SACP CC meeting, Johannesburg, 25-26 May 2007

27 May 2007

This Central Committee meeting devoted most of its time to preparations for the SACP's 12^th National Congress to be held between the 11^th and 15^th July at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth. The CC agreed that the principal objectives of the 12^th Congress will be to assess progress made and to consolidate and advance the SACP's medium term vision, building working class hegemony in all centres of power within our society – in our communities, at the point of production and in the economy at large, in the state, and in the contest to assert progressive ideas and the values of solidarity. The CC identified these latter challenges (in a world and in a society too often dominated by individualistic and acquisitive values) as being particularly important.

The 12^th National Congress will also have to evaluate and analyse the challenges facing the working class and the broader mass of urban and rural poor. Like their counterparts throughout the world, and especially throughout the Third World, South African workers have experienced an intense capitalist offensive over the last decades, which has seen mass retrenchments, wholesale casualisation and informalisation. These realities call for a return to the basics of grass-roots trade union organisation, but also for new forms of working class organisation and mobilisation in communities, in rural areas, and around issues of sustainable livelihoods and communities. These challenges underline the ongoing and increased relevance of a broad national democratic struggle within our country, a struggle that must be hegemonised by workers and the poor.

Since our 11^th National Congress in July 2002, SACP membership has more than doubled from just under 25,000 to the present 51,000 members. We attribute this growth to, amongst other things, the many important campaigns the SACP has waged over the last several years - including a land an agrarian reform campaign; a financial sector campaign; a "know your neighbourhood" campaign; a campaign for safe, reliable and affordable public transport; and ongoing grass-roots work in support of the cooperatives movement. Among the many achievements of these campaigns is the National Credit Act which comes into effect on the 1^st June this year, and it includes a partial amnesty for some of those black-listed by the Credit Bureaux. While the struggle on this and many other fronts continues, the SACP is in no doubt that these important developments are the direct consequence of the campaigns led by the SACP together with over 50 other formations. We will, of course, need to be vigilant that partial victories won in legislation become real victories in actual implementation.

A key challenge of the 12^th National Congress and of the SACP going forward will be to work to ensure that we enhance the interconnections and systematic impact of our various campaigns. The point is not to simply ameliorate the present reality but to actively transform our society and economy, taking it out of its apartheid-colonial capitalist accumulation path that still, today, constantly reproduces abject, racialised poverty and inequality.

The weekend's CC coincided with the 85^th anniversary of the founding of the Young Communist League on what has now become Africa Day, 25 May. The YCL was originally launched in 1922, a year after the foundation launch of the Communist Party of South Africa. Since its re-launch in December 2003, the YCL has mobilised a new generation of communist youth, and it has become one of the most dynamic youth formations in our country. The CC salutes the YCL on its 85^th anniversary.

The CC discussed the public sector workers mass actions and impending strike. The CC fully endorsed the SACP consistent support for the entirely legitimate demands of public sector workers. We hope that the necessity for a strike can still be averted, but this will require that government negotiates seriously and with a strategic understanding of what is at stake. The apartheid wage gap between the lowest and highest paid persists, and in many cases it has worsened in the public sector over the last years. Many of the current problems in the public sector, including key shortages in teaching, health care and safety and security, date back to the misguided, neo-liberal influenced interventions of our government from the mid-1990s when public sector workers were treated as if they belonged to a "bloated" and strategically irrelevant sector. As government itself is now discovering, there is no sustainable development or even growth without an active developmental state, and there is no sustainable developmental state without tens of thousands of skilled, motivated and effective public sector workers.

The CC received a briefing from a delegation from the Western Sahara, including one woman comrade, who has been brutally tortured. The ongoing human rights abuses of the Moroccan forces against the civilian population in these territories needs to be exposed internationally. The rights of the Saharawi people to national sovereignty must be recognized, and Moroccan colonial occupation must be ended.

The CC also received a report from the "End the Occupation – Free Palestine" campaign, within which the SACP and YCL are actively participating, along with our allies and many other formations, including Muslim groups and the SACC. The SACP will be fully supporting the mass mobilisation activities that will be running through the week of Monday 4^th June to Saturday 9^th June.

The SACP has learnt of the extension of the house arrest of Cde Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma by the repressive Burmese regime. The SACP condemns this in the strongest possible terms, and calls for the immediate release of Cde San Suu Kyi, an end to repression and restoration of full democracy in Burma.

In the course of the past week, the SACP received from COSATU a copy of an alleged intelligence document, "Special Browse 'Mole'". The SACP does not know the origin and status of this bizarre but potentially gravely dangerous document. If this is indeed a product of any of the state security and intelligence agencies, this constitutes a gross abuse of state organs. We therefore expect that the relevant state entities in South Africa will get to the bottom of this document and expose those forces behind its compilation and circulation. For its part, the SACP will be formally writing to the Inspector General and the parliamentary Joint Standing Committee on Intelligence to ensure that the origin and status of the document are explained, and those responsible exposed.

While we do not know its status and origins, the SACP notes that it has all of the features of the disinformation, "Comops" documents that were prepared by the apartheid intelligence networks in the 1980s and into the 1990s, and notably in the year before the assassination of cde Chris Hani. In 1992, for instance, a "black propaganda" document purporting to be an "intelligence" document claimed that cde Hani was organizing a renegade army opposed to the negotiations, and which was supposed to have included disaffected MK and even Apla and Azapo forces. Our experience of the past compels us to call, now, on all SACP members, and on our Alliance partners to close ranks, to keep cool heads, and not to allow counter-revolutionary forces to deepen mistrust and division within our ranks. For its part, the SACP has nothing to hide, and if there is a legitimate interest from any relevant and authorized state organs about any of the SACP's activities, we are absolutely ready at any time to share information and to cooperate. What we would totally reject would be any attempts to try and collect information about our activities clandestinely.

The SACP 12^th Congress will be occurring shortly after the ANC National Policy Conference, and in the run-up to the ANC's own National Conference in December this year. Naturally, all of these major meetings need to be seen as part and parcel of a single broad process within our alliance. The SACP has welcomed the open, democratic and participatory manner in which the ANC has proceeded with its Policy Conference process. We have engaged fully with it as the SACP. We note important policy shifts affirming, in particular, the need for an active developmental state driving infrastructural development and industrial policy. The big question remains, however – are these important shifts designed largely to lowering the cost to doing business for those who continue to benefit from South Africa's persisting apartheid-colonial accumulation path? Or will our developmental state lead a process of thorough transformation, moving us away from our current dependent-development?

The CC also discussed the Gauteng provincial government's premature and ill-considered announcement of a monorail between Soweto and Johannesburg. The CC fully endorsed Minister Jeff Radebe's intervention to block this attempt at creating an irreversible fait accompli. The proposal was blatantly out of step with both the spirit and the letter of three pieces of legislation, and it cut across careful and important integrated transport planning that is now beginning to shape up promisingly for the citizens of Johannesburg and Gauteng. Quite how and why two provincial MECs should have precipitated this ill-considered announcement is unclear, and should perhaps be the subject of a SCOPA enquiry.

The SACP believes that it is important to clarify to the people of Soweto that the blocking of this project is not driven by inter-governmental turf competition, or merely on technical and procedural grounds. This monorail proposal, which ludicrously promised to transport one and half million Sowetans a day, is complete pie-in-the-sky. It is a low-density technology most suitable for theme-parks. If it were to be allowed to go ahead, it would end up being a disastrous white elephant costing the tax-payers of Soweto, Johannesburg and South Africa millions to bail out. This is exactly what has just happened in Malaysia with the self-same consortium.

The SACP will continue to intensify its campaign for safe, affordable and efficient public transport system especially for the workers and the poor of our country.