THE strategic alliance between the African National Congress (ANC), South African Communist Party (SACP) and Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) will break under one of two conditions, or a combination of the two.
First, the split will occur when the tasks of the national democratic revolution are complete — that is, when the fundamental goals set during the liberation struggle have been attained. Second, the break will occur when contradictions, ideological and otherwise, between the different components of the alliance have become so antagonistic that continuing with the arrangement has become untenable.
The challenge facing the tripartite alliance in our post-apartheid setting is twofold. The most immediate of the two challenges lies in the multiclass character of the ANC. The second is a consequence of the understanding that the transition to socialism is not linear in character and content. This means that conditions for a transition to socialism must be created in the belly of the domestic and global reality of capitalism.
In other words, struggles for socialism are not going to wait for either the demise of capitalism, or the completion of the tasks of the national democratic revolution. And therein lies the problem.
Since the creation of a socialist society is not the historical function of the ANC, how should the ruling party and its left allies engage with policy options that take into account the multiclass character of the ANC if the policy choices of an ANC government are deemed detrimental to the interests of the working class? When the ANC claims the working class as a key force for social, political and economic change, how should this be reconciled with its multiclass character and the contention that the ANC has a bias towards the poor and the working class?
Are the ANC and the alliance the best tools for the mediation of class conflict and contradictions, or should the alliance be reconfigured in a manner that seeks to resolve these contradictions and conflicts through democratic electoral contests? Should a ruling party with an electoral mandate fight policy battles in an alliance that consists of entities that have no such mandate, and should the SACP and Cosatu continue giving electoral support to a ruling party whose policy orientation will, at times, be a product of the dominant position of so-called class enemies of the working class in society and the ANC?
I suspect that Buti Manamela of the Young Communist League (YCL) has been mulling over these questions, hence his statement the other day that in future congresses of the SACP, the YCL will seek to convince its parent body to contest elections independently. The parents , as you know, have argued consistently that the SACP is not a narrow electoral machine. That is precisely the point. Manamela wants the SACP to be a broad electoral machine.
The difference in opinion between the SACP and the YCL on this question suggests the possibility of a third condition under which the alliance may split — that is, this may one day happen when generational pressures within both the ANC and the SACP force the two parties to go their separate ways. We must remember that the desire of young communists for electoral independence is probably shared by the ANC’s young Turks, who see in these communists nothing but a career-limiting nuisance.
Seriously, though, the position of the young communists is informed by the meagre policy returns in relation to the energy investments made by the left in policy battles with the ANC. It appears that the returns are disappointing also to the extent that the juice of the fruit of support for the presidential ambitions of seems to drip more down the cheeks of the “class enemies” of workers who toiled for Zuma’s political and electoral victories.
The irony is that within the ANC many are convinced the left has stolen the fruit bowl of the ruling party. Unfortunately for Manamela, the older generation in the SACP is in no mood to abandon the benefits of riding in the ANC’s election cart.
- Matshiqi is a senior research associate at the Centre for Policy Studies.