In his examination of why nine non-ruling European communist parties, with meagre results at the polls, continue to have sporadic participation in multi-party governing coalitions, Sidney Tarrow suggests that fear of being absent during a perceived period of crisis drives strategies for participation, often in a multi-party, left coalition. 

He concludes that efforts to avoid isolation causes them to actively or passively support moderate policies and to form alliances with normally anti-communist elements. 

And while such communist parties may have the theoretical and practical acumen to themselves take a country out of a crisis, they may also lack the courage or capacity to take the reins of political power, or believe that the balance of forces don’t allow them to do so on their own. 

In South Africa, the historical and ideological roots to the political cooperation between the ANC, Cosatu, the SACP and the SA National Civic Organisation (Sanco) led to their alliance in the post-1990 dispensation. 

Ahead of the first national democratic elections in 1994, the ANC sought organisational skills, material support, membership and electoral support  from the alliance partners. For their part, Cosatu and Sanco needed  a political organisation that could win elections, hold political power and advance a progressive agenda that would safeguard labour and civil society interests in Parliament. 

The ANC also needed to enlist seasoned strategists, tacticians, organisers and campaigners from its alliance partners. Its electoral prospects depended highly on the constituencies of its alliance partners. And, importantly, the SACP did not have enough popular support to be a political force on its own in parliamentary politics.

The SACP did foresee the challenge of mediating and harmonising the ANC’s multi-class and centrist politics with its own professed working-class and leftist politics. 

It opted to rely on the notion that swelling the ranks of the ANC would enable it to populate ANC spaces and platforms with communist ideas. 

It also opted to intensify efforts to influence the political positions of Cosatu unions and education and research labour service organisations; to deploy some of its seasoned cadres to take up leadership positions within Cosatu; to lobby for leading SACP, Cosatu and Sanco activists to have representation in the parliamentary and ministerial lists of the ANC, and to push for extensive consultation with alliance partners on significant policy and programmatic issues of both the ANC and the government. 

Brain drain

The unintended consequence of this strategy was a brain drain, as seasoned leaders and activists moved into government. 

This also created difficulty where these members found themselves bound by the oath of office and ANC processes, compelling them to implement ANC policies and programmes – even those at odds with their own personal values and the principles of Cosatu, the SACP and Sanco. 

This arrangement also created a challenge of political careerism where positions of leadership and influence within Cosatu, the SACP and Sanco became social currency and a stepping stone to deployment into government, or business with the government. 

For the ANC, the strategy hit three birds with one stone: the party would acquire the votes of the constituencies of its alliance partners; it would acquire the political and technical skills of the leadership and activists of the alliance partners, and it would co-opt them to implement neoliberal and neo-capitalist policies and programmes. 

Having alliance leaders deployed in government – or deployed to the business sector on an ANC ticket – reduces their capacity to deviate from ANC policies or to shape ANC social policy or political economy trajectory. 

When serious differences on policy arose, the ANC flexed its muscles, openly telling the alliance partners that if they want to pursue an alternative agenda, they must do so on their own. 

Mandela reads the riot act

It will be remembered how former president Nelson Mandela read the riot act to Cosatu at its own congress, asserting that Cosatu can’t dictate ANC policies. Mandela rebuffed Cosatu’s opposition to GEAR with a declaration that GEAR is and shall remain ANC policy. 

Another example is how former president Thabo Mbeki ejected SACP leading activist, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, from his executive for daring to challenge government policies. Mbeki remarked that, as a member of the executive, the minister was bound by the policies and programmes of the ruling party and she could not serve in the executive whilst criticising government policies. 

As these tensions grew, a 2006 SACP discussion document reaffirmed  its position that the chief instrument for achieving the goal of national democratic revolution (NDR) was a multi-class mass movement or liberation front, and that the ANC was such an instrument. 

The SACP’s participation therein would be to represent the working class, which should be the dominant force in the alliance – but the ANC was recognised as the leader of the alliance. 

The dilemma of how to assert the dominance of the working class and advance the revitalisation of the socialist project through government policies and programmes has always been a theoretical and practical quandary for the SACP.

In addition to asserting that socialism is not realisable in the immediate future, the SACP resolved to assume responsibility for “partial” power, and the possibilities for making its own contribution to the NDR while building momentum towards socialism.  

According to the SACP, this entails working to roll back the empire of the so-called free market and build confidence in the masses to take on the soulless secular religion of neoliberalism. 

SACP holds little power

The reality, however, is that the SACP does not have partial political power. It does not participate in the legislature and the executive, or any formal structures and processes of government and the state, on its own terms. 

It has access to political office, participation in government and discussions around the social policy and political economy of the country only at the behest of the ANC. 

It is ANC structures and processes that prevail. 

Thus far, other than episodic shadow-boxing with the ANC on policy issues and theatrical threats to delink from the alliance, there is not much that the SACP has shown to make its social and political agenda take root within the ANC and government spaces. 

In theory, the ANC’s broad church provides an open pulpit, but in reality, the centrist denomination is the ecumenical council.

A number of the top brass of the SACP are entrapped in full-time careers in politics (as MPs, ministers, MECs, mayors, councillors, MMCs etc) courtesy of the ANC, at risk of being ensnared in the ANC’s patronage system and unable to significantly raise a socialist/communist voice. 

It is noteworthy that the three people at the centre of the campaign to freeze the wages of workers in the public service and deny them an increase in the name of reducing the so-called bloated public service wage bill are former shop stewards, trade union leaders and erstwhile firebrand fighters against capitalist super-exploitation of labour: President Cyril Ramaphosa and ministers, Enoch Godongwana and Thulas Nxesi. 

On his appointment as minister of higher education, the very first pronouncement of former SACP general secretary and current national chairperson of the party, Dr Blade Nzimande, was that free tertiary university is not possible in the near future. 

And even when free education is possible, it will be a targeted provision directed solely at the poor, and not a blanket, free education for all. 

This is completely opposite to the universal provisioning of free and quality education that sincere communists, socialists and even social  democrats advocate. 

Repositioning

With its rich political history and the tremendous range of political skills, the SACP could innovatively reposition itself on the political stage. 

It could opt to contest elections on its own with the support of radical elements within Cosatu and Sanco, without ending its political collaboration with the ANC on common issues – even entering into a post-election pact with the ANC. 

The chances of the SACP tilting the ANC more to the left would be much higher if the two parties were in a political cooperation in which the SACP contests elections on its own. 

It would be easier for the SACP to place conditionalities for its political cooperation with the ANC. 

Furthermore, if the SACP contests elections on its own, but retains a political cooperation with the ANC in an electoral pact or as part of a coalition, it will not necessarily fall with the ANC when, ultimately, the majority of South Africans opt to ditch the ANC at the polls. 

The other alternative is for the SACP to seek collaborations or unity-in-action coalitions with progressive elements of the broader civic, social and labour movements, and the various green, socialist and  feminist organisations outside the congress movement. 

This should include active support of and participation in community and labour struggles. The SACP could play a pivotal role in uniting and mobilising the labour movement and in building a popular front to include movements such as the Bolsheviks Party of South Africa, the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party, Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front, the Workers International Vanguard Party, the Land Party, the Workers and Socialist Party, the Socialist Party of Azania, Abahlali baseMjondolo, Equal Education, the Poor People’s Alliance, the South African Unemployed Peoples’ Movement, Sikhula Sonke, the Treatment Action Campaign and the Socialist Group.  

Instead, the SACP often provides the terminology and ideological arguments for the ANC to rebuff labour and community struggles. A case in point is the blanket generalisation of civil society protests as the work of a faceless third force, or the so-called anarchist “ultra-left”. 

Held to ransom

The SACP’s fixed notion of the NDR and the ANC as the leader of society, or the disciplined centre of the left irrespective of its social policy or the trajectory of its political economy and service delivery performance, holds it to ransom. 

As a result, talks about reconfiguring the alliance or repositioning the SACP are confined to “modernising” or refurbishing its relationship with the ANC and related organisations.

It is in this sense that Yacoob Abba Omar likens the SACP’s position on reconfiguration of the alliance with sacrificing divorce for redecoration. It has not given serious thought to actively participating in the project of  building forms of people’s power beyond the ballot and the mechanics of the government. 

It hardly engages with the cooperative and solidarity economy movements or grassroots movements to experiment with cooperative, communal and social forms of production, distribution and consumption as a way  of building democracy and socialism from below.

The  ideology of the SACP does not prevent it from participating in parliamentary politics on its own. 

The decline in the electoral support of centrist and conservative parties, the steady electoral performance of the Economic Freedom Fighters, and the significant number of votes garnered by civic and social movements that have opted to contest elections on their own, indicate the appetite of the people for an alternative to mainstream political parties. 

There are many possibilities for the SACP to test and build its electoral strength in the local government sphere, which is effectively where the immediate and daily needs of communities can be addressed and where grassroots organisations can be engaged. 

The SACP has the political skills to engage in such a participation and use it to build the capacity, strength, support base and confidence for the eventual participation in general elections. 

Perhaps leadership of  the party believes that the loss of whatever social and political currency or mileage that it derives from its association with the ANC surpasses the possible political gains of contesting elections on its own. 

However, a revolutionary party cannot afford to be in a comfort zone, nor  can it afford to be a slave to its own tactics and strategies.  

A progressive, revolutionary party must have the courage to stride where angels fear to tread.  

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A communist party that seeks to seize or shape or influence state power cannot afford to be fixed in its choice of strategic and tactical alliances, nor can it afford to be dogmatic about organisational and institutional forms.  

Organisational and tactical agility is a must. Maintaining the balance between this and ideological consistency is probably the biggest quandary for communist parties in parliamentary and coalition politics.

The risk of alliance and coalition politics is that it may cause a dilution or confusion in a party’s ideo-political identity. But the reality is that the SACP may have to think and act outside their traditional modes of operation to capture the imagination and support of the populace beyond their traditional congress movement and Marxist-Leninist base.

The party must carefully examine the social and political agendas and class affinities of its political allies. 

If a communist party  enters into a coalition government as part of a socialist alliance, it will have more chance of exerting a socialist agenda than if it enters into an alliance with a centrist organisation on its own. 

Any alliance must be based on clear-cut minimum demands shaped by the socialist/communist party. The party cannot afford to rely only on parliamentary structures and processes or polite agreements. 

It must build its fighting capacity outside of government and thus be part of broader movement-building and regular mass action outside of parliament. 

The social intent of the parliamentary and extra-parliamentary action of a socialist /communist party must be the seizure of political power and the use of that power to advance a social revolution. 

Anything else will be chasing shadows rather than pursuing and realising a socialist/communist society. DM