Green Left Weekly's Johannesburg correspondent NORM DIXON talks with JEREMY CRONIN, South African Communist Party (SACP) central committee member, and editor of the African Communist, about South Africa's transition to democracy and the prospects for radical transformation.
The April elections and the process of democratisation "are being underwritten by a consensus that goes all the way from Washington through to at least the SACP head office", says Cronin. Given the dangers that the democratisation process faces from the right and elements within the security forces, it is necessary, where possible, "to try to travel along a broadly similar road and maintain that wide consensus. But one shouldn't exaggerate the degree of togetherness."
It is not just at some point after the elections that this consensus will be challenged. "There will be ... more robust struggle between the components of this consensus after the election. But the struggle — which is ultimately a class struggle — has been going for the past four years."
Since the unbanning of the liberation movements in 1990, the more enlightened elements of the National Party (NP), backed by Washington, have been resigned to the fact that the African National Congress will win the election, Cronin explained, but they have attempted to ensure that it would be "impossible for the ANC to continue with its revolutionary traditions of the last decades".
Through the negotiations, the NP attempted to create a constitution that would tie an ANC government's hands. "That was the motive behind the troika idea — the negotiating position of the regime until the Hani crisis — that there should be entrenched power sharing forever and that the top two or three parties would share equally executive power ...
"They also wanted a transition that thoroughly detached the ANC negotiators and leadership from their mass base and transformed the ANC into a narrow electoral party. It would win the elections but with no ability to steer the process beyond that."
The NP failed, Cronin said. The victories of the mass movement over the past few weeks underscore this. "The ANC-aligned mass movement is going into the elections, and the process beyond, with relatively high morale. The ANC is not fighting the elections as a narrow electoral party."
Program
A central component of the ANC's campaign is the holding of hundreds of meetings, with attendances ranging from tens of thousands to a few hundred, where people are encouraged to participate.
"The People's Forums and Workers' Forums are a very progressive form of electioneering. It hasn't just been Mandela kissing kids. The ANC has gone to its working class and rural constituency and asked: 'What is it that you want? Throw questions at us.' The ANC has established a direct participatory democracy approach to elections. Hopefully that legacy will continue when the ANC is the dominant partner in government."
Cronin doesn't deny that some elements in the ANC favour it becoming a narrow electoral party. "This is where the ANC's Reconstruction and Development Program becomes very important. The left within the ANC alliance — the party, COSATU and many others — have ensured that there is a fairly elaborate program in place before going into government. If you look at the ANC election manifesto, it is about jobs, houses, education, electrification. The ANC is going into elections as a liberation movement with a lot of its perspectives not just intact but elaborated for the conditions."
One of the key challenges will be to go beyond the "transfer of power" to the "transformation of power", Cronin explained. Transformation of power means that the mass movement is not demobilised but strengthened; society is thoroughly democratised and the mass movement is involved in deciding its direction. State officials cannot substitute for the organised masses.
"Electoral and statist illusions are quite rife within the movement ... It has been a problem of liberation movements in Africa that they've thought that there is a dramatic moment called the 'transfer of power', which means you think transfer, not transformation, of power. The same power gets transferred into different hands. Armed struggle, negotiations, elections, or a combination of those, is the mechanism for the dramatic 'transfer of power'." This has to be guarded against.
"Affirmative action is another word imported from American liberal struggles. It also can mean 'transfer of power'. The SACP has been saying, 'Fine, if you want to use the words affirmative action, use them but let's have a class approach'. Get infrastructure to rural people, build roads and millions of houses — that's affirmative action. Of course, affirmative action has another meaning as well, which is to promote a new stratum of black managers and administrators.
"You've got to have a civil service that talks the languages of the people and understands their problems, but that's all you might end up with ... There may be tens of thousands of leading activists of the ANC alliance who will soon constitute a new stratum of administrators, MPs, soldiers, military officers. Part of the internal battle is to hold them so that they are there on behalf of the struggle and don't become detached from it. The neo-liberal agenda is the reverse: to promote this new stratum and consolidate a new stability for capital, for imperialism."
Competing tendencies
Cronin is confident the ANC will remain committed to the transformation of power, but "it can go many ways. It is a struggle. There are marked tendencies toward careerism and maybe the most worrying thing, to be very frank, is a large proportion of the cadre of the ANC has — in my view rather mindlessly — gone onto the electoral lists. It means the capacity for the ANC to continue as an extraparliamentary force will be in question."
While there is "a small element of hard-headed opportunists with an open agenda of transforming the ANC into an electoral, right-wing social democratic — at best — party, there is a large number of people who are very opposed to that, but very worried and pessimistic ... In between a lot are drifting. In numbers, the progressive wing is much larger than the less progressive wing, but in terms of influence and power and location in leading positions, which will become even more powerful and more leading after the elections, I'm not so certain."
The pessimism of some sections of the left and labour movement is both unfounded and "is opening the field to the opportunism". This pessimism is rooted in an inability to adapt realistically to the new situation. "People were insurrectionists. The party's program was for a mass insurrection. When the process became a different kind of transformative process, a large number of people got lost, confused, demoralised and pessimistic.
"The real challenge is to find our feet on this terrain of a negotiated transition, to approach this process of reforms as revolutionaries, so we don't just get sucked into a narrow cul-de-sac of reformism. That's the big challenge ... Our big theories don't prepare us for the new terrain, although our actual struggle experience does."
Cronin believes that this new political terrain and the people's experience of mass mobilisation keep open the way for radical transformation. "We didn't fight the struggle as a peasant army in the rural areas. We fought it as trade unions, civics, political formations, progressive religious formations, women's organisations, youth and students ... The pattern one sees in post-independence Africa is of a peasant army taking power, then being demobilised.
"We are getting two anthems and a flag that looks like a terrible compromise. We've got a power-sharing constitutional arrangement. That's all because we haven't decisively won power. I'm not pleased we are going to have de Klerk in the cabinet, but the flip side of that is that the struggle will continue in classrooms, in the streets, in the churches. Some people are demoralised because it isn't the flag-down-flag-up scenario ... But we don't have the illusion that the struggle is over."
Popular power
The elections will give the ANC "elements of state power. We'll install people in the upper echelons, but it will effectively be the same army, the same police force, the same civil service, and we are going to have to transform that in a process of struggle." The ANC will have to rely on the hundreds of thousands of lower level civil servants and soldiers and the mass movement.
"State power isn't everything ... We are going to have to buttress it with our power outside the state. It is the combination of these that is important — not just in the coming weeks and months, but also for a socialist transformation. That's where we are very critical of the excessive statism of the East European model, and the national liberation model in Africa — the view that the state can just 'introduce' socialism and everybody else can just sit back."
Cronin is very critical of those sections of the left that are calling for the creation of an alternative to the ANC. "To abandon the ANC at this point is very short-sighted. It enjoys overwhelming mass support. That's where the working masses are. The real challenge is the struggle for the 'life and soul' of the ANC, to struggle to ensure that the ANC aligns itself to the working class and poor.
"Because it is a struggle without guarantees, people get worried and look for alternatives. But to move out of the mainstream of left progressive politics — which is within the ANC at this point — would be to marginalise the left and play into the hands of those with a neo-liberal agenda to cut the ANC off from the left ... What most worries them is the insertion of the left into the ANC. Whatever the intention of the comrades calling for a mass workers party — and I can understand some of their concerns and fears, I am far from absolutely certain that everything is going to go well — I am convinced the right politics for the left is to engage, not disengage."
The struggle to implement the ANC's Reconstruction and Development Program is important for the left, Cronin said. "The underlying strategic concept is everything we have been talking about. It is a state plus mass democratic movement-driven process. It is about using representative democracy and also participatory and direct forms as well: mass involvement, mass action and participatory institutions.
"Through the RDP, we are trying to empower the mass movement, propel it and regroup it. Part of the challenge is to transform the mass movement from purely oppositional to a kind of developmental mass movement ... The RDP has that 'transitional program' character to it.
"You don't necessarily emblazon your program with hammers and sickles and anti-capitalist rhetoric. You pose basic demands which have broad acceptance but that in fact can only be met under strain within a capitalist system and mobilise a huge number of people around that program. It is the task of left forces to sharpen the class perspective of that struggle."
The emphasis the SACP has placed on "reinforcing the ANC project" has resulted in the party "still battling with its identity and role", Cronin said.
The SACP "has been a little bit invisible, and there is a certain unhappiness inside the party at this. But on the other hand the party has done extremely well in the nominations process in the ANC." So much so that there will be cabinet members and a couple of provincial premiers who open members of the SACP.
"That is something refreshing in the 1990s", Cronin added with a grin. "We are certainly going to impose a heavy party tax on our cabinet ministers, premiers and MPs. Those resources will enable us to do a lot more regrouping and organisational work." The party now has 60,000 members.
In July the SACP will convene a conference of South Africa's left so that it can "reassert a socialist, working-class perspective" on political developments.