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Further to SA Communist Party decides on private sector role

From A-Infos News Service
10 September 1999

Comrades

An essential addition to my previous post on "SA Communist party decides on private sector role" (6/9/12)

The SA Communist Party's "strategic conference" last weekend in Johannesburg underlines the dangers of the SACP's continued stranglehold on working class formations. Operating in the vein of "talk left, act right, and avoid controversy" that is the mainstay of the SACP leadership, the "strategic congress" opened the doors to an acceptance of local government privatisation. The issue, it appears, is not whether or not to accept privatisation but to investigate and engage with the process.

This accommodation to neo-liberalism is the product of the SACP's continuing alliance with the ruling African National Congress (ANC), a party which the SACP campaigned for in SA's 1999 elections on the grounds that the ANC "defends worker rights" and has a "working class bias". Within weeks of the elections, however, the ANC's bias was clearly demonstrated to be a bias *against* the working class. Mass retrenchments in the public sector were announced, whilst a pay dispute in the public sector has dragged on for the subsequent seven months.

The SACP congress, however, refused to consider the facts, and failed to make any clear statement regarding the ANC's confrontation with the working class. On the contrary. The fact that SACP leader, Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, the Minister of Welfare, is leading the government team that has unilaterally implemented a wage increase below inflation (i.e. a wage cut) was brushed aside by an SACP spokesperson indicative of the healthy diversity in the Party. No statement condemning the government's union-bashing was forthcoming- instead, attention was focussed on the East Timor issue.

As long as the SACP leaders continue to provide left cover for the ANC's neo-liberalism, they act as a barrier to working class self-emancipation.

Lucien

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