The South African Communist Party says it has grown frustrated living in its mother’s basement where it spends all day writing fan fiction about the late 1950s, confirming that it will almost definitely move down into the garden shed, especially if its mother refuses to keep bringing it cookies and milk.
Of course, the move has been a long time coming — it’s been over eight months since the SACP resolved that it would contest elections as a stand-alone party outside the tripartite alliance — but as it carefully packs its Lenin action figures into a box next to its lava lamp, and yells up the stairs that it wishes it had never been born out of the systematic oppression of the proletariat, it’s time for critics like me to give credit where it’s due.
Not that you could blame us for our belief that the SACP was fundamentally silly, at least not while it remained a paradoxically geriatric version of that particular kind of teenaged boy who contributes almost nothing but reheated, glum jargon and who only lightens and brightens when he can start telling you about Vladimir Putin, but who keeps insisting that he has a say in the running of the house.
Now, however, it seems that the move is really happening, and I feel compelled to congratulate the comrades of the SACP for finally stepping up and earning that final P as they give up being the South African Communist Passengers and become an actual party.
I’m equally impressed by the way they’re going about it, too, mournfully bringing up the possibility during a Sunday press conference that the ANC might soon expel them from the tripartite alliance. What a tragedy that would be, eh, comrades? To be snoozing inside a heap of soiled nappies for years, so long, in fact, that most people assume that you, too, are a soiled nappy, only to have the heap eject you on the grounds that you are not, in fact, a soiled nappy after all?
Yes, being kicked out of the alliance would be manna from atheist heaven for the SACP, pulling it clear of the collapsing ANC brand without it even having to pause in its ongoing discussion of the framework in which to imagine the question of how to root out class collaborators among the — oh, wait, is that your mom going out? Won’t you ask her to bring us back a pizza?
The ANC might not be talking expulsion yet, but it is certainly unhappy, with Thabo Mbeki recently insisting that the SACP should focus on socialist revolution and leave the National Democratic Revolution to the ANC, an unconscious allusion, perhaps, to the work of political scientists Michael Caine and Steve Martin, whose seminal 1988 treatise Dirty Rotten Scoundrels illustrates the conflict that inevitably arises when two entities are trying to liberate the wallets of the same people.
What Mbeki doesn’t seem to see, however, is that there is a perfectly serious and sensible reason the SACP cannot remain in any alliance with the ANC.
It’s right there, in red and white, in every manifesto and on every banner at every party conference, repeated over and over again: communism is, at least in theory, dedicated to improving the lot of workers.
Of course one can quibble about how true this is in practice. But in South Africa, we have hard, cold employment figures, and they show us one indisputable truth: if the ANC is good at anything, it is turning workers into non-workers by the tens of thousands.
So go get ‘em, little SACP. And enjoy the shed.
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