Paul Trewhela
SACP and Cosatu prepare to impose command economy by force
On the sixtieth anniversary of the imposition of a Communist regime on Czechoslovakia by bullying and by stealth, it would appear that the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions are planning a coup to install a Stalinist state in South Africa that will impose a command economy. I would like to know what else is meant by the statement by Cosatu's general secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi, that the 'war starts now' to ensure that in future the 'Cabinet, the Presidency, premiers, mayors and strategic staff such as DGs (directors-general)' would, in his words, be loyal to the agenda of the working class; by the statement of Cosatu’s acting president, Sdumo Dlamini, that Cosatu seeks to pack the National Executive Committee of the African National Congress with an additional tranche of unelected appointees from the SACP and its own ranks, to be installed ex officio; and by Cosatu’s threat that there will be ‘blood on the floor’ if it does not get its way. [See 'Cosatu whips Zuma into line' (29 February 2008)].
This is the language of the putsch, whether of Mussolini’s march on Rome (successful) of October 1922, of the Kapp and Hitler putsches in Germany of March 1920 and November 1923 (unsuccessful) and of the Stalinist coup d'etat in Czechoslovakia of February/March 1948, which succeeded in creating a failed state much admired by leaders of the SACP, Cosatu and the ANC. [See here: 'J’accuse! Cosatu considering a putsch?’ (3/1/2008)]. This is a strategy for the combined violent and parliamentary takeover of the state by force. There will be blood.
The fiction of the 'National Democratic Revolution'
As in eastern Europe in the wake of Stalin’s military victory over his fellow mass-murderer Adolf, the language under which this totalitarian enterprise has been embarked in South Africa is a debauched discourse of 'democracy'. This language for the installation of a dictator state in South Africa was invented for Cosatu and the ANC by the Communist Party, following the example of Comrade Stalin in eastern Europe. 'Make it dictatorship, but make nice: call it democracy.' That was the squalid enterprise of Comrade Josef Djugashvili in eastern Europe, and so the so-called 'People’s Democracies' were born, less then fifty years before being overthrown again by their own peoples exercising a desire for a more real, and less lying, democracy. The same fate awaits the labours of Comrades Vavi, Dlamini and Blade Nzimande (secretary general of the 50,000-member Communist Party) in South Africa, should they succeed in wrecking the country.
While drumming up the washed-up dogma of 'historical materialism' as if they had invented it, history stares them in the face but they will not and cannot see it. The so-called 'theory' of the National Democratic Revolution - by which a drive towards absolute power is placed above constitution, law, economy and every civic freedom – was bequeathed to the ANC in exile by the Communist Party. This is a fiction that operates at the same remove from truth as the name of the National Socialist German Workers (or Nazi) Party related to the best ideals of socialism and the actual lives of actual German workers. For 'revolution', read violent take-over of power. For 'national', read the interests of a criminal and unaccountable political bureaucracy. For 'democratic', read dictatorship. It's a jaded story.
The Zuma stratagem of Cosatu and the SACP
The brutalist strategy of Cosatu and the CP depends on their employing the new president of the ANC, Jacob Zuma, as their patsy. So far this man has shown himself to be an empty vessel, prepared to say anything to anyone, so long as he thinks it will enable him to reach the top post in the state where he can at last afford to pay for his multiple wives and children. A bad combination: power-hungry extremists at the head of a mass pressure group, and a political leader in need of money which only the coffers of the state can satisfy.
After the sunlit rhetoric of an African Renaissance, it has come to this. Few parties ever enjoyed such a naïve glow of international goodwill as the ANC, following Mandela's release from prison. Now the prospect of prison awaits the new leader of the ANC, for completely other reasons, with a tarnished Zuma apparently the prisoner of the SACP and Cosatu. Troglodytes from another age, their leaders ignore the failure of state economy in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, North Korea, Mao's China, Cuba and Angola – and closest to hand, even Zimbabwe – in order to impose their self-serving strategy on a disoriented nation. A state apparatus that is barely managing to hold together the functioning structures it inherited in 1994 is now expected by these wizards of political economy to manage an entire, complex, first-world economy in the real world of rapid globalised capital flows. What Russia failed to manage, the SACP and Cosatu are supposed to achieve. Any fool can see the outcome: yet another African failed state, in the once brightest hope of all.
Moment of decision for Ramaphosa, Sexwale and Phosa
A great deal now depends on the backbone and resolution of the countervailing current in the ANC. Zuma’s populist victory at the ANC's national conference at Polokwane last December headed up a host of contradictions. It brought together temporarily the only combination of forces able to displace the political megalomania of the Mbeki presidency. Counter to the Stalinist drive to install another dysfunctional Cuba or North Korea on what still remains the most functional economy in Africa, the new black business class represented in the ANC National Executive Committee by Cyril Ramaphosa, Mathews Phosa and Tokyo Sexwale now also faces its moment of decision. It was not its choice that it would have to stand down its former allies in the trade unions, in the ANC Youth League and in the Communist Party. But that has been decided for it by the putsch strategy of the rival camp. These beneficiaries of the ANC policy of Black Economic Empowerment now face the real possibility that their rivals in the so-called Tripartite Alliance will kill the goose that lays the golden eggs for them.
Problem of dual membership of the SACP in the ANC
The time has come for the ANC either to become a normal political party in the normal world of globalised economy, administering a normal state when elected to do so, or face being gobbled up by the Communist Party which it has permitted to be incubated within itself for nearly sixty years. For nearly sixty years, the ANC has tolerated dual membership of members of the Communist Party within itself, organised simultaneously by a separate party caucus, and often in effective control of its levers of policy and decision. This enabled the ANC to survive the ordeal of illegality and exile, supported by the Soviet Union as a world superpower.
After 14 years of ANC government, this cuckoo in the nest has now grown so big as to wish to eat its host. The challenge facing Phosa, Ramaphosa and Sexwale is to construct a series of alliances in defence of Constitution, the legal system, the freedom of the press and the survival of an advanced economy, in face of a retrograde and reactionary attempt to impose a government of dictatorship and poverty. Under the rhetoric of reducing the numbers of the unemployed, the power drive of Cosatu and the CP will create only tens of thousands more.
Statesmanship for defence of the Constitution
Clearly, the CP and Cosatu seek to overturn the judiciary in order to abort the trial of Jacob Zuma. Only last week counsel for Zuma's imprisoned financial adviser, Schabir Shaik - brother of the director of procurement in the arms deal corruption scandal - placed documents before the Constitutional Court directly implicating Zuma. [See 'Zuma's role in arms deal conspiracy, court told' (28/2/2008)]. Cosatu and the CP aim to paralyse the judicial process with either the threat or more likely the reality of mass violence in the streets, so as to intimidate the court and put witnesses in fear of their lives and the lives of their families, should they proceed to give evidence.
This is the politics of the Mafia. Should they succeed, and a disgraced empty vessel of a man be placed on the presidential throne by a cabal of blood-stained kingmakers, South Africa will sink into political anarchy and destitution, with murder as its talisman. It was above all the far-sightedness of Nelson Mandela, aided by the sagacity of Joe Slovo of the Communist Party and FW de Klerk of the National Party, which permitted South Africa to circumvent the abyss of political mayhem in the late 1980s and early 1990s. An equal and possibly even more difficult task of statesmanship now faces Sexwale, Ramaphosa and Phosa.
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