True or False?

Today at 10h00 in the SATAWU offices on the 13th floor of Old Mutual Building, 29 Kerk Street, between Loveday and Harrison Streets, Johannesburg, the SACP Johannesburg Central Branch will have a general meeting (BGM). Matters that may be before the branch include the situation left by the COSATU 9th Congress, the forthcoming YCL National Congress (in December) and the next Gauteng SACP Provincial Council, due very soon. Yesterday the Communist University recommended the Weekender. Actually, the current issue is not as good as it looked at first. The front page splash (the body text is actually printed on page two in the Weekender’s unusual “Berliner” format) is a story mostly made up of “analyst” interviews, probably done over the phone. Even so, it is worth reading. It confirms COSATU’s view, not acknowledged until the very end of the article, that the recent fall in the South African jobless figure is not mainly due to an increase in quality jobs – the kind we all want and need – but rather in the “working poor” situation. The article is linked below. The other Weekender item linked below is from Vukani Mde’s Political Diary. Mde was at the COSATU 9th Congress. He noticed that the tribal card was being played by some people during the election held for the position of COSATU President. Others have mentioned the same thing. Not good. The paper that Raymond Suttner is to present tomorrow is now available from the link below (PDF download). Suttner begins with some useful observations about the ANC. Then he makes a virtue of reformism as a means of palliating the condition of the working class, with a view to revolution at a later stage. He does not treat reform as a means of completing the bourgeois revolution, and makes no mention of the concept of National Democratic Revolution in any of its interpretations. He does not develop the distinction between a national bourgeoisie and monopoly finance capital, or mention Imperialism as a factor (“Hamlet without the Prince” was Colin Leys’ remark about Frantz Fanon’s similar omission). He strays off into an examination of the position of COSATU and the SACP, which he does not do well. He treats these two as organisationally and politically identical - a sure sign that he has long been out of touch with both. Suttner recycles myths such as that Jacob Zuma has been presented as a leader of the working class, and that COSATU and the SACP have proposed and supported Zuma for President. Neither of these things is true. Suttner is also not willing to accept the clear “not guilty” verdict of the Zuma rape trial and invents a quotation from Zuma which amounts to an allegation that Zuma confessed to rape and that a rape did take place. By repeating these falsehoods he undermines the effect of the otherwise unexceptionable attitudinal furniture that he initially sets out in his attempt to define the Zuma phenomenon. Suttner does concede in a short paragraph that Bulelani Ngcuka may have used state agencies in a wrong way against Jacob Zuma, but does not develop the implication that the Zuma phenomenon is not an initiative but a response to the menace of the Maduna/Ngcuka proto-fascist clique. In this Suttner uncritically follows the bourgeois journalists. Suttner seems insufficiently aware of the hollowness of the ANC today or of the flight of organised cadres to the SACP, precisely because the latter's inner-party democracy is in working order, unlike that of the ANC. He rightly refers to the 2005 ANC NGC as an example of the rank and file giving a correction to leadership but does not examine whether or not such an occurrence is possible again. He lays great stress on the personality of President Mbeki and on a dichotomy between Mbeki and Zuma, but at the same time admits that there is not a lot to choose between the two, politically. It has not dawned upon Suttner to consider the possibility that neither of these two will be in a position to contest for the ANC Presidency in 2007, and the potential difficulties that may arise for the ANC and the alliance, including the SACP, as a result. It is also not clear from Suttner’s paper whether he is presenting himself as a partisan or as a historical scientist. He uses the first person singular a number of times, which suggests the former. Yet he does not offer a clear way forward either, as a politician would feel obliged to do. Instead, he gives the impression of an excruciating nostalgia towards the SACP of the bygone middle period following liberation, while it was overrun by ineffectual windbags. Click on these links: False hope on jobs data , Kevin O’Grady, Business Day Weekender (1053 words) Alleged tribalism in COSATU leadership election, Mde, B Day Weekender (404 words) Suttner, Raymond, ANC as dominant organisation 061002 (235KB PDF download)