Forward to Socialism!! - South African Communist Party

Umsebenzi 11
Comrades in struggle: Cde Jeremy Cronin
(left) and Cde Julius Malema (below)
administrative democracy – the democratisation
of the state apparatus;
constitutional democracy – equal rights
for all, “regardless of race, colour or sex”;
and
(absolutely central to everything else)
participatory democracy through the
consolidation of organs of popular power
– or what the Freedom Charter refers to
as “democratic organs of self-government”.
Note, the Freedom Charter doesn’t say:
“The government shall govern”. It says:
“The PEOPLE shall govern”. Of course,
both a progressive government and a
progressive ruling party (or parties) are
What about the fat cats
sitting on top of the soil?'
important, but they are means (not ends)
to the popular democracy envisaged in
the Charter.
Which is why, when the Freedom
Charter speaks of transferring the commanding
heights of the economy to the
ownership of the people as a whole, it is
not confining itself to what is often just a
narrow bureaucratic take-over by the
state apparatus and a ruling party’s “deployees”.
And this is why the SACP also
prefers in general to refer to “socialisation”
rather than “nationalisation”.
State ownership is a legal form, but the
mere fact of state-ownership doesn’t tell
us what kind of state we are dealing with.
December 2009