public control through participation by producers at all levels—what the German social democrats call co-determination...
...It supported the crushing of Solidarity, the war in Afghanistan, and the complete suppression of Soviet dissidents...
...The practice of "necklacing," favored by ANC "Comrades" and once endorsed by Winnie Mandela, continues unabated...
...In their lexicon, interimgovernment is a Popular Front phase in which party control is cemented, and after which the dictatorship of the proletariat begins...
...Mandela has stated that the ANC favors a mixed economy, and that the new government will honor foreign debts incurred by the de Klerk regime, but the new ANC secretary-general, Cyril Ramaphosa—who refused to allow party leaders within the ANC to proclaim their identities—has repudiated Mandela on the debt repayment issue...
...Indeed, the current American left campaign to end the embargo on Cuba and to promote sympathy for Castro stems from a little known alliance forged between the American Communists and the SACP hardliners...
...rather, they would "be looking at areas like policing, broadcasting...
...So much for the experience of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe...
...Their aim is to wage a series of immobilizing and demoralizing strikes until government passes over to the Communists and their allies...
...The Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODE-SA), made up of all political parties, now has a mandate to establish a new constitution and create an interim government...
...Jordan held out the gauntlet: the SACP's Stalinist credentials are too well known for anyone to think that it has changed...
...Last year he appeared at Castro's side in Havana, yelling: "Long live Fidel Castro...
...Indeed, the hardline Stalinist Harry Gwala, an ANC official in Natal, recently told the press, "We will kill Inkatha warlords," hardly a prescription for peace and order in the townships...
...He argues that the pressure of events will push the SACP towards social democracy, that it will evolve into merely another contender for political influence in a functioning democracy...
...Such a program amounts essentially to a social-democratic welfare state with a strong private sector, but those who saw some hope in it were to be disappointed...
...The answer, of course, is the SACP, still proclaimed the "vanguard" of social change in South Africa—although Slovo says the party must "earn" the credit of vanguard, not merely proclaim it...
...The respected British newsletter Africa Confidential said two years back that the SACP's "popularity is at an all-time high in the South African townships," and called the SACP and the ANC "one body with two heads...
...under CPUSA auspices in May 1991, and in August, CPUSA National 46 The American Spectator September 1992 Committee members Angela Davis and Charlene Mitchell visited South Africa as the SACP's guests...
...Americans sympathetic to Mandela prefer to ignore that the SACP has cemented its "people's alliance" with the ANC...
...Slovo finally responded this past February by pointing out that the opponents of Stalinism cited by Jordan had themselves helped lay the foundations of totalitarianism: Trotsky, for example favored trade unions' becoming little more than a wing of the state apparatus, and in the 1920s attacked the Worker's Opposition for making "a fetish of democratic principles...
...The party and the ANC still talk about the necessity of exploring moves towards nationalization when the new government assumes power...
...The first hints at a revisionism came from Joe Slovo, long considered the "voice of South African Communism...
...A third group—the soi-disant "democratic socialists"—supports Slovo, but goes even further...
...A secret document meant for the SACP's internal leadership, written this past June 20, accuses Nelson Mandela and the ANC leadership of "suffocating" the mass struggle, and of acting as if they were a regular party preparing for an electoral triumph...
...Moreover, the ANC seemed to realize that its cadres were hardly ready to to govern a country rampant with violence and economic trouble...
Vol. 25 • September 1992 • No. 9
