Since the overwhelming April ANC election victory, government ministers have spoken with increasing confidence about the importance of an active and strategic public sector. The incoming Minister of Public Enterprises, cde Alec Erwin, for instance, has said categorically there will be no whole-sale privatisation of strategic public entities like Transnet, Eskom or Denel in the next five years.

These policy indicators were given a more general ideological underpinning by President Mbeki when he spoke in the parliamentary debate on the Presidency's budget vote. Cde Mbeki's views were entirely reasonable and pertinent, articulating a set of broad left social values.

It is a mark of the ideological and moral parochialism of much political commentary in our country that these views should nonetheless have provoked consternation in some quarters.

The editor of South Africa's leading business daily, Peter Bruce, asked partly in jest, partly in exasperation: 'What is going on? Has President Thabo Mbeki lost his mind? Has he lost his temper? His patience? Or has he just lost his faith?' (Business Day, June 25, 2004). Others spoke of a 'dramatic U-turn' in ANC economic policy, and of a 'dangerous lurch towards socialism'.

So what is the truth? And what is the SACP's view of these matters?

Yes, there has been a growing conviction, from the side of senior ANC leadership and from government, that the developmental challenges of our country require an active and strategic public sector. This growing conviction has, in part, been born of frustration and disappointment with the private sector, and its blatant inability to lead economic transformation over the last decade, notwithstanding many 'investor friendly' macro and micro-policies.

Since 1994, there has been an important stabilisation of the so-called 'first economy', sustained, if modest, growth has been restored after a decade of negative growth, and capitalist profitability restored. The defeat of apartheid has opened up new markets for South African capital, not least in the rest of Africa. But if democracy has been generally good for South African capitalism, capitalism has signally failed democracy in South Africa. There has been a concerted capitalist attack on the working class, with mass retrenchments and casualisation.

Capital in South Africa has also massively appropriated a greater share of surplus to itself at the expense of those who are still at work. The pre-tax profits of listed companies rose 52 percent in 2002, for instance. The earnings of executive directors mirrored this growth, rising just over 22 percent. Fees paid to non-executive directors rose 19 percent. But workers' minimum wages rose just 0,41 percent, and with inflation running at more than 10 percent, this means that average real wages fell, workers earning the minimum wage were poorer at the end of 2002 than at the beginning. And this trend has continued through 2003.

It is against the background of fact like this that there is a growing disenchantment with capitalism within the leading sectors of government. But while these shifts are welcome, they should not be exaggerated - for two main reasons. They neither represent something totally new within ANC politics, nor are they as extreme as some pretend to make them.

The idea that there has been a dramatic 'U-turn' in policy comes mainly from those who, over the last decade, have attempted from the outside to put words into the mouths of senior ANC leaders. Liberals (and, indeed, various anti-ANC ultra-left groups) have portrayed government policies as uncomplicatedly 'free market capitalism'. The same quarters present our democracy as inherently 'bourgeois'. Our Constitution (in the words of Tony Leon) is 'essentially liberal democratic'.

Both liberals and the ultra-left have been wrong in their simplistic portrayal of the complexities of dealing with an imperialist-dominated global economy, and in their cut-and-dry characterisation of what is, in fact, a contradictory and contested domestic transition.

Our Constitution, for instance, does embody progressive liberal ideals (multi-party democracy, individual rights, checks and balances). The SACP unambiguously supports these features of our democracy - after all, they were not bestowed upon our country by a generous bourgeoisie. They had to be fought for over many decades by a radical, Third World national movement that was essentially working-class in character.

What is more (as examples close to hand in our region emphasise), the working class and poor are usually the first to suffer when an authoritarian bureaucracy rides roughshod over democratic checks and balances, and when multi-party democracy is curtailed. We are also acutely aware of severe limitations of liberalism. Hence our commitment to thorough going national democratic transformation and socialism, as the only basis for a genuine effort towards poverty eradication and equality.

Leon and others like him are also quite wrong to reduce our Constitution to liberalism. Like the Freedom Charter before it, our Constitution embodies and goes beyond the progressive content of liberalism, and then transcends the individualistic, imperialism-blind, race-blind, gender-blind, class-blind, and under-development-blind limitations of classical liberalism. Our Constitution certainly affirms 'first generation' human rights, but it also affirms 'second' and 'third' generation rights - collective rights, national self-determination rights, cultural rights, working class rights, women's rights, and the need for environmental sustainability.

These are some of the basics that cde Mbeki was touching upon in the course of his budget debate. He quoted extensively from the British political commentator Will Hutton, whose most recent work (The World We're In) is a ringing critique of US-style neo-liberalism. Against this globally dominant brand of individualism, Hutton advocates the social values of traditional European social democracy, respect for the public sector and a spirit of social solidarity.

Concluding a long quotation from Hutton, cde Mbeki says: 'There can be no doubt about where we stand with regard to this great divide. It is to pursue the goals contained in what Hutton calls the 'broad family of ideas that might be called left' that we seek to build the system of governance we indicated today and in previous Addresses. The obligations of the democratic state to the masses of our people do not allow that we should join those who 'celebrate individualism and denigrate the state.''

In his responding speech at the close of the debate, cde Mbeki took some of these ideas further. He sharply attacked the leader of the DA, Tony Leon, and his Thatcherite notion that society is composed of individuals and not groups.

'If this has any meaning, it constitutes a vain attempt to eradicate our history', cde Mbeki observed. 'Africans as a national group did not and do not exist. What we had and have are merely individual Africans, who were oppressed as individuals and who suffer from the legacy of racism as individuals. They did not come together as a national group to fight oppression... And since there are no classes, only individuals, the workers are also wrong to have combined in trade unions.'

The SACP, naturally, warmly endorses all of this. We have always held that, while the ANC has never been a socialist organisation, it certainly is not anti-socialist either. The ANC is, quite properly, a broad left formation, home to a variety of progressive ideological currents. The ANC, with its 70% electoral majority, is at the very centre of South African politics. But, as we have also long maintained, in South Africa the centre is (it has to be) LEFT.

These important value statements from our President, like the many positive socio-economic policy indications and commitments from the ANC election manifesto and government in the recent period, once more reaffirm these basic truths. They create a constructive climate in which meaningful and ongoing discussion and debate can be carried forward.

We make this last point so that none of us exaggerates. The Peter Bruces of the world have tried to be ventriloquists, putting neo-liberalism into the mouth of the ANC. It would be equally misguided and inaccurate for the SACP to now read Marxism or socialism into every government policy statement.

The government has said there will be no major privatisations in the next five years. But it has not said what will happen thereafter. Is Transnet needed as a strategic public entity simply to address a short-term infrastructural back-log that will then make South African capitalism more competitive? Or is a strong and democratic public sector the kernel of a different kind of society in the making? A society in which meeting social needs is prioritised over private profits?

This, like many other matters, remains an open question within our broad Alliance. What is certain, however, is that, with a decade of governance experience behind us, learning from our successes and weaknesses, and constantly dynamised by our organic interaction with the working class and poor, together, we are forging a progressive left consensus. It is a consensus on the basic values of our ongoing democratic revolution. Within that consensus, many discussions and debates lie ahead.



--Blade Nzimande is the General Secretary of the South African Communist Party. Re-posted from Umsebenzi Online.