Sacp Documents Pdf

[Evangeline Mellon]

Thispage has been created to facilitate document sharing during the development of the area contingency plan. Any final official plan documents will be posted at the Region 8 Regional Response Team website in the Links section. All documents on this site should be considered draft/in progress.

The document that follows is in two parts, and it forms the basis for discussions both inside and outside the SACP on the relationship of the SACP to state power in a democratic South Africa. These documents are official Central Committee Discussion Documents, but they do not constitute the official views of the SACP.

In discussing this SNC resolution, the Central Committee felt that the best way to guide and conduct this debate must be through a structured discussion document, and this is what this special edition of Bua Komanisi contains. This document has been developed and approved by the Central Committee to facilitate such a discussion.

The key questions through which the Commission will be engaging all these formations, which are also the questions we would like to use in approaching this discussion systematically, include the following:

Part I of the Discussion Document broadly deals with the historical evolution and current status of the relationship between the SACP and the ANC, within the context of the three main contradictions that the national democratic revolution seeks to address, the class, national and gender contradictions. It aims to elicit discussions on the changing nature of this relationship, lessons that can be learnt out of it and the challenges in the immediate future.

Part II of the Discussion Document characterizes the kind of state we have built thus far since 1994, within the context of the evolving class struggles since the 1994 democratic breakthrough. This part ends by posing some very specific questions on some of the options facing the SACP on its relationship to state power and its electoral options.

We invite all our structures, our allies and other allied formations and fraternal organisations to engage with this Discussion Document and give us their frank and honest feedback, as part of answering the question of the relationship of the SACP to state power and its future electoral options. The SACP will also consciously seek to create numerous platforms for engagement with this Document and the questions under discussion.

The history of the SACP in South Africa can be captured, simultaneously if not principally, as the history of the relationship between national and class struggles in our country. It is a history of a struggle for socialism in a context where the immediate struggle is that of national liberation.

These two sets of things are not identical. National and class struggles are always taking place whether consciously or otherwise in any struggle for liberation and independence. But the achievement of formal national liberation and independence may occur without a simultaneous or rapid transition to socialism. The distinction and relationship within and between these two sets of relationships have been a subject of decades of debates within Marxism-Leninism. They are, perhaps, one of the key defining features of Marxism-Leninism in the era of imperialist colonial domination and exploitation.

For further conceptual clarification, the relationships outlined above are not reducible to the relationship between the ANC and SACP, though it could be argued that the dominant organisational expression of these relationships for most of 20th century South Africa was through the alliance and the relationship between these two formations.

Clearly the relationship between national democracy and the transition to socialism is seen as being incorporated in the implementation of the demands of the Freedom Charter. The 1962 programme further conceptualises this relationship in its economic development proposals thus:

The Party had also understood that the main organisational vehicle to achieve the goals of these shared political perspectives beyond just the NDR, was the Alliance, primarily between the ANC and the SACP. During the underground period these shared perspectives evolved into a deeper relationship and conscious collaboration between communists, the ANC, and MK, with communists occupying prominent and leading positions in the latter two formations.

These events, often experienced directly by ANC and SACP cadres in exile, naturally had a profound ideological impact on our movement. As the ANC moved towards assuming state power, the leading cadreship within the ANC (and SACP) were faced with a basic choice:

Contrary to some of the historical accounts of the SACP response to this rebellion, the SACP identified with the rebellion, but at the same time distanced itself from the slogan and its content, calling instead for unity between black and white mineworkers. But the aftermath of this strike was to cause a sometimes acrimonious debate within the ranks of the Party for some years to come. It was a debate that at some stage led to some of the Party leaders calling for separate trade union organisation for black and white workers as the best way to respond to the separate national expression of the class struggle at the time.

It was therefore no accident that by 1924 the membership of the Party was more than 90% black African, though senior leadership positions were still dominated by whites. The increasing orientation of the Party towards the African majority, plus the intervention of the Comintern, was ultimately to find expression in the adoption of the Native Republic Thesis in 1928, which called for the establishment of a native republic as a stage towards a socialist republic. The resolution further enjoined the Party to work closely with the ANC, an African organisation identified at the time as having the most potential to become a revolutionary nationalist organisation.

All the above marked a contradictory expression between the class and the national question. Resistance (often of a relatively conservative liberal variety) in some quarters of the ANC to working with the SACP continued through the 1940s. In the late-1940s a more radical Africanist anti-communism was articulated by an emerging group of youth leaders, including Anton Lembede, Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo, who in 1949 worked together to form the ANC Youth League.

However the ever persistent simultaneous problematic and necessity of the articulation of the class and national struggles in our revolution, as expressed through the relationship between the ANC and the SACP, manifested itself during the 1950s. The then banned CPSA resuscitated itself underground in 1953 as the SACP. After this resuscitation there was an extensive and fractious debate inside the underground SACP on whether to publicly announce its resuscitation, whose resolution was partly achieved only in 1959.

There were two, fairly entrenched, positions on this matter between 1953 and 1959. The one position argued that the SACP should defiantly announce its resuscitation as an underground organisation, partly to express defiance to the banning by the apartheid regime, but most critically to rebuild the confidence of the membership and supporters of the communist party amongst the people. The other position strenuously opposed this on the grounds that this would affect the smooth functioning of communists in other organisations that were legal then, principally the ANC. This position argued that the standing and respect for communist leaders working in other organisations could be compromised as their arguments and positions could be seen as positions canvassed and secretly caucused in the underground SACP structures. It is even rumoured that one of the secret Central Committee meetings immediately after the rebuilding of the Party underground took a majority decision to publicly announce the existence of the Party, but refrained after Kotane and Dadoo, respectively General Secretary and Chairperson threatened to resign as they were adherents of the second position.

This debate in Robben Island was partly occasioned by reluctance by some of the leadership to permit the establishment of Party cells, as these were seen as having the potential of dividing the energies of the movement, instead of focusing on building the ANC as the leading national liberation movement. This debate also arose within the context of the intake of greater numbers of young black prisoners in the wake of the 1976 student uprisings and intensified mass struggles into the 1980s. The trigger seems to have been around what type of political education should be conducted in the Island, a re-telling of the history of the ANC or Marxism or both.

Although a detailed study and debate about the SACP during the thirty years of its joint underground and exile with the ANC is still urgently needed, it is important to highlight briefly some of the aspects of the articulation and relationship between the national and class struggles, and consequently the relationship between the ANC and SACP during this period, 1960-1990. Two critical periods propelled the rebuilding of the SACP underground structures and its aggressive public stance as an independent party in its own right, though within the alliance.

The first period was the huge intake of young activists into the exile, underground and prison structures of the movement in the wake of the 1976 student uprisings. These were militant young cadres, many strongly influenced by Black Consciousness. The movement identified the need for intense political education to harness the militancy of this generation to the ideological traditions of the ANC alliance. At this time the hegemonic ideology inside the (exiled) ANC was Marxism-Leninism. This ideological hegemony was typical of many radical national liberation movements of the time, but it also reflected the influence of the SACP and of the Soviet Union. These combined realities led to the easing up on the part of the ANC on the creation of SACP underground structures, though this matter had been partly resolved already in the late 1960s. In addition many of these students were sent for both military and political training to the Soviet Union, Cuba and other socialist countries that were firmly supporting the ANC.

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