JEREMY CRONIN is a member of the African National Congress' National Executive Committee and a central leader of the South African Communist Party. He is the editor of the African Communist, theoretical journal of the SACP. He was interviewed for Green Left Weekly by FRANK NOAKES in Johannesburg.
"Nelson Mandela, from time to time, has been making statements which suggest the long-standing alliance between the SACP and the ANC, going back to the 1920s, will come to an end basically after the elections", says Jeremy Cronin.
"Some people within the SACP also think that that's not a bad idea, in the sense: one, we've been a national liberation alliance and that immediate task will come to an end with the elections and a new constitution; two, in any case there's a need for the party to be much more independent."
Cronin's view, and the one he says is dominant in the party, is that the alliance is still needed. The opposing position "is conceding the most important battle, which is for the life and soul of the ANC", he insists.
"It's not enough to build an independent SACP which is capable, in two years' time, of going into electoral opposition to the ANC. That might be forced upon us by events, but it would be a huge defeat for the ANC, ourselves, the liberation movement.
"The task of the national democratic transformation, liberation, is a very long-haul project in South Africa. I'm not talking here about the new constitution and de-racialisation. It will be a long-haul process to overcome the legacy of three and half centuries of colonialism, decades of segregation and apartheid. Apartheid is the last chapter in a long process of national oppression."
"This reconstruction requires a very broad front of forces in order to lead the process. And at the heart of that is the ANC, which is the formation best placed to pull it off."
But the ANC's success is not guaranteed, he points out. Partly this is because such a wide range of ideological forces, from liberals to those to the left of the SACP, make up the ANC.
"At the time when the reward for being a member was jail, if you got caught or found out, clearly those involved had a level of commitment that might be a bit different from now, when large number of members are coming in under very different
circumstances — where the ANC might be the quick route to office, or whatever. So clearly there are those tendencies inside the ANC. These are natural pressures, and they're the consequence of going forward."
Cronin believes the peculiarities of South Africa create a different dynamic than that of the Philippines or Nicaragua, where a "third force" platform was contrived by the representatives of big local and international capital.
"Here, there is not an easy candidate somewhere in the centre. About 15 years ago [Inkatha leader Chief] Buthelezi might have shaped up in that direction; he was being cultivated for those purposes by external forces like the CIA and even some of the more enlightened elements of big capital in South Africa. But for a whole range of reasons he's blown that project very badly. But one shouldn't be too comfortable; sometimes people like [Nicaraguan president] Violeta Chamorro come from nowhere.
"The racial question in South Africa is part of what makes it very difficult for them to find a third force", Cronin points out. "De Klerk is obviously a third force, but he is white and his apparatus is white, despite his attempts to dress himself in non-racial drag. The reality is the ANC hasn't left much space for a substantive third force; that's now a huge strength."
In the absence of a credible third force, Cronin says, parts of the National Party, and the US and Britain, are attempting to transform the character of the ANC. "It's all about softening up, corrupting, blunting what the ANC has stood for. Part of that project is to break the alliance with the SACP.
"But there's no reason why that should succeed if we do our work properly. That means maintaining and even extending the character of the alliance. It certainly doesn't mean the party hiving off in a kind of narrow leftism, proclaiming socialism and hoisting a red flag."
Tendencies within the ANC are just that: nothing is finalised. Clearly the overwhelming majority of members want the ANC to see the process through, want it to lead a real transformation. The liberal project naturally wants to limit change as far as possible because capital is itself in crisis.
International and local capital have profited through super-exploitation, which has worked well in the past, Cronin explains. Despite this, it has now hit major problems and will need to restructure. It will therefore resist, as far as possible, granting the black majority greatly improved social and working conditions.
"We've got to try to deal realistically with the balance of forces in our situation in a way that doesn't foreclose on the project. And it's difficult because we haven't defeated the regime. We've put it into crisis and it's in retreat, but there are examples of retreats that have been turned into famous victories.
"The repressive forces, the bureaucracy and the economy are all in various degrees of crisis, but they're not falling apart; Anglo-American [Corporation] hasn't pulled the plug; it's there and it's a massive power reality. Ditto the army, ditto the police, ditto the bureaucracy. Those are realities that an ongoing transformation process are going to have to deal with, and they're complex, difficult realities.
"Therefore after the first election the reality is some kind of power-sharing. It's not a nice word because it suggests a cosy arrangement, but power does not arrive on a tray because you've won the elections relatively handsomely. So I am not as scandalised as some about the idea of five years of power-sharing."
Other ANC spokespeople hotly deny that what is being contemplated is "power-sharing". Cronin believes this to be a semantic argument. "Within a year we will have ANC and party people in senior positions within government, and that's going to be important.
"But unless we still help those people with a powerful, mobilised mass movement outside state structures, they're not going to be able to steer the bus at all. And that would be true whether the cabinet consists of National Party and maybe a few Inkatha people as well or not; steering the state machinery, steering the country from a few elected positions within central government, albeit important positions, is going to be a difficult task.
"And therefore, we've got to direct a lot of our energies and attentions to the elections, to do well, because that's the next qualitative moment in the struggle, it's not just a numbers thing, but a psychological breakthrough.
"The danger is that you become an electoral machine and forget about your real strength, the mobilised population. There's been a tendency in the internal struggle to transform ourselves into effective negotiators, an effective election fighting apparatus; the battle is not to throw away what we've learnt over the last 15 years, by the way of mass mobilisation, mass involvement."
Cronin repeats a joke that, like the French Revolution, South
Africans will "change the calendar: January, February, march march march". Mobilising people can't be that mechanical, he continues. "Because it's mass action, but it's also mass participation, and we need to try to be creative in institutionalising the way in which people impact upon the transformation process."
He has no doubt that there are going to have to be marches on police stations into the future. He talks about extending participatory democracy to include the civic level, street committees, "institutions which enable that popular power to impact upon the deliberations of the future parliament and cabinet.
"Yes, there are battles within the ANC over the role of mass mobilisations and struggle; but there are real considerations which have to be balanced up, of negotiations and of reconstruction as well as building a broad alliance of forces — that's a reality. We can change the calendar to February, march march march and end up with a counter-revolution, or massive destabilisation, so we've got to get the balance right. But unless we've got the masses mobilised behind us, nothing will be possible."