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We are not an integrity desk of the ANC
Jeremy Cronin responds to Trevor Manuel's attack on the SACP
Jeremy Cronin, City Press, Johannesburg, 19 July 2015
I've known Trevor Manuel since the early 1980s. Although we've long since
disagreed on many things, I still regard him as a friend.
It was with unsurprised interest, therefore, that I read his anti-SA
Communist Party (SACP) tirade, "Blurring of the blur" (City Press, July 12
2015).
How to respond? Let me make an assumption with which many of my SACP
comrades will disagree. I assume Manuel's intervention was out of concern
for the wellbeing of the SACP rather than an attempt to rubbish us.
If I'm right, then Trevor (if not Manuel) will be relieved to learn that the
specific concerns he raises are groundless.
He writes that the SACP failed to applaud the previous week's judgment in
the Western Cape High Court ruling that emolument attachment orders against
farm workers were illegal. In fact, the SACP immediately issued an extensive
statement saluting the ruling.
Since 2000, the SACP has been actively campaigning against attachment-order
irregularities, loan sharks and corrupt clerks of the court.
However, Manuel uses this misinformed allegation as a platform for a broader
point. The SACP's supposed failure to applaud Judge Siraj Desai's ruling is,
he writes sarcastically, "perhaps because it was a court decision (aren't
all judges 'class enemies'?)".
Concern about judicial overreach certainly shouldn't become a cover for an
anti-judiciary stance that has little to do with defending the Constitution
and everything to do with seeking to subvert the rule of law.
This is why the SACP has warmly saluted several recent judgments from, for
instance, the Constitutional Court, among them the important judgment in the
Mark Shuttleworth case that government was legally entitled to deduct R240
million from Shuttleworth's expatriation of billions to an overseas tax
haven, and the more recent judgment that liquor retail licences are not
corporate "private property".
Both judgments were delivered, as it happens, by Deputy Chief Justice
Dikgang Moseneke.
Pseudo-left narrative
I cite these specific and important judgments because the SACP and its
alliance partners have also expressed concern that some of what Moseneke has
advocated in academic lectures represents, in our view, a problematic
blurring of the separation-of-powers doctrine. We should, and do, commend
excellent judgments and critique poor ones whenever they occur, regardless
of who makes them.
A second specific allegation made against the SACP by Manuel is that we've
failed to say anything about the Marikana Commission of Inquiry's report.
Again, he is misinformed.
After the public release of the report, the SACP issued a brief welcoming
statement. Contrary to Manuel's claim that we've "become an organisation
that just protests on any issue that comes along", we chose to reserve
fuller comment pending a study of the report.
We waited for the SACP national congress to provide a relatively extensive
perspective on the commission's findings. Delivering the central committee
report to congress, SACP general secretary Blade Nzimande noted that the
Farlam commission singled out for harsh criticism the conduct of senior
police both for the tragically incompetent tactical handling of the
situation on the ground, and the subsequent cover-up.
"The SACP supports the recommendation that steps be taken," Nzimande said,
"to inquire into the fitness of the national commissioner and the now
retired North West provincial commissioner to hold office."
He went on: "We also welcome the recommendation that the Independent Police
Investigative Directorate establishes whether any of the SA Police Service
shooters exceeded the bounds of self-defence and whether criminal
proceedings should be introduced."
Nzimande commended those from the media (not simply by definition, Trevor,
our "class enemies") who exposed evidence of a second scene of police
shooting at Marikana. In these respects, the SACP was agreeing with what had
been well-rehearsed publicity. However, we noted the commercial media had
been exceedingly poor in its coverage of other critical aspects of the
Farlam report that contradicted prevailing narratives on the tragedy.
In particular, we noted a pseudo-left narrative that sought to portray the
strikers as virtuous proletarians taking on the combined might of the state,
Lonmin and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). NUM members and shop
stewards became joint perpetrators of the massacre that was designed, we
were told, "to protect mine property".
Ideologically coherent
The Farlam commission presents a different and more accurate perspective in
this regard. It found that the strike, which commenced on August 9 2012, was
from the outset characterised by high levels of intimidation and quickly
descended into a complete disregard for the lives of non-strikers. It finds
most of these attacks were perpetrated by a core group among the strikers,
and continued relentlessly both during and after the strike.
The commission further found that, on August 11 2012, the strikers who
marched on the NUM office at Western Platinum Mine did so with violent
intent, armed with dangerous weapons. Accordingly, NUM members in that
office who acted to protect themselves were exonerated.
This finding is absolutely central to debunking the narrative that gunshot
injuries to two strikers among those surrounding the NUM office on that day
were the "game-changer" that introduced violence into an otherwise "normal"
labour strike.
Another specific issue Manuel raises in his attack on the SACP relates to
the National Development Plan (NDP) and to me personally. I quote: "The
SACP's first deputy general secretary, Jeremy Cronin, spoke about a
commitment by the party to implement part of the NDP and then to hold out to
radicalise the rest. As deputy minister of public works, he was present when
Cabinet agreed to implement the NDP. My sense is that even if he had a
slightly different view, he is bound by the decision of the executive."
Back in 1996 Manuel presented his shock-therapy Growth, Employment and
Redistribution macroeconomic policy as "cast in stone". Then president
Nelson Mandela subsequently apologised for this.
Manuel is now ill-advisedly seeking to cast the NDP in stone. But the NDP is
not a ready-made implementation plan, it is more a vision. It consists of
some useful insights and recommendations, intriguing but untested proposals,
summaries of programmes long under way, and much else. These are sandwiched
between an opening section of cringeworthy poetry ("Our leaders' wisdom is
ours, because we sense our wisdom in theirs.") and a clumsy attempt to
present a social contract theory.
Chapter 3 of the NDP is the most pertinent to my own responsibility as a
deputy minister. I welcome the centrality it places on the expanded public
works programme, but the projections made and targets set in Figure 3.1
(yes, I have read the NDP, I do take it seriously) are technically
undermined by an elementary but fatal error (it confuses "work
opportunities" with "full-time job equivalents").
>From the outset, the SACP has warned against "monumentalising" the NDP -
either idolising it or seeking to tear it down like Saddam Hussein's statue
in Baghdad. All serious plans need to be relatively open-ended and subject
to learning from experience.
Manuel goes further in trying to stir NDP divisions: "He [that's me] now
says that President Zuma should have found a method other than to appoint an
independent commission." But neither I nor the SACP have ever tried to
conceal this. While recognising the value in having an independent,
nongovernmental advisory panel for planning (as many governments do), we've
consistently argued the need for an organic state-planning commission.
That's almost exactly the same position Manuel once articulated. In a 2013
interview, he said: "The [national planning] commission itself is an
interesting construct. I'll be bold enough to say that my initial thought
was to have the commission structured more along the lines of the Indian
Planning Commission, which has about half a dozen ministers on it. It is
chaired by the prime minister and often the president or the deputy
president could chair it and I would do the spade work inside. I lost that
battle, and it was not about wanting to be a prime minister. It was about
wanting to follow a construct whose relationship to implementation would be
understood."
In short, Manuel is well aware of the NDP's inherent problem in its
"relationship" to implementation.
Globally, we're in a context in which neoliberal austerity and Blairite
"third way" social accords are thoroughly discredited. Even the
International Monetary Fund can only watch powerless as the tyranny of
German bankers imposes unsustainable debt servitude on Greece. This is the
context in which, at the alliance summit, our partners concurred that the
SACP is currently the most ideologically coherent, and therefore
organisationally stable, of the partners.
That's not grounds for complacency. We're not immune to the problems facing
all our formations. The SACP should welcome constructive criticism from
within and without. However, we've built a 230 000-member party of socialism
not by being an integrity desk for the ANC (as Manuel wishes us to be), but
an active formation in the struggle for democratic national sovereignty
against the ravages of loan sharks, anti-union vigilantism, capital flight
by the megarich, the illusions of an overarching social compact and the
tyranny of monopoly finance.
. Cronin is SACP first deputy secretary and deputy minister of public
works
From:
<http://www.news24.com/Opinions/Jeremy-Cronin-responds-to-Trevor-Manuels-att
ack-on-the-SACP-20150719>
http://www.news24.com/Opinions/Jeremy-Cronin-responds-to-Trevor-Manuels-atta
ck-on-the-SACP-20150719
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