Business Day *Communists confuse tactics with gutlessness* *Anthony Butler, Business Day, Johannesburg, 23 August 2010*In a demonstration of the South African Communist Party's (SACP's) growing political weakness, the party last week threw its weight behind the proposed media appeals tribunal.
The crisis of the SACP has four principal origins. First, the party lacks the political capital to launch the country on its hoped for "new national growth path". It has lost the argument in the African National Congress (ANC) for a meritocratic and developmental public service, and the proponents of industrial policy have been unable to face down vested interests and black empowerment competitors.
Second, the SACP has not been able to turn Polokwane's social policy resolutions into a practical programme. Education reforms have been obstructed by powerful unions, national insurance cannot be introduced in a crisis-ridden public health system, and rural poverty is entrenched by incapacitated public agencies.
Third, pre-Polokwane factionalism ended in the effective expulsion of SACP leaders with government experience. Recruitment campaigns and the relaunch of the Young Communist League, meanwhile, turned the SACP from a cadre party into a volatile political amoeba. Finally, the party's alliance with the ANC has come under siege from what the SACP leadership calls "the disrupters" and "the wedge-drivers". These antagonists are allegedly motivated by their "huge siphoning off of public resources through all kinds of tenderpreneuring, political bullying, rent-seeking and patronage distribution".
Youth league kleptomaniacs are meanwhile targeting ANC secretary-general and SACP chairman Gwede Mantashe as a precursor to outlawing dual membership of the two parties.
The "wedge-drivers" have already used the issue of mine nationalisation to divide young communists from their leaders. Now they are using attacks on the bourgeois press to place the SACP in a further quandary. The party's leaders have long used the existence of the "white media" to explain away their "tactical compromises". A decade ago, SACP deputy general secretary Jeremy Cronin told academic Padraig O'Malley that he favoured antiretrovirals, the Movement for Democratic Change, and a restructuring of parastatals --- but that potential media sensationalism was forcing him to keep quiet.
Equally illuminatingly, Cronin observed of the liberal media that "week after week after week of exposing another black scandal, a black person in a prominent position scandal --- that's good, if there's corruption let's hear about it, let's deal with it --- but that's the story that it is running with week after week after week and, frankly, it looks like racism to a lot of ordinary people".
The SACP presented a pathetic spectacle last week. Mantashe, unable to choose one set of bourgeois rights over another, argued that press freedom and freedom of expression "must not be elevated above the right to privacy and the right to dignity".
It is easy to see why the SACP leadership thinks it should not expend scarce political capital defending the unpopular press. The party has driven ANC initiatives to alleviate poverty and inequality, it has countered social conservatism, and it leads the anticorruption initiatives on which the country's future depends. At Polokwane, the SACP kept democracy alive by insisting that the ANC was not the possession of any individual or faction. Yet its politics have been relentlessly ridiculed in the media --- most often by liberal whites who did not fight apartheid --- and its substantive policy contributions have been ignored.
The party's leaders also place great store in their own political survival --- and perhaps with good reason. If the SACP loses its war against the wedge- drivers and tenderpreneurs, the ANC could quickly become a dismal parody of the post-colonial southern African liberation movement.
The trouble with decades of Leninist political calculation, however, is that it becomes hard for even the cleverest communist intellectual to distinguish a brilliant tactical compromise on his own part from a simple lack of balls when it comes to something that really matters.
* *Butler* teaches politics at Wits University. *From: http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=118781* * * * * -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. You don't have to put anything in the message part. All you have to do is to send an e-mail to this address (repeat): [email protected] .
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