The betrayal of revolutionary ideals

The ANC leadership treats its ally the SACP as enemy number one

- RENEVA FOURIE

COSATU and SACP members display their support for the ANC at a May Day rally held in Mamelodi on May 1, 2016. Today, the ANC leadership treats its long-standing alliance partner, the SACP, as enemy number one while embracing neoliberal and right-wing parties such as the DA and Freedom Front Plus, says the writer. | AFP

(AFP)

WITH the recent commemoration of Solomon Mahlangu, executed by the apartheid regime on April 6, 1979, and the assassination of Chris Hani on April 10, 1993, the contrast between past sacrifice and present political reality is stark.

Mahlangu embodied the courage of the working class and youth in the armed struggle. Hani, as general secretary of the SACP, member of the ANC national executive committee, and chief of staff of Umkhonto weSizwe, epitomised the principle of dual membership that bound communists and nationalists in a common revolutionary project.

Yet today, the ANC leadership treats its longstanding alliance partner, the SACP, as enemy number one while embracing neoliberal and right-wing parties such as the DA and Freedom Front Plus.

The ANC has always constituted an ideologically contested terrain, a multi-class nationalist movement whose internal contradictions reflect the broader class dynamics of South African society.

Tensions with the SACP, rooted in scientific socialism, have always existed. Nonetheless, the two converged as the ANC saw the black working class as the primary motive force of national liberation. Racial oppression under colonialism and apartheid made national consciousness essential before class consciousness could develop. Communists recognised and adapted to this reality.

The International Socialist League, founded in 1915, and the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) after 1921, contested elections independently or with the Labour Party, until the proclamation of the 1950 Suppression of Communism Act.