Is the South African Communist Party still on the track of Marxism?

On the African continent there are some communist parties as old as those in Europe and East Asia. The South African Communist Party (SACP) is one of them.

Formally the SACP still upholds Marxism-Leninism to this day¹. So are they reliable comrades of us? Before answering that question in final, the better question is: What is their understanding of what Marxism-Leninism is? There the answer is quickly found: The falsified, social-democratized understanding of the Khrushchev type.

Nobody else than Joe Slovo, General Secretary of the SACP between 1984 and 1991, could show that fact better. He was drawing the Stalin era in the usual darkest colors. He did so for example in January 1990 when he accused Stalin of “undemocratic and tyrannical practices” and praised Gorbachev², who would later openly say in an interview that he is a social-democrat, not a communist³. This shows how far on the road of social-democratization the SACP was already back then: They supported the Perestroika, the process of capitalist restoration in the USSR. But that was not everything.

Already in 1988 Joe Slovo tried to “disprove” Stalin’s theory of nations by claiming that Stalin would have seen nations only belonging to the “epoch of rising capitalism”, while this was untrue for many national countries emerging after World War II and especially for the case of Mongolia⁴.

It is true, Stalin wrote in his work “Marxism and the National Question” in 1913:

“A nation is not merely a historical category but a historical category belonging to a definite epoch, the epoch of rising capitalism.”⁵

So, Slovo was right, case closed? Not at all! After the mere sentence Slovo quoted, Stalin said:

“The process of elimination of feudalism and development of capitalism is at the same time a process of the constitution of people into nations. Such, for instance, was the case in Western Europe. The British, French, Germans, Italians and others were formed into nations at the time of the victorious advance of capitalism and its triumph over feudal disunity.”

So it is obvious that Stalin only meant the European “epoch of rising capitalism”. Before capitalism emerged firstly in Europe, nations could not exist. Stalin also stresses that overcoming feudalism and the emerging of capitalism brought forth the existence of nations. It is obvious that Stalin in 1913 could not foresee developments of decades afterwards, especially the creation of the socialist national states.

In 1929 Stalin addressed this matter in his work “The National Question and Leninism”. He was talking of “new, Soviet nations” and clearly said about those: “Such nations must be qualified as socialist nations.”⁶ In the most classical sense Slovo committed a case of revisionism here: He revised a correct theory to replace it by a wrong one instead. What is remarkable, is, that there were tries in the Khrushchev era to get rid of Stalin’s nation theory during the Khrushchev era, but it failed due to Lenin supporting this theory⁷. And not even that was everything.

According to the former Deputy General Secretary of the SACP, Jeremy Cronin, from the year 2011, Joe Slovo once spoke about an occasion of a speech by Khrushchev after the XXth Congress of the CPSU about Stalin’s alleged crimes, where he was asked by an anonymous person: “Where have you been, when these crimes were committed?” And Khrushchev is said to have shown into the silent rows: “That is where I was in those years.”⁸ The whole story is obviously made up. Not even Western anticommunists were that naive to believe such a tale. When “Khrushchev remembers” was published in 1970, which was based on smuggled tape recordings of talks with Khrushchev, the American editors were not so naive to believe him everything. Edward Crankshaw noted that Khrushchev’s memoirs were “sometimes self-contradictory, sometimes inaccurate” and have a “usually tendentious narrative”⁹. When it comes to Stalin, he even concretely said: “Because of condemning Stalin he is condemning himself.”¹⁰ It was well-known that Khrushchev was a high-ranking party official during the Stalin era in Ukraine and later also in the Central Committee of the CPSU. For anything he would blame on Stalin, he would be also responsible. He was no innocent person from some silent backrow at that time at all. This is only the way his revisionist disciples would try to portray him.

Of course Khrushchev lied about Stalin in his speech on the XXth Congress of the CPSU, as Grover Furr thoroughly analyzed over a decade ago in his book “Khrushchev lied”¹¹. Anyone can get this information today, who is willing to do so. But the South African revisionists instead continue to believe in long debunked claims. Even today, long after Joe Slovo´s demise. Tom Lodge wrote: “Not all the old guard were pleased with Joe Slovo’s efforts to distance the SACP from its Stalinist lineage.”¹² But that despite such sentiments by old cadres the revisionist, anti-Stalinist line was succeeding, can also be seen very well in the following example.

In 2021 on the centenary of the SACP Blade Nzimande wrote about “tragic and disastrous show trials and bloody purges of hundreds of thousands of outstanding communists during the worst of the Stalin years”¹³, without going into detail. He could also not have gone into detail without showing that he either defends counterrevolutionaries like Trotsky and Bukharin as “outstanding communists” or that he would make the claim that Yezhov acted “on Stalin’s order” while he was punished by execution for his murderous deeds in 1940. That today’s capitalist-turned China is praised by Blade Nzimande is no wonder, their line is almost exactly that line Bukharin represented. The claim that China would today be mainly a state-run economy is untrue and not even claimed by Xi Jinping himself. Xi proudly presented in November 2018 numbers about the dominance of the private sector in China’s national economy¹⁴. Therefore it is not a wonder that Stalin is not mentioned as a classic of Marxism-Leninism by the author:

“We have consistently sought inspiration from the classics of Marxism-Leninism, and not just from a Marx, Engels, or Lenin – but also from other great contributions whether by Rosa Luxemburg, or Antonio Gramsci, or, on our continent, Amilcar Cabral and Samir Amin, to mention just a few.”¹⁵

De jure Marx, Engels and Lenin are still seen as classics of Marxism-Leninism by the SACP. But what is that worth? The SACP openly rejects a revolution since its 2007 program “The South African Road to Socialism”¹⁶. This shows that Mao was completely right, when he said in November 1956:

“I would like to say a few words about the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. I think there are two ´swords´: one is Lenin and the other Stalin. The sword of Stalin has now been discarded by the Russians. Gomulka and some people in Hungary have picked it up to stab at the Soviet Union and oppose so-called Stalinism. The Communist Parties of many European countries are also criticizing the Soviet Union, and their leader is Togliatti. The imperialists also use this sword to slay people with. Dulles, for instance, has brandished it for some time. This sword has not been lent out, it has been thrown out. We Chinese have not thrown it away. First, we protect Stalin, and, second, we at the same time criticize his mistakes, and we have written the article ´On the Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat´. Unlike some people who have tried to defame and destroy Stalin, we are acting in accordance with objective reality.

As for the sword of Lenin, hasn’t it too been discarded to a certain extent by some Soviet leaders? In my view, it has been discarded to a considerable extent. Is the October Revolution still valid? Can it still serve as the example for all countries? Khrushchov’s report at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union says it is possible to seize state power by the parliamentary road, that is to say, it is no longer necessary for all countries to learn from the October Revolution. Once this gate is opened, by and large Leninism is thrown away.”¹⁷

When Stalin is discarded, it is to discard Lenin as well and with him the whole practice of the Marxist doctrine.

On the 29th July 1990 Nelson Mandela said on a rally:

“The ANC is not a Communist Party. But as a defender of democracy, it has fought and will continue to fight for the right of the Communist Party to exist. As a movement for national liberation, the ANC has no mandate to espouse a Marxist ideology. But as a democratic movement, as a Parliament of the people of our country, the ANC has defended and will continue to defend the right of any South African to adhere to the Marxist ideology if that is their wish.”¹⁸

As we all know, Mandela became the South African president in 1994. He kept his word in the sense that the SACP was able again to act legally. The ANC always protected that right. But is that enough for a communist party to legally exist and then vegetate? For the revisionist SACP it seems that it was enough for them. They willingly became the junior partner of the ANC instead of taking the lead as a vanguard of the working class¹⁹.

Already in the year 2002 Eddy Maloka asserted about the SACP:

“The Party, like its communist counterparts in some post-colonial African countries, is faced with the difficulty of having to survive as a socialist force within an alliance that is led by a nationalist movement.”²⁰

The “nationalist movement” is the ANC. The mentioned problem is true. It is even manifested into the “Constitution and Rules” of the SACP:

“To this end, the Communist Party aims […] to participate in and strengthen the liberation alliance of all classes and strata whose interests are served by the immediate aims of the national democratic revolution. This alliance is expressed through the liberation front headed by the African National Congress.”²¹

By the SACP writing the alliance with the ANC into its “Constitution and Rules”, it sort of became the sidecar of a social-democratic party. The SACP is not a party acting on its own anymore for decades, it is just a mere appendix of the ANC.

The SACP degenerated into a leftist social-democratic party effectively that still de jure claims to be a Marxist party. If the party would exist in Europe instead of Africa, it would be characterized as Euro”communist”, because that trend of social-democratization while in words still staying “communist” is typical for that type of party. In Europe a very similar example is the KPÖ in Austria.

It is up on us to prevent a similar future for our Party.