Threats on Our South African Road to Socialism

I writing this after the statements attributed to Billy Masetlha in the Mail and Guardian and I think it is improper to just think that Billy Masetlha’s statements we a distortion or fabrication by the newspaper. When we said we want the President of the ANC to serve another term, we said that it is, amongst other things, because some people are already engaged in these debates and are beginning to position themselves and what we see is that they do not have an agenda to advance the cause of the people but want to serve their narrow BEE interest.

A frank analysis of this tendency is provided by the SACP Special Congress Discussion Document titled, “Building Working Class Hegemony on a Terrain of the National Democratic Struggle.”

In analysing the balances of forces in the battle of ideas the document indicates that,“Over the past several years, in the battle of ideas within our movement a broad front of tendencies and ideological orientations got to be mobilised against the “1996 class project”. The SACP played a leading role in this process. However, it would be an error for the SACP to imagine that within this broad front everyone agreed with the positions of the Party, or necessarily disagreed with the core underlying ideology of “the 1996 class project” (as opposed to having personal grudges, for instance, against it).”

This paragraph does not need to be unpacked and elsewhere in the document it is analysed as to why these people got to be mobilised against the 1996 class project, even thought they did not disagree with the core underlying ideology of the project. It states that this was because they, like SACP and COSATU, dismissed the manner in which the 1996 class project abused the state in order to advance its factionalist ends.

In analysing these concerns the document states that, “In other cases the concern appears to have been more opportunistic – i.e. a grievance at being excluded from the abusing inner circle – rather than a principled rejection of the idea that personal wealth, or access to bureaucratic power should be used to advance personal accumulation interests.”

We must always take these issues into cognisance and we must be always ready to fight against what comrade Mao calls ‘non-antagonistic’ forces within our movement. Cronin puts it bluntly that “The fact that they are “non-antagonistic” does not mean that they are not real political contradictions ultimately located in objective realities.”