4. Dilemmas and Contradictions in the ANC Alliance

We initiated negotiations and we are serious about negotiations .…I think we need to have a lot of what I call revolutionary patience.

Liberation, Cohesion, and Heterogeneity

In the process of preparing itself for normal politics, the ANC was confronted with its own shortcomings. It was forced to become more self-critical. As ANC spokesperson Gill Marcus admitted, “The emotional support for the movement is massive, but translating that support into a knowledge and understanding of the ANC’s policies, strategies, programmes and tactics is proving to be an unenviable task” (Natal Mercury, February 4, 1991). The rival organizations that maintained the liberation posture, standing aloof from the politics of compromise, could much more easily maintain a purist stance on internal problems.

The initial organizational chaos within the ANC reflected badly on its potential for rule and deterred sympathizers and adversaries alike from considering the organization an effective alternative to the present government. “When the movement cannot even clean up the hopeless muddle in its own head office,” read an editorial in the National Party organ, Die Burger (July 4, 1991), “how does he [Mandela] actually expect that people should trust him to govern a taxing country like South Africa.” Other observers focused on the spreading political violence, which had clearly weakened the organization. One South African commentator, Harold Pakendorf, asked in all seriousness: “Does the ANC actually exist—as an organization—beyond the rhetoric and the headlines?” He concluded: “What is apparent is that the ANC does not initiate the violence in the country, does not direct it, does not control it and cannot end it” (Sunday Times, August 26, 1990). Blaming the victim was combined with naive dismay that the ANC could not guarantee instant stability.

The international press, too, voiced criticism and disappointment. The Guardian Weekly (April 14, 1991) concluded that the ANC “has not had a good year.” The writer, Roger Ormond, summarized sympathetically the various obstacles the ANC had encountered, but could not hide disillusionment: “Whatever else the ANC may have in its armoury—international goodwill, the backing of probably the majority of South Africans, and moral force, a magic wand is missing.” Other more cynical observers wondered about the temptations of exile. As Simon Barber commented, “The truth perhaps is that the ANC is only truly at home abroad. Abroad, it is treated as the government-in-waiting. Foreigners, especially in the West, fawn obediently, allow it to dictate their policies and grant it the illusion that it has won a famous victory. At home, there is no such obedience but rather a grinding confrontation with unpleasant facts” (Sunday Times, September 2, 1990).

The most important criticism of Mandela’s first period in freedom deplores his failure to reconcile the ANC with Inkatha. By placing himself squarely within the ANC fold upon his release, he also inherited the organization’s feuds and constraints. An alternative strategy would have been to assume the mantle of a reconciling statesman capable of rising above the petty quarrels. Mandela’s huge prestige, along with the widespread longing for peace and stability, would perhaps have allowed him to play such a nonpartisan role for a while. However, he would have had to rely solely on his prestige, since he would have sacrificed his organizational power base. By subjecting himself to the collective ANC discipline, Mandela eschewed the presidential role and faith in a fragile charisma in favor of a more democratic mandate and greater organizational clout. That decision is now bearing fruit in Mandela’s extraordinarily high prestige and influence within the organization.

The moral stature of its leader notwithstanding, it was in the organizational arena that the self-declared “premier organisation of the oppressed and democratic majority” faced major gaps.^[1] Having taken for granted its mass support, the ANC hierarchy gradually woke up to the harsh reality of a fragmented, confused, and skeptical constituency. So disappointing was the first ANC recruitment drive that the organization initially refused to reveal membership figures. Total membership in June 1991 was given as 521,181, well below the April target figure of 776,000. In contrast, the government minister in charge of constitutional negotiations boasted in all seriousness that the newly inclusive National Party could beat the ANC in a straight election contest. Granted, Gerrit Viljoen may have been engaging in wishful thinking—or perhaps he placed his trust in the manipulative power of the government-oriented television monopoly, whose immense influence on attitudes is still vastly underrated by the opposition.

The ANC certainly did not fare as well as expected. South African politics remains far from a marketplace where groups may compete on equal terms. However, many of the ANC’s dilemmas cannot be reduced to weak institutional support for people whose main political qualifications were suffering and commitment in the past. Some problems were of the ANC’s own making, the result of ideological contradictions and dubious policy decisions. The ANC argues that it has to remain a liberation movement rather than becoming a political party “because Apartheid is not yet gone.”^[2] However, there are other advantages to being a liberation movement, regardless of apartheid. Several foreign donors do not fund political parties. A liberation movement can continue to define itself as a broad alliance, while an ANC political party would obviously have to separate from the South African Communist Party. At the same time, though, defining itself as an ideologically heterogeneous liberation movement spares the organization from developing specific policies, since it cannot risk a split. Instead, it must rely more on symbols and myths, of which the notion of Africanization and the image of the defeated enemy are prime examples.^[3]

The symbolic Africanization of the ANC, however, hampered its support among other ethnic groups, who either stayed on the political sidelines or looked to the government for protection from a feared black majority domination. At the 1991 Durban National Congress, Mandela acknowledged that the ANC could ill afford to be content with its low level of success in attracting whites, Coloureds, and Indians. “We must ask ourselves frankly why this is so…confront the real issue that these national minorities might have fears about the future,” Mandela warned. The ANC had to remain a movement representative of all the people of South Africa, both in name and in reality.

Mandela’s commonsense emphasis on minority representation runs counter to the colorblind nonracialism of the ANC. For example, while Allan Boesak or Mac Maharaj publicly announce that they are unwilling to represent Coloureds or Indians in the ANC, Mandela’s sense of political reality leads him to stress the opposite. In Mandela’s old-fashioned recognition of ethnicity, “the ordinary man, no matter to what population group he belongs, must look at our structures and see that ‘I, as a coloured man, am represented. I have got Allan Boesak there whom I trust.’ And an Indian must also be able to say: ‘There is Kathrada—I am represented.’ And the whites must say: ‘There is Gerrit Viljoen—I have got representation’ ” (The Star, July 18, 1991). The racial representation that Mandela advocates constitutes a dramatic departure from the official doctrine of color-blind nonracialism hitherto propagated by the ANC. Were Mandela’s views followed literally, the ANC would embrace the previous National Party policy of group representation, paradoxically at the very moment when the old racist party has foresworn any reference to race or ethnicity in its constitutional blueprints.

Yet the pragmatic balancing of ethnicity in the parties and executives of a plural society is required by a political reality that is still largely perceived in ethnic terms, perhaps as much by the ruled as by the rulers. Mandela realistically senses this culture of ethnic perceptions, but he prescribes an unsuccessful remedy. In his noble attempt to avoid racial polarization and build a broad, ethnically diverse movement, he overlooks the fact that the non-African ANC members are not considered community representatives precisely because they have long disassociated themselves from their ethnicity by embracing ANC-style nonracialism.

Indeed, among the fifty elected members of the ANC’s National Executive Committee are seven whites, seven Indians, and seven Coloureds. In terms of statistics, then, the latter two groups are overrepresented in the ANC leadership, the Indians in particular. However, they do not represent “the Indian community”; they are not active in the ANC as Indians but as marginalized dissidents from the Indian community. They rejected the primacy of their Indianness long ago in favor of nonracial individualism. NEC and SACP member Mac Maharaj stated explicitly that he does not wish to be referred to as an Indian: he considers himself a third-generation South African, does not know any Indian language, and finds his only link to his Indian origin in a fondness for curry. Although most Indian South Africans share this political acculturation, they would nevertheless remain suspicious of Maharaj’s rejection of his cultural background. In short, the “Indian” representatives among the ANC officeholders are the wrong Indians as far as attracting support from the Indian sector is concerned. Similar perceptions of Coloured and white NEC members are held by their respective communities.

The whites on the NEC are all self-confessed members of the SACP and longtime political activists who have fought bitterly against the predominant attitudes among their ethnic peers. While the sophisticated tolerance of an Albie Sachs attracts admiration among liberal whites, the actions of someone like Ronny Kasrils—his unconventional behavior, the manipulative games he plays—serve to deter other whites from supporting the ANC. In fact, the state television network seems deliberately to put characters like Kasrils on its programs in order to discredit the ANC.

Perhaps the most amazing feature of the 1991 NEC is the total absence of liberal whites who have fought the anti-apartheid struggle inside the country in sympathy with the ANC. The ANC made no effort to woo into its ranks some of its potential high-profile supporters, people like F. van Zyl Slabbert, Alex Boraine, or Wynand Malan, who enjoy great popularity among anti-apartheid whites. The SACP faction, which in the past exercised the power of vetoing which whites were allowed to join the ANC, does not wish to share its monopoly with strategists of a different ideological outlook. A few white Members of Parliament switched from the Democratic Party to the ANC in 1992, but their very move alienated them from their former constituency. They were not influential public figures in the first place; nor have they risen in the ANC hierarchy or determined the ANC’s image for the non-African public.

As in many political organizations, longtime activism on behalf of the party as a foot soldier is ranked higher than expertise or appeal to voters. Candidates have to earn their mandate through long service, or suffering. However, as long as the ANC has no prominent liberal minority members among its officeholders, it is unlikely to make any inroads into skeptical (as opposed to hostile) minorities. Ironically, the previously racist National Party, particularly if it bills itself as a “Christian Democratic law-and-order, free-market alliance,” may turn out to be the most nonracial grouping by attracting widespread support from security-conscious conservatives across the racial spectrum.

Public opinion polls show that the ANC-SACP has failed to attract supporters from the three minority ethnic groups (see Table 1). Although black support for the National Party increased between 1991 and 1992, it remains quite weak. The most dramatic change since 1990 has been the massive support for the National Party among Coloureds and Indians, which in July 1992 exceeded white support for the ruling party. The National Party being accepted as the political home for these two minorities is surprising for several reasons: during elections for the tricameral parliament, Indians and Coloureds overwhelmingly (80 percent) boycotted the event; besides declaring itself nonracial, the National Party has not changed its program, name, Afrikaner symbolism, or high-profile personnel in any way in order to appeal to Coloured or Indian voters. Therefore, it is clearly the fear of ANC domination and Africanization that drives minority voters into the orbit of the National Party. The party may even have additional potential appeal for African voters as the guarantor of law and order. In a survey of 3,500 Africans, 35 percent responded that they “feel close” to the National Party (Schlemmer, Indicator South Africa, Spring 1992, p. 13). Although Mandela, de Klerk and Buthelezi all lost support during the squabbling over negotiations, the lineup at the end of 1992 is approximately ANC, 45 percent; NP, 25 percent; PAC, 5 percent, Inkatha, 10 percent; CP, 5 percent; Democratic Party and others, 5 percent.

Questioning the ANC-SACP Alliance

A strange discrepancy exists between the reaction of liberal, nonsocialist anti-apartheid activists in South Africa and their counterparts in the international anti-apartheid movement. Foreign supporters of the ANC hardly ever mention the ANC’s alliance with the South African Communist Party, while South African liberal democrats are greatly concerned about the influence of the SACP in a future ANC government. Foreign activists, however, either ignore these anxieties or dismiss them as red-baiting or relics of the cold war. Yet Oxford political scientist R. W. Johnson has rightly called attention to the success of the SACP in setting the agenda for the anti-apartheid forces worldwide: “Bolstered by Eastern bloc financial and political support, the SACP became the paymasters and organisers of the ANC in exile, effortlessly colonising anti-apartheid "support organisations’ in many countries, and dictating terms to non-Communist sympathisers such as the World Council of Churches, trade unions, student organisations, U.N. agencies and so forth.”^[4] Johnson, who is considered to be on the British Left, would certainly be criticized for this view by those who do not feel that they were duped by the SACP and who supported the anti-apartheid cause without consulting mentors. However, he correctly stresses the influence of the growing and committed group, which has some twenty-five thousand members.

Inside South Africa, the ANC’s alliance with the SACP constitutes probably the single most important reason why so few whites, Coloureds, and Indians have formally joined the ANC, even though their ideological sympathies and hopes for the future lie with that organization.^[5] Peter Brown, a victim of state persecution, a sterling liberal of long standing, and a close associate of Alan Paton, has perhaps most clearly articulated these concerns in his journal Reality. The SACP is a separate party with separate policies within the ANC, and, as Brown observes, “it has not been SACP policy in the past for its members to leave their convictions and their practices outside the door when they join another organisation.” Brown thus asks whether the “high proportion of what seem to be members of the SACP on the new ANC national executive committee” does not mean that the ANC as a whole is influenced in the SACP direction (Reality, July 1991). Indeed, the more the ANC becomes a normal political party, the hollower sounds the standard answer—that the Communists are only loyal members of a liberation movement from which they take orders. When the same personnel serve crucial roles in both parties, either their policies have merged or the one is using the other for its own ends. At issue is not only the economic vision of self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninists but also the commitment to multiparty democracy and the tolerance of political dissent.

As Idasa executive director Alex Boraine has pointed out, voters have a right to know whom they voted for and the specifics of the policies a candidate supports. However, this will not be possible if the ANC and the SACP continue to fuse their images. “It is in the interest of both the ANC and perhaps the SACP to have a very clear distinction between them because the current alliance will inevitably come back to haunt them” (Cape Times, July 10, 1991).

The government, too, perceives problems with the SACP. As long as the ANC-SACP alliance exists, a genuine NP-ANC coalition government of national unity will be resisted by sections of the National Party, because of potential objections from the right wing. Simply put, the government makes itself vulnerable to the accusation of having allowed Communists into the halls of power. Such a perception gives the right wing a major boost and could trigger more terrorist acts, quite apart from the fact that it works to delegitimize the historic compromise among whites more generally. Pretoria would therefore want to see the ANC-SACP marriage end as soon as possible after the first election. At the same time, in the first democratic election campaign, a nonracial coalition led by the National Party could also greatly benefit from the ANC-SACP alliance. The association of the ANC with the Communists would deter conservative black voters from supporting the ANC, while permitting the National Party to parade itself as the guardian of religion and free enterprise.

SACP strategists, who piggyback their socialist vision onto the populist ANC, do not see the propagandistic benefits that this alliance grants their mutual adversary. Instead, they elevate the alliance into a great threat, of which the government is supposedly very afraid. In the words of Jeremy Cronin, “What the regime most fears, and with good reason, is the combination of a working-class political party with a relatively large following (the SACP), and a massive national liberation movement.”^[6] The West European model of a capital-oriented conservative party (“Christian Democrats”) and a labor-oriented social-democratic ANC sharing the political center in roughly equal measure would marginalize the Communists, relegating them to the same status as fringe parties on the Right. Therefore, Cronin quite logically insists on “a broad national democratic front, and not a charade of a west European democracy.” The need for such a broad united front is justified by the task of overcoming three centuries of underdevelopment, which can be accomplished only through democratization in conjunction with “the socialist project.” In contrast to the feasible social-democratic vision of reformed capitalism stands the SACP vision of a historically discredited socialism which denies emphatically that such socialism would impede both economic development and democratic competition in the post-Marxist reality of South Africa in the 1990s.

In its own eyes, the ANC leadership made its peace with business long ago. However, it has in fact failed to communicate its social-democratic program convincingly, allowing the specter of Marxism and the fear of expropriation in a command economy to impede much-needed economic growth. Even sober liberal analysts abroad take the ambiguity of the ANC’s economic stance and its alliance with the SACP as serious threats. For example, under the heading “South Africa Not for the Squeamish,” an editorial in one British paper commented: “The biggest single question continues to be the attitude of the African National Congress to private ownership. Marxism may be a dying creed in Eastern Europe, but it is alive and well in the ANC, which remains formally committed to nationalisation of leading companies” (The Independent, September 4, 1991). Thus, the ANC is faced with a predicament. If it openly declared its accommodation with capitalism, it would lose major sections of its radical constituency; however, if it played the card of socialist rhetoric much longer, it would not attract the essential investment to enable it to deliver on even a minimum of the high economic expectations. Instead, the cultivated ideological ambiguity of the ANC, the contradictory signals it emitted, contributed to the further deterioration of an already weakened economy, in part by foreclosing on the option that the negotiations could be legitimized by material gains. At the same time, the lack of political education among black South Africans did nothing to alleviate the anxieties of much-needed investors with access to risk capital.

Mandela has repeatedly affirmed the ANC’s close cooperation with its long-standing SACP ally. In an interview with Stanley Uys, Mandela declared: “We don’t think that we have been persuaded to feel that there is something wrong in the alliance. I don’t think that we could ever be persuaded to put an end to that alliance” (The Star, July 18, 1991). If the ANC were to push for a separation now, before the new constitution is accepted, the split would not only deprive the ANC of many leading activists but would divide the movement along ideological lines. This dilemma is largely responsible for the ANC’s reluctance to transform itself from a broad liberation movement into a political party espousing precise economic policies.

Who or what, then, is the SACP? How serious a political and intellectual force is the group in the aftermath of the cold war? Is the party a band of unreformed Stalinists? Or a collection of reluctant social democrats? What does it mean to be a communist after the collapse of the communist metropole?

Few political groups are as misunderstood and misrepresented as the SACP. While in the past the South African government regularly painted the SACP as militant, KGB-led terrorists, the American press has characterized them as “not of the Gorbachev stripe but more along the lines of fire-breathing Trotsky of yesteryear” (The Wall Street Journal, February 5, 1990). If anything, however, the SACP has been influenced more by Trotsky’s main opponent, Stalin. Until 1989 the party regularly endorsed Soviet policy and criticized its detractors as “childish Trotskyist ultra-leftists” or “ghetto-nationalists.”

The alliance between the ANC and SACP makes the strategic logic of South African communists particularly important for the future of democracy. Joe Slovo, the former SACP general secretary, is Mandela’s right-hand man in the negotiations. Most leading members of the ANC’s National Executive Committee are self-declared communists. Only in the apartheid state does the hammer and sickle proudly fly at mass rallies. Francis Fukuyama may naively proclaim the end of history because the “principles of liberal capitalism have won” and “cannot be improved upon,”^[7] but as long as gross inequality and the historical exclusion of the majority persist, all hopes that Eastern Europe’s embrace of capitalism will prove infectious in South Africa will remain wishful thinking. The director of Anglo-American, Michael O’Dowd, may invoke the recent mass retreat from socialism or “the stifling of initiative and progress implicit in Slovo’s hatred of profits,”^[8] but the dream of greater equality and nonexploitation is fueled rather than stifled by Anglo-American monopolies. This reality gives the SACP’s pronouncements a special importance, its quaint orthodoxy and discredited Stalinist past notwithstanding. The end of state socialism, many argue, heralds the future of democratic socialism in South Africa.

South African socialists, like their comrades elsewhere on the continent, face the problem that socialist decolonization has met only with failure; there are no successes to emulate. In Zimbabwe socialist forces were subjugated to the national struggle, the unions eventually becoming as emasculated as they had been under the Smith regime, despite the Marxist rhetoric of the state. After national liberation, socialism in Angola and Mozambique became entrenched in an official Marxist state agenda, but it proved as disastrous an economic failure as it was for their East European sponsors. Neither Zimbabwe nor Angola nor Mozambique, let alone the “market Stalinism” of China or the one-party dictatorship of Castro, can therefore serve South Africa as a model for socialist transformation, quite apart from the differing economic bases of the countries in question.

Slovo has made the first attempt to shed the ideological ballast of a Stalinist past and to come to grips with his party’s role in supporting Stalinism.^[9] But Slovo’s rather partial description of Stalinism does not go nearly far enough in criticizing a tyrannical system whose terrors are akin to those of fascism as well as of apartheid. Moreover, he fails to recognize the intrinsic causes of Stalinist tyranny, since he blames human error rather than fundamental Leninist tenets. But the Leninist notion of a “vanguard party” possessed of “moral superiority” remains incompatible with liberal equality. Even if the vanguard role must be earned rather than assumed, as Slovo now realizes, commitment per se is no criterion of truth or higher morality.

The exclusivity of SACP membership is rationalized on the grounds that the party wants only tested and committed activists, not opportunists or deadwood on whom the leadership cannot rely. In practice, this has given rise to a self-styled elite within the opposition movement. SACP members are credited with a higher consciousness and a deeper insight into political reality. In Mac Maharaj’s definition of the vanguard, “Its selectivism is to ensure that those who say they want to join the Party come to a higher level of consciousness at the level of activism and at the level of understanding the political realities.”^[10] It is, however, the party hierarchy, rather than adherence to any particular theory, that determines what constitutes “correct consciousness.” Maharaj despises the “ultra-Left,” dismissing them as “armchair theorists.” He urges his leftist critics to “move to a constructive mode of thinking and acting” if they do not wish to disappear as chaff “into the dustbins of history.” In Maharaj’s Leninist vision, ultra-leftists will have to abandon their “puritanical forms of principles in the furnace of struggle” and emerge, like the communists, as “steel.” Not even the handpicked members of the Broederbond are expected automatically to display such “steeled” loyalty to the cause of the Volk. Only after a six-month probation period of supervised study and activism can a potential comrade be admitted to the SACP.

Yet an elite group may be needed to discipline and educate a vast pool of undereducated and brutalized youth. Furthermore, for sheer self-protection the party may have to be selective about potential members, who might otherwise threaten the leadership, upset the cohesion, and discredit the party by questionable actions carried out in the name of communism. Those problems already constitute the negative side of the ANC’s open membership policy, problems for which the organization has found no answer other than futile exhortations for better political education. Since the ANC has yet to develop an effective pragmatic strategy for politicization, almost by default it is the SACP that provides political guidance and organizational clout.

During the period when the ANC was illegal, its organizational vacuum was obscured by the emphasis on underground structures. The government’s exaggeration of the clandestine ANC-SACP threat, on the one hand, and, on the other, the activists’ wish to believe themselves a threat encouraged both antagonists in the same illusion. One of the most surprising revelations since the normalization of South African politics in February 1990 has been how little the opposition is in fact prepared to assume its self-proclaimed role. Mandela’s virtual deification after his release, together with his undisputed role as leader, can rightly be explained only in the context of an organizational and ideological vacuum, hidden behind the myth of a mass democratic movement. As many critics have pointed out, neither its mass nor its democratic character should be accepted at face value.

Stalinism Reconsidered

During an interview in 1988 Slovo admitted that the SACP was part of a cult of personality worship. “I was defending the Stalinist trials of the thirties.” To his credit, he does not plead ignorance, as so many other converts from tyrannical regimes often do. “It’s not that we did not know what was going on, but we just rejected whatever evidence was produced and rationalised our way out of it.…It resulted in a defence in principle of everything Russia did both domestically and internationally.”^[11] Indeed, the party that in 1929 was told by the Kremlin to campaign for a black republic in South Africa subsequently supported the Soviet invasions of Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), and Afghanistan. Long after Arthur Koestler’s seminal account of the show trials in Darkness at Noon (1945), long after most European intellectuals on the left had grown disillusioned with the Soviet Union, long after Eurocommunism and Solzhenitsyn, the SACP’s solidarity with the Soviet Union remained unshaken.

Only a few months before the collapse of the East European client states in 1989, the SACP adopted a program that stated: “Socialist countries today represent a powerful international force. Some of them possess highly developed economies, a considerable scientific base, and a reliable military defence potential.…A new way of life is taking shape in which there are neither oppressors nor the oppressed, neither exploiters nor the exploited, in which power belongs to the people.”^[12] How can a people with such an acute sense of the injustice that prevails in their homeland become so blind to oppression elsewhere? The admirable early commitment of South African communists to the cause of liberation has fed on this self-definition of the SACP as the guardian of a universal political and economic rationality, of which the Soviet Union was considered the first realization.^[13]

Although the SACP was never an offshoot of the Soviet Communist Party, its intention to root itself as an African communist party acquired momentum only with the collapse of the party in Moscow. The reaction of the South African communists to Gorbachev’s abolition of the party bordered on the frivolous; it refused to draw historical lessons. In the opinion of the SACP’s Essop Pahad: “If you lose your mother you cry and bury her, but you don’t jump into the grave with her” (Financial Mail, August 30, 1991). Pahad argues that events in the Soviet Union merely confirmed what the SACP has believed all along: “You can’t build socialism in an undemocratic society.” As his critics point out, though, the SACP somehow managed to keep this belief very quiet. Pahad further maintains that “it is true that we were often in common agreement with the party in Moscow, but we didn’t take our line from it.” If past SACP policy was indeed based on independent judgment rather than on necessity, however, it makes the fault that much worse.

Concurrently, an editorial in the anti-apartheid, pro-ANC Weekly Mail offered a rare frank criticism: “It is deeply shaming to reflect that the South African liberation movement—not just the SACP but the ANC too—could uncritically support a system so dehumanising and so lacking in the qualities that the movement espouses in South Africa” (August 30–September 6, 1991). For fear of seeming to join the government’s anticommunist hysteria, the independent alternative press and the democratic South African Left in general failed to elaborate the Weekly Mail’s point and reprimand the movement about its dubious ideological baggage. Slovo now claims that he had his personal doubts since the mid-1950s. However, he remained silent on the subject, and the party continued to endorse subsequent Stalinist practices. When pressed as to why, Slovo can only answer in terms of expedience: “It became almost risky and counterproductive to battle this issue out in our Party. It would have caused an enormous split, and it had less and less bearing on our own work” (Die Suid-Afrikaan, February 19, 1989). That opportunism could shape policy, and on such a vital issue, disproves Slovo’s current claim that internal democracy has always existed in the SACP. If the party could not take a principled position on Stalinist crimes for fear of a split (or, more likely, for fear of being denied Soviet assistance), then its internal debates on relatively peripheral issues are reduced to meaningless distractions.

Given the political goal of effectively opposing apartheid but the ethical necessity of denouncing Stalinism, the SACP was obviously in a predicament. The Soviet Union construed any criticism as disloyalty. Under these circumstances, had the SACP taken a public stance against its sole sponsor, it would have found itself cut off from financial and military assistance. In the absence of alternative sources of support, the SACP would have condemned itself to organizational ineffectiveness and political paralysis, which would in turn have jeopardized the very purpose for which the Party was formed: the liberation of South Africa. Faced with such a dilemma, the Party opted for organizational clout rather than morality—perhaps understandably, although the choice of expediency over ethics must be difficult to rationalize for a party that claims to possess moral superiority.

The issue, however, is not whether members of the SACP made the wrong choice in favoring politics over morality. The real question is whether the party overstepped the bounds of political necessity and in fact enthusiastically endorsed Stalinist practices. There is considerable evidence that this was indeed the case. The majority of party members identified with Soviet strategy as politically desirable and ethically justifiable. They glorified and romanticized the Soviet Union, defending it against all criticism. In so doing, they also discredited the anti-apartheid cause. For adopting this politically foolish, but above all morally reprehensible position, the party ought to be held responsible, just as former supporters of apartheid should not now be let off the hook with the lame excuse that the grand experiment has failed. Association with a criminal system characterizes both antagonists, although they had different motives.

To be sure, there was also some internal dissent. Some party members left with a troubled conscience; others were purged by the Stalinists themselves. As an individual, Slovo cannot be equated with the organization. Yet the record shows that, in all its public and official pronouncements, the party spoke with one Stalinist voice. Party publications did not reflect any debate—not even slight qualms—about taking a stance that had become, at the very least, greatly taboo.

There is now a new myth emerging that has whites joining the SACP for the noble cause of fighting apartheid rather than advancing socialism. As George Fredrickson put it: “Many of the whites who joined the Communist Party seem to have done so more because they hoped to prevent race war and to achieve a racially integrated and egalitarian South Africa than out of support for the Soviet Union or even for a proletarian revolution.”^[14] Fredrickson here chooses to overlook the fact that only a small percentage of party members are white. Nor does his statement sufficiently attend to the possibility that committed Communists might very well have a dual motive, seeing in the ascendancy of the Soviet Union and of socialism the most effective way to defeat South African racism. There is ample evidence, however, that whatever the initial motivation for joining the party, it was frequently soon overshadowed by the advocacy of Soviet policy—sometimes at the expense of the goal of an egalitarian South Africa, since the Soviet doctrine of “socialism in one country” subjected all local concerns to the overriding interests of Moscow. The SACP’s submission to all Soviet foreign policy decisions is in fact clearly documented in the party’s publications. Not only did the party invariably and uncritically accept this submission to its sponsor—even on such controversial issues as the Hitler-Stalin pact—but party publications and resolutions consistently endorsed and defended Soviet imperialism, while inveighing militantly against its Western counterpart.

The SACP’s initial rejection of South Africa’s entry into World War II offers a good example. The party denounced South Africa as exhibiting the worst kind of fascism, which should be fought at home rather than in Europe on the side of the Western imperialists; one editorialist for the party organ declared in June 1940 that he “would rather be a Jew in Hitler Berlin than a Native in Johannesburg.”^[15] It was only after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941 that the Party changed its antiwar stance. “Accordingly,” a party historian writes, “the Party launched a series of dynamic campaigns to transform South Africa’s contribution to the Allied war effort in accordance with the potentialities.”^[16]

The question remains: Can the Communists’ dedication to the anti-apartheid cause, the suffering they endured like no other group, and the bravery they showed obliterate their simultaneous political foolishness and moral culpability in supporting Stalinism? The tendency is now to forgive and forget, to excuse past failings in light of other achievements. Thus, in a review of Baruch Hirson’s bitter Trotskyite critique of his Stalinist comrades, Jeremy Kridler concludes: “Whatever their involvement in expulsions of Party members and despite their subservience to the Moscow line, what they strove and bravely fought for threatened a racist and authoritarian state. And in the last analysis, this—not the shoddy, Moscow-induced politics in which they sometimes engaged—is their legacy” (Weekly Mail, June 22, 1990). However, assuming human rights are indeed universal, the anti-apartheid struggle, no matter how noble and dedicated, cannot turn a blind eye to violations of human rights elsewhere. Expedient silence destroys credibility. As long as the party does not come to terms intellectually with its errors, its support for one of the worst tyrannies will invalidate its egalitarian claims. The Stalinist past haunts the democratic future.

One striking feature of the renewed debate over socialism versus capitalism in the wake of Eastern European developments is the emphasis both protagonists place on performance. Slovo goes beyond a sterile comparison of output but still cannot resist praising the Soviet Union for its cultural and material achievements: “There are more graduate engineers than in the U.S., more graduate research scientists than in Japan and more medical doctors per head than in Western Europe. It also produces more steel, fuel, and energy than any other country. How many capitalist countries can match the achievements of most of the socialist world in the provision of social security, child care, the ending of cultural backwardness and so on? There is certainly no country in the world which can beat Cuba’s record in the sphere of health care.”^[17]

Even if these statistics were taken at face value, one would have to ask what they mean in broader terms. The former Soviet Union is the only industrialized society in which life expectancy is declining. The country has to import food and, despite its large number of graduates or its level of steel production, it lacks basic consumer goods. Cuba may have the best health system, but it also quarantines anyone diagnosed with AIDS. Finally, what does “ending of cultural backwardness” really mean, when after seventy years of socialism a country like the Soviet Union is racked by ethnic riots, religious intolerance, and anti-Semitism? As Western Europe denationalizes, the socialist East renationalizes, and with the worst kind of nineteenth-century chauvinism. How is “cultural backwardness” to be measured?

All the same, while the rest of the world is celebrating with the oppressed Eastern European populations the downfall of corrupt regimes, the editor of The African Communist, Brian Bunting, regrets the new search for democratic socialism that the liberalization in Eastern Europe has made possible: “The disappearance of the communist governments of Eastern Europe has been an undeniable setback to the liberation movement” (New Nation, June 22, 1990). In true cold war fashion, he equates “the threat to the Soviet Union, Cuba and other communist governments” with “the domination of imperialism.”

For other members of the SACP, the collapse of the communist movement merely represents a process of “cleansing.” One editorial in The African Communist (no. 121, 1990) reiterated the SACP’s goals: “to establish a socialist republic in South Africa based on the principles of Marxism-Leninism, to promote the ideas of proletarian internationalism and the unity of the workers of South Africa.” As the same editorial makes clear, the party is quite capable of defiantly closing its eyes to Eastern Europe: “Nothing that has happened in Eastern Europe or elsewhere makes us believe that this perspective (Marxism-Leninism) needs to be altered.” As if cocooned in a dream world, in 1989 the party’s Congress declared that “the advances of the socialist countries inspire the working people throughout the world.” Such dogmatic statements simply refuse to acknowledge that events in Eastern Europe have discredited the socialist idea generally.

A last example of the ANC-SACP’s relationship with Honecker’s German Democratic Republic (GDR) further illustrates the problematic attitude of the ANC toward dictatorships. Long after this embarrassing “socialist” model mercifully passed into history and long after its domestic oppression had been exposed in all its lurid details, the official ANC journal Sechaba in its last issue, published in December 1990, celebrated with a front-page picture of Honecker and an editorial about the cordial ANC-GDR relations. The ANC writer bemoans “the loss the liberation movement has suffered with the disappearance of the German Democratic Republic as we knew it, and the emergence of a new Germany.” The ANC author in all earnestness asserts that “Sechaba was printed voluntarily by GDR workers” in what was the state-owned and Stasi-controlled “Erich Weinert” printing press. Without noticing the contradiction that for the first time the workers could really make a voluntary decision after the disappearance of their regime, Sechaba explains that “the new conditions under which our supporters have to operate do not allow direct assistance…, such as we have been receiving all along, to be given.” The ANC blames “capitalist competition” because now the plant “must give all its available time to this competition.” Any student press in a basement could have typeset and printed the thin “official organ of the ANC” during a few overtime hours, if they were really committed. But far more serious moral issues arise from this false lament.

The SACP and the ANC have yet to question the morality of accepting support from a dictatorship, be it the GDR, Libya, China, or Cuba. It could be argued that American foundation money is also tainted by slavery and imperialism, or that even pious Scandinavian or Canadian government grants are ultimately derived from workers’ exploitation. But at least these donors do not impose their will on their subjects, who can get rid of them if they disagree strongly. In this respect, donations to the ANC indeed are based on consent of the people. The East German, Chinese, or Libyan citizen has no choice or say in who their executives are, how their taxes are spent, or how they are collected. This remains the essential difference between a democratic and a criminal autocracy. Even if no support is available from the right side, is it therefore justifiable to align oneself with the criminal camp? No church, charity, or other worthy cause, no matter how much in dire straits, could knowingly accept money from the Mafia without discrediting its own cause. Yet the ANC has for decades known about the undemocratic privileges of an East European nomenclatura in the midst of the misery of its people. ANC representatives themselves had the luxuries of a socialist elite showered on them and willingly participated in their prescribed role. The East German ANC representative even went hunting with Honecker, who cunningly subsidized Sechaba in return for praise by a universally acclaimed liberation movement. Yet it never occurred to the South African exiles that by accepting “fraternal solidarity” from such a dubious source they also ignored the plight of the oppressed in East Germany, let alone that they harmed their own goal of establishing democracy through association and praise for dictatorships. To this day, most ANC leaders would find such moral reasoning odd and mischievous. They instead argue pragmatically that they had no choice but to take money, regardless of the sponsor’s record, if they wanted their organization to survive.

The concern for the democratic Left must now be what life is left of “Marxism” after being espoused for decades by the Honeckers, Castros, or Mugabes of this world. As indeed has been argued by many democratic socialists, if Marxism or any critical counterforce against an unfettered, triumphant capitalism is to be retrieved, it has everything to gain from being thus “discredited.” By reappropriating the original Marxism from its Leninist and Stalinist detractors, the democratic Left faces a unique historic opportunity to develop alternatives free of the bureaucratic coercion of “really existing socialism.” Instead, a pedestrian ANC-SACP mourns the breakdown of its own chains, because it lost a printing press in the process! The Eastern European transformations in 1989 constitute the most fundamental change in the world since the French revolution two hundred years earlier. What does it say about the state of mind of a liberation movement and an allied Communist Party that it laments the event, not to speak of comprehending it?

Slovo defines Stalinism as “socialism without democracy.” When discussing its failings, he repeatedly refers to “distortions” from the top. In other words, it was pilot error, not the plane’s structure, that was responsible for the crash. And even the pilot’s faults are referred to euphemistically. Ruthless purges—such as the systematic killing, before the German invasion, of substantial sections of the Russian officer corps by a paranoid clique—are described as “damage wrought to the whole Soviet social fabric (including its army) by the authoritarian bureaucracy.” There is no comprehension of Stalinism as “internal colonialism,” akin to apartheid.

Slovo’s use of the phrase “judicial distortions” is tantamount to a rationalization of the show trials: by merely deploring the excesses of Stalinism, it leaves the principle intact. Had Stalin killed a few million people less—even if he had killed only one comrade—it would still be a crime. Yet nowhere in Slovo’s account does one find an adequate explanation for the Stalinist holocaust, let alone moral outrage. Instead, the SACP chairman attempts to distance himself from an embarrassing past and to deflect attention from his failure to examine the causes of the Stalinist tyranny onto one of the unfortunate consequences of that tyranny: the discrediting of socialism. Accurate naming, rather than metaphor and euphemism, remains crucial to understand and overcome a criminal past.^[18] Stalinism’s primary fault was not that it ended up discrediting socialism. Slovo’s laudatory attempt to reflect critically on Stalinism ultimately fails, because he does not draw the obvious connections.

Almost alone on the left, Frederick Johnstone insists that the Gulag is about apartheid, that Auschwitz is about Cambodia. “It is certainly no accident that even now, by the end of the twentieth century, the horrendous fact that the human toll of Stalinism exceeded Nazi crimes against humanity remains greatly unreflected upon in its deeper implications. Or that many on the Left would dismiss any attempt to think about the Leninist state in terms of the apartheid state.”^[19] But, as Johnstone rightly reminds us, the victims of Auschwitz, the Gulags, and apartheid are not concerned in whose name they were killed or maimed.

The apartheid labor system compares almost favorably with the Leninist system that prohibits independent trade unions. Both combat idleness. But forced labor cloaked in rhetoric about discipline for the people’s cause is worse, because of its pretenses. In the original Marxian vision, alienated labor was to be abolished, Leninists glorifying higher productivity as the patriotic duty of selfless brigades. The apartheid laborer at least knows of his exploitation; he complies only grudgingly, because there is no alternative. But in addition to exploiting them, the Leninists and Stalinists betrayed their victims. This explains the magnitude of the fury for revenge when those victims were set free. Blacks in South Africa, in contrast, have always known that racial rule was for the benefit of the ruling race. That rule now drawing to a close, they do not feel cheated as hardworking Communist Party members did when the luxurious corruption of the people’s representatives was finally revealed. Hence, rather than wanting to turn the tables, most blacks merely desire their proper share.

Slovo reiterates the scientific nature of Marxism. It is a “revolutionary science” or a “social science whose fundamental postulates and basic insights into the historical processes remain a powerful (because accurate) theoretical weapon.” The insistence on the scientific nature of historical processes, which can only be established by positivistic methods, has long been abandoned by most historians and critical theorists, who instead stress the hermeneutic, interpretive task of analysts. In this view, the very term social science is a misnomer, inasmuch as it assumes that human behavior is predetermined by laws similar to those in the natural sciences that can be verified or disproved by some objective method, whether Marxist or otherwise. But such a postulate denies human agency and the essential open-endedness of history. It usually results in a crude reductionism or an economistic approach that neglects the fact that people have not only material interests but ideals as well. The infinitely varied subjectivity through which people perceive, interpret, and act on their world cannot be reduced to an epiphenomenon, the powerful attraction of materialist rationality notwithstanding. Individuals are more than agents of interests.

Slovo restates the central tenets of “Marxist revolutionary science,” namely, that the class struggle is the motor of human history, that “all morality is class-related,” and that “working class internationalism” is the most liberating concept. Who, however, are “the people”? What is the “working class”? Who is the “society as a whole” that, according to Slovo, should assume control? In the context of the South African debate of democrats against Leninists, Mervyn Frost has rightly called attention to a point made at the turn of the century by Robert Michels and later documented by Max Weber. “In modern states control by society as a whole means in practice bureaucratic rule,” Michels wrote. “Those who say organisation inevitably say oligarchy.” As Frost argues, oligarchic tendencies can only be counteracted from below, by a democratic culture, not by Leninist “democratization from above.”^[20]

Like Marx, Slovo hypostatizes an abstract working class. But the real working class is comprised of blacks and whites, men and women, religious adherents and agnostics, homosexuals and heterosexuals, skilled and unskilled workers, all of whom live in urban or rural settings. Most important, there are the employed and the unemployed. By ignoring all these faultlines, the abstract concept of a working class misses the crucial social texture. Yet whether a group is or can become the leading force in a conflict depends as much on those differing social conditions as on common material interests.

To expect a group to feel solidarity because of shared exploitation is a long-standing illusion. Yet it is precisely on such a self-deception that the SACP bases its strategy. Working-class unity and solidarity have failed worldwide. Ever since the German social democrats voted for the Kaiser’s war budget in 1914, the dream of internationalism has suffered repeated setbacks, although the idea has managed to retain an elusive attractiveness. In a crisis, organized labor will want to prove its patriotism, especially in the face of conservative accusations of disloyalty. Workers thus participate in nationalist euphorias in different political cultures as readily as their class antagonists—from the World Wars, to the Falkland conflict, to the Armenian-Azerbaijani clashes in the Soviet Union. External enemies defuse internal class conflicts (albeit only until the enemy is defeated). The split labor market that exists in most Western states—more expensive indigenous labor pitted against cheaper, more exploitable immigrant labor—proves an ideal situation in which to counteract union solidarity, let alone militancy. Ethnic divisions also undermine solidarity. Even so, working-class racism and chauvinism remain among the great taboos within the Left.

Given this record, it is all the more surprising that the dream of working-class unity lives on in the society whose white and black segments are politically and legally furthest apart. Because the economic recession also hurt the privileged white working class, the SACP argues, the prospect of a common struggle with black workers has arisen. “It is becoming clearer to sections of white workers, faced with growing impoverishment, that they have to stand up in the face of economic policies aimed at appeasing big business and strengthening the Apartheid regime.” Despite the long tradition of evidence to the contrary, the South African Left continues to hope that resentment of big business by white workers will translate into common action with black unions. “This has opened up some possibilities for these workers to be drawn into struggle, and in action, to realise more clearly that their true interests lie with their fellow black workers and the democratic trade union movement.”^[21]

However, in the perennial conflict between common interests and nationalist-racist surrogates for class solidarity, it is futile to bank on the superior rationality of interests winning out. The symbolic satisfaction of belonging to an imagined community possessed of superior qualities easily defeats the potential real benefits of solidarity. The appeal to emotional rewards overpowers calculations based on material interests. Thus, rather than joining Cosatu or the ANC, the few remaining white workers flock to the neofascist AWB. Deep resentment over loss of status, especially in combination with immediate economic insecurity, drives its victims into the camp of those who long for the restoration of a lost past. That was one of the lessons of Nazi Germany, and also explains the resurgence of right-wing extremism.

By building its strategy on the prospect of a white-black working-class alliance, the SACP not only starts from a false assumption but also neglects to address an increasingly significant split in the labor movement: the competition between employed and unemployed. Neither the ANC nor Cosatu has devised a strategy to cope with the one-third to one-half of the national workforce that is permanently unemployed. Increasingly, unions represent only the employed. But mere employment in South Africa almost qualifies one for membership in a “labor aristocracy”: having a job is already a mark of privilege. A whole range of opportunities, from access to housing and medical care to education and pensions, depends on employment. Those millions who live outside the formal economy—in the backyards of townships, in the shacks around the cities, in desolate huts in the barren countryside—form a permanent underclass. The liberation movements have yet to organize these permanently marginalized outsiders; unions have yet to address the relation between the employed and the totally deprived. With the ranks of the unemployed swelling, the state finds ready recruits for its various police forces; local warlords organize vigilante groups, drawing on a vast pool of resentment; puritan, fundamentalist church cults vie with drug peddlers and petty criminals for the souls and pockets of the downtrodden. Orthodox Marxism has traditionally written off this Lumpenproletariat, which constitutes a substantial section of the South African population.

Wavering Social Democrats

The 1989 SACP program “The Path to Power” claims to be “guided by the theory of Marxism-Leninism” as well as its own and others’ experiences of revolutionary struggle. Repeatedly invoking the “seizure of power” as its goal, it asserts: “We are not engaged in a struggle whose objective is merely to generate sufficient pressure to bring the other side to the negotiating table.” Yet barely a year later the SACP was officially negotiating with “the enemy,” and Chairman Slovo was assuring capital that only a mixed economy guarantees growth. He even declared that “the narrow issue of nationalisation is a bit of a red herring” (Argus, February 28, 1990). In Slovo’s newly pragmatic assessment, the South African economy cannot be transformed “by edict without risking economic collapse.” Instead of bureaucratic state control along Eastern European lines, Slovo now advocates public control through effective democratic participation by “producers at all levels.” This amounts to a classic social-democratic program of codetermination, wherein large firms are held publicly accountable and union representatives sit on boards. Since such widely legitimate visions are also considered negotiable, little that resembles economic orthodoxy survives among former Leninists. The collapse of Eastern European state socialism has finally made an impact on some of its last, most fervent adherents.

Classical Leninism misled the SACP in its understanding of a totally changed constellation of interests. The SACP’s orthodox world view prevented it from comprehending three crucial developments that did not conform to predetermined patterns. First, the ANC-SACP leadership was surprised by the active support that calls for sanctions received in the West, the reaction of Margaret Thatcher notwithstanding. In the SACP theory, Pretoria, as the outpost of imperialism, had been and always would be propped up by its international sponsors. Pressure on the apartheid regime would thus have to emanate primarily from progressive socialist and nonaligned countries. In fact, the opposite occurred. South African trade with African and various other Third World countries increased; diplomatic contacts between, for example, Pretoria and the former Soviet Union and East European states improved, while South Africa’s relationship with the United States, Canada, Australia, and the EEC deteriorated—an eventuality that the SACP had not anticipated.

Second, these trends increased the need for Pretoria to seek a negotiated solution, particularly in the light of the loss of foreign investment capital, which now threatened to bypass South Africa in favor of Eastern Europe. Faced with benign neglect by its traditional allies as long as it failed to reach a political settlement, South Africa had to change course if it aspired to remain part of the global economy and avoid becoming another Albania. By its own admission, the SACP was caught off guard when it was legalized on February 2, 1990. After preparing thirty years for liberation, the ANC also found itself unprepared. Believing the ANC’s propaganda about a fascist, racist enemy, most exiles never took seriously the warnings that their opponents might have the potential to adapt, to relinquish racism and modernize.^[22] Lacking an adequate theory of the antagonist, the opposition wasted precious years pursuing ineffective strategies.

Finally, its slavish support for the Soviet Union made the SACP one of the last foreign parties to understand Eastern Europe. A worker’s party that backed the Polish government against Solidarity, the SACP proved unable to sense the people’s growing anger that would finally sweep East European rulers out of power. Deprived of Honecker’s support, the SACP exiles suddenly found themselves searching for new international allies almost against their will. Despite its newly professed anti-Stalinism, the SACP held its 7th Congress in 1989 in one of the last Stalinist redoubts: Havana. Observers have interpreted this choice as “perhaps indicative of the schism between the SACP and CPSU” that perestroika and the flagging Soviet interest in regional confrontations with U.S. allies had brought about.^[23]

Because SACP members are the major force in the theoretical debates within the broader apartheid opposition, the party’s own practice of internal democracy influences the style of the entire movement. Whether the SACP’s declarations of its support for democracy should be taken at face value or treated with skepticism is best tested by the behavior of the party itself. Will the SACP nevertheless continue placing its members in strategic political and union positions in the same way the secret Afrikaner Broederbond has infiltrated influential Afrikaner and government institutions? As long as the Party has to “authorize” its chairman to circulate a discussion paper, it resembles more an authoritarian Jesuit order for the organic intelligentsia than an open, broad-based vehicle for the self-critical exploration of feasible socialism. Pallo Jordan, one of the few unorthodox socialist thinkers in the ANC’s top hierarchy and himself a onetime victim of paranoia within the movement, has harshly pointed out that “the political culture nurtured by the SACP’s leadership over the years has produced a spirit of intolerance, petty intellectual thuggery and political dissembling among its membership.”^[24] Such a culture of authoritarianism does not augur well for the chances of democracy in the postapartheid era—despite the SACP’s new lip service to democratic values. However, the pressure for democracy from below, particularly from the unions, may well force the SACP to abandon the relics of Stalinism.

The way in which the ANC leadership has dealt with two other moral crises within the movement provides signs of encouragement. The Winnie Mandela episode and the revelations about widespread systematic torture and human rights abuses in ANC camps were not suppressed. Both incidents were fully aired, despite internal pressures to close ranks around the guilty. By accepting collective responsibility and letting the internal democracy take its course, the movement has been morally strengthened and set a noteworthy example for handling aberrations on the other side. It can only be hoped that the ANC-SACP leadership also grapples eventually with its problematic ideological past in exile.

Finally, there remains the problem of the lifestyles some ANC leaders have adopted. Critics point to this embourgeoisement as the visible betrayal of a dream. In contrast, in his inimitably reflective, generous manner, Albie Sachs comments, “We must reject the kind of revolutionary asceticism that equates purity with poverty.” He continues: “It is not inappropriate that our leaders should move into well-appointed houses and be supported by secretaries, drivers and security staff. It is only the psychology of underdevelopment on the one hand, and the habits of arrogance on the other, that say they must forever live in the back yards of cities and ride around on mopeds in old suits with battered briefcases.”^[25] This touches a sensitive chord that preoccupies the fantasies of many ANC supporters and opponents alike.

There seems nothing wrong with political leaders living in comfortable conditions, particularly after being deprived of luxuries for decades. However, the ostentatious display of affluence in the midst of poverty becomes even more problematic when wealthy business interests “donate” million-rand houses, cars, and free vacations. These perks create expectations and potentially compromise leaders. It is difficult to imagine how one can be an advocate for squatters and enjoy the company of a hotel tycoon. A three-day wedding for Mandela’s daughter, with a glittering reception for five hundred well-groomed guests in the most expensive Johannesburg hotel, may fit Hollywood tastes but hardly honors Soweto. Yet, the intriguing aspect is the clamor of the poor for their own “royalty” to live in style. The workers of the Mercedes plant, unpaid and on overtime, built the most expensive model as their gift for Mandela.

In this respect, the conspicuous consumption of some ANC leaders contrasts sharply with India’s postcolonial liberators, who shed their British suits in favor of homespun cotton clothing. But Gandhi’s ideal of cultural liberation from the values of one’s oppressors has never been part of the African value system. Even as the ANC celebrates its victory, it lays the basis of common consumerism.

What white South Africa has not yet fully understood is the recent development that turned rhetorical Stalinist ideologues into the ANC’s more pragmatic force. With a disintegrating Soviet bloc seeking peace and investments instead of world revolution, South African communists have nowhere else to go but home. The SACP now considers reconciliation and trust useful methods for bridging differences. As a result, they have become the allies of Pretoria’s negotiation project, and “without a hidden agenda,” as Slovo assured the government during the first Groote Schuur talks. Contrary to all tenets of Marxist orthodoxy, an editorial in the party journal asserted that “recent events have proved abundantly that long-standing prejudice can be dispelled by personal contact,” as if antagonistic interests could be wiped out by pleasant small talk at cocktail parties and conferences.^[26] Furthermore, according to Slovo, the SACP’s attitude toward socialism once democracy has been achieved will depend on the “class forces in play” at the time. In practical terms, this puts socialism on ice. Once nonracial capitalism delivers the goods, Marxist socialist parties shrink or turn into social-democratic parties, as has been demonstrated the world over.

Because of its past radical image, moreover, the SACP leadership can entice skeptical youths into the negotiation process. From this perspective, the government should welcome the red flags. If anyone can prevent a counterracist backlash and make a rational, colorblind attitude prevail, it is the traditional Marxists with their ideological indoctrination in internationalist universalism. That is the historical merit of South African communists, their undemocratic Stalinist baggage notwithstanding. Whatever its flaws, Slovo’s self-critical account of the failure of socialism constitutes the first indication of a democratic renewal, one that may lay to rest van den Berghe’s pessimistic comment that “South Africa, which has already spawned the world’s last official racists, may also see its last Stalinists.”^[27]

The question remains: To what extent does the SACP’s residual Stalinism color the ANC? Especially given that many members of the ANC hierarchy are also SACP members and that the close alliance between the two groups is likely to continue for a while, the prospects of compromise and democracy are directly affected. With the apartheid enemy officially gone, the amorphous ANC alliance is in danger of ideological disintegration. The only group with sufficient discipline and cohesion to come out of this internecine strife relatively intact is the SACP, based as it is in the unions. Redefined as a social-democratic party that advocates redistribution alongside economic growth, the SACP would be well placed to survive the discrediting of socialism elsewhere. In view of the long-standing mass poverty of a black proletariat in South Africa, no fictional consumer nationalism or yearning for a market is likely to pacify the quest for socialism for some time. The initial radical advocates of change in South Africa, therefore, are likely to remain a formidable force. However, whether their socialism will have a human or an authoritarian face is unclear. Mandela’s moderation is not necessarily an indicator of the things to come when political competition starts in earnest. The real problem, in short, is the lack of a democratic culture in black politics, and the rejection of social democracy. For example, Cyril Ramaphosa’s first public act as ANC secretary general was to forbid ANC members to publicize their membership in the SACP: “We felt that the press had no business to subject members of the ANC to such an inquisition” (Vrye Weekblad, August 9–16, 1991). Quite apart from encouraging rumors and red-baiting by this interdict, Ramaphosa denied legitimate inquiries into the political beliefs and loyalties of public figures.

At the SACP’s 70th Anniversary Congress in December 1991, the overwhelming majority of the 413 delegates reaffirmed the Marxist-Leninist nature of the party and rejected a proposal by the leadership to define its future goal as “democratic socialism,” voting instead to drop the word democratic. The 330-strong majority argued that the adjective was tautological, since the SACP’s vision of socialism was inherently democratic, in contrast to the “distortions” of socialism in Eastern Europe. At the same time, however, the congress praised Castro’s Cuba as a socialist model, and Slovo criticized Gorbachev for having abolished the Soviet Communist Party after the failed 1991 coup.

The Congress was generally interpreted as an assertion of greater organizational independence of the SACP from the ANC. But it also demonstrated how strong the overlapping membership between the party, the ANC, and Cosatu still is. Both the president and vice president of Cosatu were elected to the central committee of the SACP, and eleven of thirty members of that committee are also on the ANC’s National Executive Committee. Adherence to a multiparty system remains half-hearted and contingent. In March 1990 a meeting of the SACP and Cosatu in Harare resolved that “in general” the multiparty system “provides one of the favourable conditions for democratic participation” but also stated that “a one-party-system cannot be ruled out in principle—particular conditions may make it necessary.”^[28] It would, of course, be the SACP that decides when formal democracy has to give way to a more suitable “people’s democracy.”

The constant invocation of “the will of the people” sounds almost totalitarian, as if the people were monolithic and had a single will. Speeches by ANC leaders and articles in ANC or SACP journals hardly ever refer to competitors such as the PAC, Azapo, or Inkatha by name; they merely denigrate them. To be sure, the ANC no longer makes hegemonic claims to power. It now recognizes that Afrikaner nationalism has to be accommodated and that a simple transfer of power is an unrealistic demand. But the SACP still claims ideological hegemony in representing the interests of “the masses,” an ironic assertion given its history as an elitist personality cult.

One of the most astonishing features of the Stalinist show trials was the humble plea by most of the convicted that they be duly punished or even executed for their crimes. In the end, the brainwashed defendants—previously all strong, self-confident, highly placed and committed communists—themselves believed in their “unintended crime,” because the party’s collective wisdom had decreed it to be so. As an analyst of the Slansky affair put it succinctly, “The main point of the trials was the violation of reason, of logic, of common sense. They proved that lies can be impossible or outrageous, and still be taken as truth; they are protected not by logic but by state power.”^[29] When one reads the rationalizations of Stalinism by some South African communists today, it seems as if common sense and hard evidence can be violated all too readily, without any particular psychological torture. A theme articulated by Harry Gwala—that “the excesses committed under Stalin, while not justified,” must be seen in the light “that spies and saboteurs were being infiltrated into the Soviet Union”—finds constant repetition.^[30] Gwala, an influential local leader in Natal and member of the SACP Interim Leadership Group, goes on to explicitly reject “the denunciation of Stalin” by Slovo: “This sort of nihilism only clouds the issue and does not deal with the problems of socialism scientifically.” In Gwala’s view, the talk of giving socialism a “human face” is incorrect because “to us Marx’s socialism has only one face, the scientific face.” Against all evidence, there is an unyielding dogmatism. According to Gwala, “The saying that the term "dictatorship of the proletariat’ has been abused and therefore we must shy away from it sends shivers down our spine.” The cold war and the siege of the communist bloc by the forces of Western imperialism are said to justify, or at least explain, the need for “extreme measures.” While Soviet domination “protected” Eastern Europe from such machinations, in Western Europe “the American troops saw to it that the working class was stifled.” These are the views of a leading South African communist who, together with his comrades, proved powerful enough initially to veto the planned meeting between Mandela and Buthelezi.

After the military coup against Gorbachev in August 1991, the SACP presented another picture of confusion, despite Slovo’s previous support for democratic socialism. While the attempted takeover had already been condemned by the world as “unconstitutional” and “disturbing,” the first SACP statement asserted that “information on developments in the Soviet Union is still sketchy. Without adequate information and a proper study of it, we are unwilling to comment on these events.” The Natal Midlands branch of the SACP even issued what Slovo later described as an unauthorized statement welcoming the downfall of Gorbachev: “His government could have become destructive to the socialist objective.” The October 1991 issue of the ANC journal Mayibuye gave a prominent place to Gwala’s denunciation of Gorbachev and the defense of the military coup against him: “Those who employ bourgeois morality and imperialist norms in dismembering a socialist union and suppressing the Communist Party can expect any method to be employed in defending socialism.”

Gwala and his Natal supporters are not alone in arguing for a stricter adherence to Marxist-Leninist principles. Dave Kitson deplores the departures from orthodoxy and “ill-informed denigration of the doctrines” by an SACP that in his view has descended into a social-democratic “Kautskyist-Luxemburgist” position.^[31] Insurrectionists on the Left would like “to arm the masses in the townships.” Rather than democratize the SADF and integrate MK into it (as current SACP chief and former MK commander Hani advocates) they dream of seeing the state displaced and its security apparatus dismantled. Because of this ideological disarray in the ranks, the party is careful not to tamper with its unifying symbols, particularly its name. The party journal scoffed at the suggestion to adopt a social-democratic label and suggested that its ill-informed critics “should consider changing their prejudices instead.”^[32]

Yet the fate of the future South African democracy may not hinge on the past alliances of the most committed component of the apartheid opposition but on how democratic culture will be practiced in the new internal constellation. The recognition of union independence by the SACP, together with the conditional endorsement of a multiparty system and traditional liberal freedoms, bodes well for South African democracy, despite the Leninist relics and the repressed legacies of a Stalinist past. More significant than any ideological posturing remains the SACP practice of active cooperation in the negotiated compromise. The calamity of Eastern Europe seemed to have finally dawned on at least some of the SACP leadership because they now accept full responsibility for the “task of confronting the reality of the crimes committed in the name of the cause for which we stand.”^[33]

The Fallacy of the Leipzig Option

What would be the worst scenario for successful negotiations in South Africa?^[34] If a compromising ANC leadership were rejected as sellouts, the eventual historic accord would not be worth the paper on which it is written. Were Mandela to be perceived as a co-opted stooge, he would share the fate of the sidelined Muzorewa.

The deadlock of Codesa II has prevented this nightmare. An elitist ANC leadership, which was out on a limb in its pace and scope of accommodation, aligned itself anew with its skeptical constituency and power base. Inasmuch as the Nationalists could not be sure of their mandate before the March referendum, so the ANC had to renew its legitimacy by walking out of Codesa. In the absence of the franchise, the ANC is left with the street to gauge support, to mobilize and to discipline an increasingly undisciplined grass-roots. The heterogeneous ANC alliance had never reached an enthusiastic consensus about abandoning confrontation in favor of negotiation. The unconvinced insurrectionists among the youth—always distrustful of the “new site of struggle”—found a golden opportunity to make up for lost ground during the two-year demobilization. The secret deals had not brought any tangible benefits to the townships.

Therefore, neither unsolvable disagreement over constitutional percentages nor the much-exploited tragic Boipatong massacre stalled negotiations. Codesa developed into a pre-election campaign where both sides needed time to consolidate support. Tragically, they also squandered a historic moment of unprecedented possibilities.

The ANC leadership’s newly reaffirmed credibility among its constituency has been acquired at a high price: the risk of discrediting violence and further economic decline. If the “Leipzig option” of massive street demonstrations, the occupation of factories and city centers could “topple the regime,” it would have been replaced long ago. But de Klerk is hardly in the position of Honecker, their similar domestic illegitimacy notwithstanding. The ANC expects world applause for its street theater, the kind of support the West offered the pro-democracy movement in Eastern Europe. However, the capitalist West backed an anticommunist upsurge in East Germany. In South Africa, on the other hand, a communist-aligned opposition aims at transforming an arch-capitalist order. Why would Bonn, Washington, or London empathize with “left” experiments of redistribution in South Africa? A like-minded, “reasonable” de Klerk strikes a far more amenable chord.

The denunciation of de Klerk as a Nazi by Mandela, the mock trials and murder charges, not only poison the climate for negotiations but discredit the ANC among informed observers. The demonization of the opponent is also shortsighted because it will backfire: if the ANC leadership continues to peddle the Nazi label, Mandela will be perceived as a sellout for even talking to fascists, let alone compromising with them. The ANC plays into the hands of its purist competitors, who, quite logically, argue that Nazis ought not be talked to but only defeated in battle. Thus, a negotiating ANC leadership digs its own grave by encouraging blind militancy.

In this predicament a new factor was introduced: the ANC initiated, and the government accepted, a plan for international collaboration with local peace commissions. As long as the sovereign South African state does not allow international control over its wilder security operatives, however, foreign missions are reduced to monitoring, facilitating, and pleading. The new feature of this outside involvement is its balanced, impartial exhortation—compared with peace activists’ former automatic endorsement of apartheid’s victims. Given this experience, the legalized ANC overestimates its current international standing and clout. Indeed, the ANC has frequently misinterpreted international solidarity. Apart from a declining Left, anti-apartheid movements in the West were always more motivated by embarrassment about and disgust with an intransigent racist regime than support for the ANC’s goals. But the ANC confused the two and miscalculated that it would receive as much foreign endorsement during the era of a liberalizing de Klerk as in the period of a stubborn P. W. Botha. Instead, foreigners of all political hues are more likely to lean on the ANC to be “reasonable” than to propose that the government abdicate.

It is also doubtful that any foreign monitoring can diminish the township violence. Only a political accord that includes acceptable provisions for the hostel migrants and, regrettably, perhaps a general amnesty for the killers among all factions can achieve a lasting peace. The sensible recommendations of the Goldstone Commission on how to handle demonstrations civilly and professionally can lead the way toward curbing the violence. Nonetheless, as long as every policeman is considered to be an enemy of the community, as long as the president of the ANC Youth League approves of the harassment of policemen’s families, impartial policing would seem beyond the human capacity of equally brutalized uniformed youngsters.

The National Party has stalled a possible constitutional compromise about a minor percentage difference, which it has conceded in the meantime. Pretoria also wanted time to build up its African support beyond the estimated 10 percent at present. Ironically, the Leipzig option of turmoil and inevitable intimidation may well play into the hands of the government by discrediting the ANC among the mass of apolitical, law-and-order–oriented voters. Instead of retaining the moral high ground, a remarkably moderate liberation movement will be associated with anarchy and economic decline. Only the advocates of violence without victors can hope to benefit from such a course of events.

Notes