Today marks the 23rd anniversary of the first democratic general election held in South Africa on 27 April 1994. The election, the first ever in our country to be based on the principle of one adult person one vote without regard to race and gender was a historic achievement. It finally dislodged the apartheid regime and delivered our historic April 1994 democratic breakthrough in the continuing struggle towards the realisation of freedom.

The SACP celebrates this epoch-making milestone towards complete liberation and social emancipation by our struggle, and the many human rights and social redistribution achievements experienced by millions of our people since 1994. For so long as the legacy of colonialism and apartheid and capitalist exploitation and imperialism persist the struggle must continue, intensify, always, until victory.

Our Party was declared the number one enemy of, and accordingly became the first political organisation to be banned by, the apartheid regime. The banning, in 1950 under the Suppression of Communism Act, did not bring an end to our Party. Instead our Party continued and intensified the struggle against colonial and apartheid oppression, capitalist exploitation and imperialist domination, by organising underground, in exile, and later by forming, together with the ANC, the joint SACP-ANC liberation army, uMkhonto we Sizwe. The year 1994 also marked 73rd anniversary of our Party’s founding and unbroken struggle for democracy and social emancipation.

Our April 1994 democratic breakthrough was not delivered on a silver platter. It was a result of the gallant struggles fought by our people for centuries before the establishment of the racist Union of South Africa and for decades thereafter against colonialism and apartheid. Countless lives were permanently lost. It was during these struggles that the colonisers and imperialists succeeded through war and bloody legislation to expropriate our people of their land, and of the basic wealth and productive capacities that they used to make a living based on it.

Left with no means of production of their own, and faced with an unjust tax regime, our people were then forcefully converted into wage labourers (or the proletarians) by the oppressors. The oppressors super-exploited our people economically, on a daily basis, based on capitalist production colonially imposed first from Europe and then also from the United States of America as the new metropole of imperialism after overtaking European colonial powers.

The problems we are facing today, of persisting class, race and gender inequalities, poverty and unemployment, were created and then continuously reproduced by capitalist exploitation of labour and, as its highest stage, imperialist domination, as well as by its articulation of colonial oppression including apartheid in South Africa. It is in this context that foreign, imperial capital developed control of a major stake in the economy of our country, in which the domestic white bourgeoisie that developed as the local personification of private monopoly capital was equally interested in the merciless exploitation of our people.

We do not need to create any more private oligopolies, monopolies and oligarchs who exploit the masses of our people and manipulate political power, authorities and our basic wealth and resources. This is why, as the SACP, we are pushing for principled unity of all progressive and revolutionary democratic organisations and people around the following pillars of a common programme. The second radical phase of our national democratic revolution, including radical economic emancipation must:

• Speed up the pace of land redistribution based on the Freedom Charter!
• Eliminate monopoly and oligopoly domination of our economy and rollback concentration of wealth in the hands of a few – be they black or white.
• Combat the rise of oligarchs and deal decisively with corruption, rent-seeking and corporate capture.  
• Systematically reduce class, racial and gender inequalities, as well as uneven development between rural and urban areas, and between townships and suburbs.
• Decisive policies, including a wealth tax and decent work, to change the patterns of the unjust and inequitable distribution of wealth from production and exchange. 
• Change the patterns of ownership and control by empowering the masses of the historically oppressed and previously disadvantaged, the direct producers, the workers and poor, as opposed to a few individuals simply because they are black and they often have political and business connections to the powers that be.
• The development of collective forms of ownership and control such as co-operatives, and more effective and efficient democratic state ownership and control in strategic areas buttressed by decisive efforts to combat corruption, rent-seeking, corporate capture and other forms of manipulation of power, authority, our basic wealth and resources.
• Transform the structure of our economy from that which was colonially constructed to rely on exports of raw materials and primary goods and imports of finished products; thus change the terms of our international trade by developing national production through manufacturing expansion and diversification to produce finished goods locally and thereby create productive work and reduce unemployment.

 

Issued by SACP