Centenary of the SACP

THE Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) was the first truly Marxist-Leninist Communist Party on the continent of Africa when it was established on July 30, 1921.

It was reconstituted as the South African Communist Party (SACP) in 1953. Although its membership was open to all, in practice, there was hardly any African member with the exception of TW Thibedi.

But, the CPSA in its early years of existence remained largely white in membership. This could be attributed to the fact that the white workers who came from Europe brought to our country a tradition of revolutionary class struggle and socialist ideas.

From 1924, there was a large influx of African workers and revolutionary African intellectuals. They included Moses Kotane, JB Marks, Thabo Mofutsanyana, Johannes Nkosi, Gana Makabeni, Josie Mpama, EJ Khaile and many others. In 1928 the party had 1 750 members, of whom 1 600 were Africans.

In the great anti-pass campaign of 1930, the Communist Party organised masses of Africans to burn their passes at a mass meeting on December 16, 1930. Johannes Nkosi, a leading communist activist was first shot, and then brutally thrashed to death by the police in Durban. Mofutsanyana and Marks narrowly escaped with their lives in Potchefstroom when police opened fire. Some were members of Umkhonto we Sizwe who fought and died in Zimbabwe in 1967.

Many of the new generation of Communists which has emerged since the Soweto upsurge in 1976, have joined Umkhonto we Sizwe, and some died on the field of battle. Some were massacred by the racists murderers at Matola in Mozambique. The apartheid colonial regime failed to strangle the Party at birth. It failed to wipe it out by 40 years of illegality. It was forced to unban the party, coupled with the hope that the Eastern European events would lead to its demise.

Yet, the party is stronger than it has ever been and remains confident that everything designed to negate its role will fail both now and in the future.

For many decades after its founding, the party stood alone as a non-racial political party embracing every section of our people. The very concept of majority rule was propagated first by our party. This was in 1929 (under the slogan of Black Republic) at the time when authority regarded the mere mention of voting rights for blacks as the worst treason, and when the national movement itself had not yet reached out for this objective.

It is the SACP that has raised the perspectives of internationalism, linking the mass democratic struggle with movements in all parts of the world working for democracy and for national and social emancipation.

The party was able to guard against the simplification of a complicated process. In essence, it emphasised that ignoring the democratic revolution was to ignore the national framework within every class struggle necessarily occurs. This is the point which ultra-leftists never understood.

Capitalism has proven to be a crisis-ridden mode of production which has failed to address socio-economic challenges. As we celebrate the centenary of the SACP, the struggle for socialism must be intensified. According to comrade Chris Hani, socialism is about decent shelter for those who are homeless.

It is about water for those who have no safe drinking water. It is about health care, it is about a life of dignity for the old. It is about overcoming the huge divide between urban and rural areas. Socialism is about rolling back the tyranny of the market. As long as the economy is dominated by an unelected, privileged few, the case for socialism will exist.