As the South African Communist Party prepares for its 'Conference of the Left', the inclusion of right-wing populist formations raises critical questions about the future of socialism in South Africa.
Image: Conference Of The Left
The conference of the left, in its current conceptualisation, shows signs of not being the success its conceptualisers would like.
The concept paper repeatedly talks of the concentration of resources but refuses to mention whose hands those resources are concentrated in. However, some of the arguments put forward against the conference are equally odd.
SAFTU, for example, focuses its attention on the fact that the SACP has been instrumental in the implementation of the neoliberal agenda of the past 30 years. But this line of argument is quite weird.
Many workers' trade unions have been instrumental in this current malaise. NUM, for example, has produced no less than three SGs of the ANC, two of which ended up at the Union Buildings. COSATU and its affiliated unions are implicated, as were many of the SAFTU unions when they were still in COSATU. By SAFTU's logic in rebutting the conference, they would equally reject a conference called by COSATU workers. In our collective majority in South Africa, are implicated to differing degrees.
The NUMSA shopsteward, who was not a minister in the ANC government, and knowing the dangers of the neoliberal policies of the ANC, and yet, without fail, continued to use workers' resources to campaign for the ANC, is implicated just as the leadership of the SACP that stayed silent in the alliance for all this long. But it would seem odd, would it, if a conference of the left, called by unions that are currently, or at some point were, affiliated with COSATU, is rejected on the basis that they supported the Neoliberal framework for too long.
Shouldn't the simple fact that they have now seen the light be the focus? Surely, SAFTU doesn't reject membership in unions formerly associated with COSATU on the grounds that they supported the neoliberal framework for too long. Another odd rebuttal was the one penned by comrade Brian Ashley and comrade Jeff Rudin. They complain that the concept paper does not name capital as a problem. Yet they are equally silent on the problem of colonialism as racism.
There is a general anxiety in the paper to mention the 'white' elephant in the room. And there is again the typical Rochester Road Marxism of always trying to focus attention on the so-called black elite. While the paper has no problem at all at mentioning how the 'black' elite just wants to get rich, it never once mentions the concentration of wealth in white hands. The paper mentions the black elite at least twice, yet not once is white a word that is used, even in relation to the land question. On the land question, the paper calls for qualified redistribution of underutilised land. Again, land is just reduced to an economic tool.
Lindokuhle Patiwe, Cape Town-based social justice activist