The SA Communist Party has been long dead. Its leaders, themselves mostly ancestors, refuse to accept the party is a political dinosaur. The SACP’s recent national congress at the Birchwood Conference Centre in Boksburg — where else? — saw musical chairs played mostly by old men who cannot let go. Nothing was injected into this political relic by way of fresh ideas and younger energies to bring the political ancestor back to political life.
For my writing sins, I studied some of the documents and speeches that occasioned the congress, and I want to engage here with the coma-inducing political report, as a starting point. It is a report that achieves nothing but confirms the continued disconnect between socialist rhetoric and the reality of SACP leaders knowingly choosing to be part of a government that is anti-socialist in its character, policies and actions.
The report laments, like all reports before it, neoliberal macroeconomic policies within the state. It attacks the ANC, as well as specific parts of the state such as the Treasury and the SA Reserve Bank, for apparently wrongly insisting on keeping public debt as low as possible, mistakenly focusing on inflation rather than growth and employment, and for being needlessly conservative in its reasoning about and insistence on fiscal austerity. The largest part of the diagnosis of our economic woes focuses, more specifically, on what the SACP sees as the biggest enemy of all, the financial services sector, which has supposedly become an anti-poor, neo-iberal, capitalist hegemony, conspiring with puppets within the state who pass favourable laws and policies, and who adopt regulations conducive to the de-industrialisation of the economy, and the domination of the evil banks. The political report of the party summates this as the essence of what lies behind our economic slump.
One colourful excerpt from the report demonstrates the logic and venom of the party in the direction of the conclusions above: “In 1994 the financial services sector in SA contributed 6.5% to GDP. It currently contributes nearly 25%, while the contribution of productive sectors to the economy has shrunk relatively with, among other things, de-industrialisation.
“These developments have transformed many of the dominant features of the capitalist class in SA. Class representatives (black and white, by the way) of the financial services sector (notably the banking oligopoly, but also the major asset management and insurance corporates) are now clearly the hegemonic force within the capitalist class. Monopoly finance capital presents its interests as those of ‘business’ in general (and even of the country at large). When government seeks a ‘social compact’ with so-called social partners, it is the financial sector that assumes the role of speaking for ‘business’ at large.
The most important flaw in the reasoning of the SACP, is what it leaves out or de-emphasises, rather than what it includes.
“This financial sector class dominance is reinforced by the increasing financialisation of other sectors of the economy — like mining and retail. The penetration of financialisation into other sectors includes the major shift in corporate practice to ‘enhancing shareholder value’ above all else, incentivising CEOs and CFOs with grotesque rewards, not for productive outcomes or productive investment in mines, or factories, but for short-term, manipulative increases in share-value.
“This dominance has been further cemented by the revolving door of senior personnel as they move seamlessly from National Treasury, to the SA Reserve Bank and the private banking and investment oligopolies. It is a progression that is often preceded by stints in the US in the spawning hatcheries of the World Bank, the IMF and Goldman Sachs.”
The most important flaw in the reasoning of the SACP is what it leaves out or de-emphasises, rather than what it includes. There is one sentence that nominally states that the party is opposed to corruption. This is grossly insufficient in a political report that is otherwise wordy. There were no space constraints. The party chose to not focus adequately on the elephant in the room. There is no detailed economic analysis in this report about the true total cost of state capture. State capture was not and is not about neoliberal macroeconomic policy. In fact, corruption in general and state capture more specifically is policy-neutral. Greedy people who are lawless and immoral, helped by a state that does not get the fundamentals right, such as effective law enforcement, steal from the public purse. Rehearsing ideological debates from political school seminars does not get us far if we want to understand why we have youth unemployment of more than 60%, a GDP growth rate of under 2%, plus levels of income, asset and wealth inequalities that render us possibly the most economically unjust society on earth in terms of distribution of societal resources within the population.
It is true and important to emphasise this more baldly than we sometimes do in public debate about state capture, that private interests were a crucial part of the state capture nexus. Banks, management consulting firms, accounting and auditing firms, and law firms, for example, are not as clearly lodged in our memory banks when we talk about state capture as the names and faces of politicians, civil servants and the Gupta brothers. They are all scoundrels, and companies such as Bain and McKinsey did as much damage as errant, corrupted executives within state-owned entities. They colluded to trample on our democratic foundations. But this is not about ideology as such and that is where the SACP missteps. You can be a committed capitalist and steal. You can be a Marxist and steal. And, more to my point, a capitalist and Marxist can set ideological differences aside and collude in state capture projects. It is state capture that has cost us an indeterminate amount of money, which many experts argue to be north of R500bn. The link between that stolen money and our current economic indices are obvious, but there is more here about the opportunity costs of state capture that must be understood if we want to get a grip on why the economic data the SACP rightly bemoans are what they are.
The ANC has abandoned the rule of law. You cannot both enable state capture, as the ANC government has been doing, and be committed to constitutional supremacy, of which the rule of law is a necessary. When these have been in tension, the ANC has shown little enthusiasm for protecting, upholding and affirming the rule of law. Indeed, the value chain of justice was itself a site of state capture. Furthermore, other parts of our state, and the bureaucracy, were hollowed out and repurposed by the predators to set themselves up to prey on innocent citizens and taxpayers into perpetuity. This means the state itself is not fit to implement even the wildest socialist dreams of the SACP because the ANC-led government has actively participated in the assault on the architecture of the state. Imagine, for example, education delivered by the state was excellent and no child was left behind? What difference would that alone have made to our labour force and to our economy slotting into a competitive knowledge-based global economy? How do you (wittingly or otherwise) blame the private sector for the ANC government’s disinterest in delivering essential public goods?
A thesis about the evil of banking executives and the financial sector cannot let the ANC off the hook. It has a political, moral and constitutional duty animated by impressive constitutional powers to protect us from lawlessness, including state capture. It failed because of its own moral collapse. The ANC’s moral collapse, combined with its lack of generative ideas and capacity weaknesses within the state, is a massive driver of the economic woes with which we are now saddled. Capital is not innocent, nor should it be left out of the story of economic injustice. The SACP, however, reduces this multiplicity of causal factors to a stale and narrow debate about capitalism and socialism. That shows how hackneyed the SACP itself is, despite pretending to be intellectually dexterous.
However, the most obviously laughable aspect of the entire SACP political report is that this party does not actually care about socialism. It has a leadership that is deeply committed to neoliberal macroeconomic policies. They have been part of national and provincial cabinets since 1994, and the Marxist rhetoric is sheer balderdash. Politically and legally, SACP leaders who are serving on an ANC ticket are committed to implementing ANC policies. There is nothing Marxist about Blade Nzimande’s record in government, nor those of others such as Thulas Nxesi, Buti Manamela, Gwede Mantashe or David Masondo. They are as committed to their SACP roots as I am to my Catholic upbringing, which is to say, not at all. The mental gymnastics involved in spewing Marxist rhetoric for a few days only to return to the life of a Gucci communist a few days later, smacks of ideological incoherence at best and of intellectual and political bankruptcy at worst. Since the beginning of my broadcast and writing careers, I have engaged SACP leaders, often publicly, on the question of what their record in government has to do with Marxism. I will be an ancestor myself before any of them are able to show me how the tripartite alliance has served the SACP’s founding political philosophy as faithfully as the post-1994 ANC commitment to the Washington Consensus. The ANC euthanised the SACP by co-opting it into government and falsely labelling the lethal deal an “alliance”.
If SACP leaders were committed to Marxism or socialism, they would have divorced themselves from the ANC a long time ago. They did not and will not. The reluctance might be the fear of finding out voters do not care much for communism. The ultimate reason for the SACP cowardice is not a mystery, however. There are no real communists in the SACP, only well-fed ANC pawns, pretending to be friends of the working class.
