Steven Friedman, Business Day
THERE was a time when the
South African Communist Party (SACP) terrified supporters of a market economy.
Today, it is more likely to frighten the left.
By expelling the National
Union of Metalworkers of SA (Numsa), the Congress of South African Trade
Unions’s (Cosatu’s) central executive committee seems to have slapped the
African National Congress (ANC) in the face: it ignored the appeal by its task
team, led by Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa, for unity.
This raises obvious
questions about how much influence the governing party has in Cosatu. But it is
also puzzling. The unions that ignored the ANC task team wanted Numsa out
mainly because it refuses to back the ANC. So if these unions’ leaders are that
loyal to the ANC, why did they not heed its call for unity?
One explanation is that,
despite the pious words in its task team report, the ANC leadership wanted
Numsa out. But why then invest months of energy in trying to prevent the
showdown in Cosatu? Surely because ANC leaders may have given up on Numsa but
they know that its expulsion could trigger a split in Cosatu, which would
weaken a key ally?
A more likely reason is
that the ANC alliance is split on whether Numsa should stay in Cosatu — and
that the push to get rid of it came from within the ANC’s other ally, the SACP.
As tension within Cosatu
grew, the SACP consistently attacked Numsa’s leaders, urging its members to
reject them. While it has issued statements denying that it was behind
divisions in Cosatu (despite the fact that it was not publicly accused of
this), it has remained loudly hostile to Numsa, in sharp contrast to the ANC’s
calls for unity. It has influence in Cosatu — the union leaders who have been
most anxious to push Numsa out are vocal SACP supporters. So, if the SACP is
not behind Numsa’s expulsion, it has helped create the climate that made it
possible.
Why would the SACP want a
vocal left-wing union thrown out of Cosatu? Because, some on the left argue,
like the rest of the ANC alliance, it is more interested in participating in
business than challenging it, despite the recent release of an SACP document
that wants policy to move left. It wants the left out of Cosatu, the argument
goes, because it stands in the way of this cosy government-business club.
The SACP’s history
suggests a likelier explanation — that it fears, and is hostile to, anyone on
the left who thinks independently. Numsa is the union in which
"workerists" — unionists who believe unions should be independent of
the ANC and its allies — have been most active. The SACP is threatened by
"workerism" because it challenges its alliance with the ANC.
It also seems likely that
the SACP is zealously enforcing obedience to the ANC leadership. Since the
ANC’s 2007 conference, it has been a loyal ally of the leadership — defending
it has been much more of a priority than pushing for left policies. While it
likes to claim that it has moved ANC policy leftward, its examples are
unconvincing. A few years ago, activist and academic Mazibuko Jara was expelled
from the SACP partly for writing that its flag should be "deepest red, not
JZ". He complained that the party seemed more interested in championing
President Jacob Zuma than in working for left goals. The years since have confirmed
this.
Some see this as a sign
that the SACP leadership has "sold out" to the ANC’s leaders. But the
SACP is remaining remarkably true to its history.
During the fight against
apartheid, it was very effective in getting its members into senior ANC posts —
shortly before the ANC was unbanned in 1990, virtually all its leaders were
SACP members. But this had little effect on ANC policy. Its failure to move the
ANC left was hidden in the "struggle" period by militant slogans —
and the fact that the ANC did not have an economic policy.
When that policy emerged,
it showed that the ANC was a nationalist movement that wanted to end minority
racial control of business, not a socialist organisation championing workers
and the poor: former president Thabo Mbeki once reminded the SACP that the ANC
was not and never would be socialist.
The SACP may have
tolerated market economics to stay in the ANC alliance — but not other views on
the left. For decades, it was the most uncritically pro-Soviet party in the
world: it did not tolerate even mild left criticism of its policies and
programme.
The fall of the Soviet
system and the advent of democracy here seemed to have persuaded the SACP to
live with democracy. But it grew no more tolerant of those on the left who disagreed,
hence the expulsion of Mr Jara and others. Its attitude to Numsa suggests that
it still sees those on the left who differ as enemies to be defeated, not
critics to be debated. And so Cosatu leaders’ decision to throw out its largest
union may owe something to the SACP’s desire to silence other voices on the
left.
It is not the market that
need worry about the SACP — it is democracy.
