The SACP Conference – as I head off

Tomorrow morning at the crack of dawn I will begin travelling with my children for a respite after two years of my (it seems somehow personal) Great Recession.

We will be moving through some places that are less connected than others, so I will be posting irregularly for some time.

For this reason I wanted to say something  about  the South African Communist Party’s special conference in Polokwane before I go and before it finishes on Sunday.

Our red brethren have been meeting since Thursday and it seems they have been having an interesting and boisterous time.

Much of the media coverage has centred around a visit by Julius Malema, Billy Masetlha and Tony Yengeni during which the ANC Youth League president was booed and reportedly walked out in a huff, threatening to ‘tell on’ to the president.

But the underlying conflict that is playing itself out between the SACP and a powerful faction of the ANC is the main show in town.

And the SACP leadership is ‘on message’, constantly attacking what it sees as emerging black capitalists whose primary method of accumulation is tender abuse and looting of the state. It appears that the communists believe this “project” is THE real and immediate danger.

The coordinated attack emerges from even a cursory reading of (most importantly) the political report to the conference, but also from the opening address (some of these links are a little dicky – it seems to be a problem with the SACP’s site) by SACP chairman, Gwede Mantashe, a speech by Cosatu’s Zwelenzima Vavi and an address by the Young Communist’s Buti Manamela.

The political report says it most clearly (it’s a longish quote, but it gives one an excellent idea of the main issues in our politics):

This new tendency has its roots in what we might call “Kebble-ism” – in which some of the more roguish elements of capital, lumpen-white capitalists, handed out largesse and favours and generally sought to corrupt elements within our movement in order to secure their own personal accumulation agendas. Some of this largesse helped elements within our movement to emerge as capitalists in their own right.

(…)
In particular, these elements of BEE capital have been exploring a class axis between themselves and the great mass of marginalized, alienated, often unemployed black youth. The material glue of this axis is the politics of patronage, of messiahs, and its tentative ideological form is a demagogic African chauvinism. Because of its rhetorical militancy the media often portrays it as “radical” and “left-wing” – but it is fundamentally right-wing, even proto-fascist. While it is easy to dismiss the buffoonery of some of the leading lieutenants, we should not underestimate the resources made available to them, and the huge challenge we all have when it comes to millions of increasingly alienated, often unemployed youth who are potentially available for all kinds of demagogic mobilization.

We do not use the term proto-fascist lightly, nor for the moment should we exaggerate it. However, there are worrying tell-tale characteristics that need to be nipped in the bud. They include the demagogic appeal to ordinary people’s baser instincts (male chauvinism, paramilitary solutions to social problems, and racialised identity politics).

Now  I disagree with a host of the economic solutions that the communists seem to take as gospel and I am convinced that left to their own devices they would kill creativity and diminish personal liberty without commensurate social gains. However, it is the communists who appear to be most clearly identifying where we are going and what the dangers that confront us are.

They might be full of economic nonsense (i.e. stuff with which one disagrees) but you can always trust the reds to spot the fascists before even the fascists themselves know what they have become!