Entryist Debacle

The YCL response (see the link below) to the SACP Gauteng PEC statement sent out yesterday is unequivocal. The new Gauteng PEC misrepresented the proceedings of last weekend’s Provincial Congress in their very first statement, and not in minor ways but in substantial and dangerous ways.

There were many delegates and guests at the Congress. The YCL’s official repudiation of the Gauteng PEC statement simply confirms what many witnesses have already said. The YCL statement is the opposite of the kind of thing the Gauteng PEC refers to as “an emerging popular view”. This tell-tale phrase of the new PEC is very obviously a spurious substitute for the democracy that Congress is supposed to provide and exemplify.

It is the prerogative of Congress to resolve and to decide. Congress is not meant to be second-guessed, in a loose or speculative way, by those elected to serve it and to execute its commands.

Unlike the PEC’s imaginative musings, the YCL’s repudiation is firm and direct. In addition, the YCL undertakes to be the guardian and saviour of the true record of the 9th SACP Gauteng Provincial Congress. There lies the thing at this stage.

If the Gauteng PEC chooses to respond to the YCL, then we must also hope that they will release the full list of names of the elected additional members. They should also explain all the internal contradictions and anomalies in the text of their statement of last Thursday, and not just the ones that the YCL has pointed out.

The Johannesburg Central Branch of the SACP is scheduled to meet tomorrow at 10h00 at the SATAWU offices, 13th floor, Old Mutual Building, 29 Kerk Street, between Loveday and Harrison Streets. The newly-elected Provincial Secretary, Zico Tamela and possibly some of the new additional members of the PEC are members of the branch and should be present at the BGM to give their own report of the debacle.

On Friday the Business Day suddenly came up with a good edition after a long spell of dullness. Among other things it reported concisely on the press conference that followed the two-day bilateral meeting between the SACP and COSATU. See the link.

The next link, also from Friday’s Business Day, is a brilliant concretisation by Anthony Butler of the voluminous ANC discussion document on Organisational Renewal.

Butler is saying that the technocrats and stooges, the sweetheart committees of capitalists, and all the other networks built up around the presidency in the years of the 1996 class project, will decamp in 2009 and migrate to the ANC office. To secure this life-after-death they will this year support many of the reforms that have been hitherto agitated for in opposition to their own presidential Zanufication of the state.

They will then boldly co-opt the new, improved ANC and take possession of it as their home. In the process they will naturally deprive the successor President of the advantages that the old one arranged for himself in the form of the President’s Office (which was formerly the Vice-President’s office under the Mandela presidency). They will confront the successor President with a dominant ANC - an ANC that is now in their own hands. Butler’s exposé is Machiavellian, but persuasive.

President Fidel Castro Ruz is writing again. It is something he did not do for a long time during his illness. We are joyful but we restrain our joy because we are still worried for this man whom we love so dearly. See the linked article below.

Finally, and again from yesterday’s bumper Business Day, Adam Habib explains rather well why the fight to maintain the rules of the United Nations is a fight for democracy. Cases like Burma and Zimbabwe should not be referred to the Security Council, which is the UN’s war-making body. Instead, these cases should go to the newly reconstituted Human Rights Council (which is, by the way, another site of struggle for democracy). Ad hoc behaviour is not in the interests of those who need the protection of rules. Ad hoc behaviour leaves all the advantages with the Imperialists. See the linked article. (The picture above is of Niccolò Machiavelli, author of The Prince).

Click on these links:

YCL response to the SACP Gauteng PEC statement (536 words)

SACP, COSATU warn on ANC alliance, Brown, Musgrave, B Day (518 words)

A new power behind the throne, Anthony Butler, Business Day (1057 words)
More than 3 million condemned, Fidel Castro Ruz, Granma (1433 words)

Another side to SA conduct at UN, Adam Habib, Business Day (951 words)