SACP Seeks to Have Cake and Eat It

The South African Communist Party (SACP) has confirmed that it will contest the next local government elections separately from the African National Congress (ANC) but said it will not leave the Tripartite Alliance.

The Tripartite Alliance is a long-standing political pact between the SACP, ANC, and Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU).

The party made the decision at its “augmented” central committee meeting held over the weekend in Boksburg, Ekurhuleni.

In a statement released after the meeting the party said running separately from the ANC is necessary to halt what it called working-class political decline and rebuild independent strength. It stressed that it remained committed to the Alliance and did not intend to abandon it.

Up until now the SACP has generally not contested elections separately, with its members standing on ANC tickets in national and provincial elections. The SACP has stood independently in a number of municipal by-elections in recent years but has performed poorly.

The SACP also warned that the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) was under threat. The NDR is a core ideological tenet of the SACP and aims to move South Africa towards socialism and subsequently to full communism.

It said that the NDR was in “the political grip of the bourgeoisie but is also facing possible defeat as a consequence of the collaborationist tendencies”.

The party said the ANC was endorsing “neo-liberal policies and anti-transformation agendas”, and that the ANC’s adoption of the Growth Acceleration and Inclusion (GAIn) plan recently was proof of this. (The Common Sense reported on the GAIn plan, endorsing it, and said that it showed that South Africa could finally be on the right path).

Marius Roodt, deputy editor of The Common Sense, said that the SACP decision to contest elections while remaining part of the Tripartite Alliance showed that the SACP wanted to have its cake and eat it too.

Roodt said: “The SACP has a long history of complaining that its influence in the Tripartite Alliance keeps getting diluted. This is a complaint that it has been making since the 1990s, despite many of its senior members being appointed to important cabinet positions. But the party can’t have it all its own way – the best way for it to influence government policy will be for it to be elected into the government in its own right.”

“But South African voters have shown that they don’t want to buy what the SACP is selling. The SACP should brace itself for a poor performance if it does follow through with its threat to contest elections alone,” he said.