Let me clarify two issues before proceeding. Firstly, I speak in my personal capacity. I do not represent any organization or group that I may have belonged to in the past or belong to in the present. I have enjoyed the confidence of the Mass Democratic Movement and the African National Congress and have, indeed, played a leadership role in the former. However, for my views expressed here today, I must accept sole responsibility. Secondly, these are personal reflections of a sensitive and critical activist who has often been presented as a community leader and who at all times identified - and still does - with the MDM raather than a careful academic analysis of the way in which developments - particularly glasnost - in Eastern Europe - have impacted upon the most signnificant component of liberation movement in South Africa - the Mass Democratic Movement

It was in Pietermaritzburg in early December when - on my way from attending the historic 'Conference for a Democratic Future' (CDF) in Johannesburg - I addressed the Hindu Veda Dharmma Sabha on the significance of the conference and how it all went. One of the activists present kept on modifying my more critical comments during the question and answer session that followed, preceding it with 'what the Maulana actually means...' She came to me afterwards and - by way of apology - explained that her interventions were neccessitated by the fact that I was from outside and did not quite understand the level of these people. 'We are still working with these people and must still win them over and so we could not let them walk away with negative impressions of the CDF and by implication the MDM.' Other than the covert message to such activists in the audience who may be tempted to 'clarify' what I mean in my address here today there are a few things which I would like to say about being critical of our own or of ourselves in public:
 
- If people are not won over by us on the basis of a factual assessment of where we are then it's tough. We have to move from where we are to the point where what we have to offer is intrinsically superior to what others have to offer. Winning over converts on the basis of lies, or hidden unpleasant realities of the state of our organizations will not strengthen our own basis and will only succeed in attracting the docile and unthinking - an objective which, hopefully, we don't have.

- The 'don't air our dirty linen in public because people are going to be turned away' attitude reflects a lack of confidence in people - even contempt for people because it seeks to dupe them. This is quite unbecoming of a liberation movement or an activist who speaks and acts in the name of the people.

- Truth and public honesty about those truths - especially if they are unpleasant - are far more impressive and reflective of organizational strength and confidence than its avoidance. Honesty is not only best policy. It's the only policy. The rest is intrigue and deceit - hardly the bases for democracy.

- As for the fear that public exposure will supply our enemies with further ammunition against us, firstly, none of us honestly believe that our enemies do not have an awareness of all our inadequacies and, secondly, to quote Comrade Joe Slovo, 'our silence will supply them with even more powerful ammunition'.

'The downfall of the tyrant is seen as the inevitable birth of democracy' says Van Zyl Slabbert. I must confess that for a long time I did not share a belief in that generalization. That is only beginning to hold out some hope of fulfillment which is in no mean measure due to glasnost. For a long time my own activism against apartheid had its roots in the intrinsic immorality of the present rather than any pragmatic hope for the future. Not that I did not have such hopes or articulate them. They were, however, based on a raw and religious idealism that defies a logic rooted in the realities of organizational and ideological totalitarianism.

There comes a point' says Wuer Kaixi, a leader of the Chinese student movement, 'beyond which one cannot turn back. However naive our faith may seem, we will continue to fight. Even if we are convinced the battle is lost from the beginning, at least for the time being we will have to answer the challenge'. What has prompted my activism to be rooted essentially in the immorality of the present and not in a pragmatic hope in the future and what does glasnost have to do with all of this?

I want to take a look at the phenomena of glasnost in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and then look at its impact on the MDM. In doing so I will reflect on the anti-glasnost tendencies in the movement and on the lessons already learnt from glasnost - or to be learnt from it.

A crisis for Socialism

It's been five years now that Mikhail Gorbachev was elected Secretary General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Soon after that 'nyet' was joined by ‘glasnost’ and ‘perestroika’ as Russian words commonly known outside the Soviet Union. Suddenly the Communist world was swept - later large parts 'swept away'- by a wave of authentic people's struggles rising up in wrath against unpopular regimes.  Seldom have we witnessed such large parts of the world - twelve time zones - come alive with such energy, turmoil and excitement. Glasnost and perestroika - Openess, to give people a voice and restructuring - these became the buzz words. More significantly though, Gorbachev gave content to them and in doing so became the first Soviet ruler to have crossed that great divide of raw authority to government by - even if shaky and disputed - consensus, from ruler to leader. “Comrade Maulana”, said a senior Soviet official as we watched the change of the guard at Lenin's mausoleum, “this is 1917 all over all again. We are busy with nothing less then a revolution. Only this time we are not going to mess it up.”

We must, however, guard against the idea that history is but the story of the bad king who was followed by the good king, Stalin by Gorbachev and Verwoerd by De Klerk - and whilst Gorbachev has certainly come to personify Glasnost he is by no means the material factor responsible for it. It is, however, not within the ambit of our present discussion to go in to this in any detail. I would, however, want to return to the theme of 'leaderism' later on when I reflect on glasnost in South Africa.

By now it is common knowledge that perestroika is still an elusive goal and glasnost is threatening to tear the fabric of the Soviet Union's geography apart. Initially the thrust of perestroika was in revolutionary appeals for greater discipline, offering greater rewards for harder work and exhortations to less consumption of vodka but soon they realized, Gorbachev writes in 'Perestroika' 'that cosmetic changes would not work and so we arrived at the concept of perestroika as the revolutionary renovation of socialism, of our entire society.' Glasnost has led to an unprecedented degree of political pluralism, civil liberties, press freedom and the inevitable demise of the constitutionally guaranteed leading role of the Communist Party. 'It is possible to suppress, compel, bribe, break or blast, but only for a certain period', writes Gorbachev.

It was just three years ago when I suffered two weeks of this official and highly sophisticated system of deceit. For two weeks I visited the eastern republics of the Soviet Union and was taken on interminable rounds of visits to mosques and official receptions. I had this eery feeling of being escorted through a makeshift Hollywood village having to express my admiration for the breathtaking mountains, cute cottages and cool rivers - all the time knowing that if I wwere to touch any of these that the hardboard would collapse and, with it, the honour of my exceptionally generous hosts and guides. My dance of courtesy silenced me and I stuck to polite nods. They knew my nods were deceptive and I knew that their welcome thereof was deceptive. 'Are your mosques in South Africa open?' I was asked on countless occasions. In the beginning I responded with a naive 'They are open during the day but we lock them at night after the late evening prayers'. Much later did I discover that they asked the question in terms of their untold reality of thousands of mosques forcibly closed by the state and converted into cinemas, cultural clubs and beer-halls.

It was at the grave of the most famous scholar of Sunni Islam, Muhammad ibn Ismail al Bukhari in Samarqand where I experienced an infinite sense of exhaustion at this charade and I wandered away from my hosts. At the ablution place I met Sulayman - the young mu’addhin. 'How's it with your Islam?’. I asked. 'Difficult, very difficult' came the heavy hearted response. In penance at my own complicity in the waltz of deceit and in gratitude for this single moment of authenticity I discretely placed all of four hundred roubles in his hand. Three years have passed since then and hopefully Sulaiman and all my other hosts are also experiencing - if you will pardon the expression - their own 'Gorbasms'. And so the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have dominated the world's headlines. The turmoil unleashed by the glasnost induced energy and excitement is not without its pain and loss of lives. It's a turmoil which may yet consume its own architects. As Alex de Tocqueville wrote in his essay on the French Revolution, 'The most perilous moment for a bad government is when it seeks to to mend its ways. Only consummate statecraft can enable a king to save his throne when after a long spell of oppressive rule, he sets to improving the lot of his subjects.'

Paradoxical as it may sound, it may just be the belief in an all powerful czar which can succeed in holding the enormous spillovers of openness together - thus perpetuating - albeit unwilllingly - the cult of the personality. To refer to this as a crisis of unprecedented proportions for socialism itself is an understatement. I, for one, believe FW De Klerk when he says that the collapse of socialism has emboldened him to move on his February 2nd path. That there were other factors which we created and which he may prefer to deny or that liberal adherents of the bad king-good king theory may want to ignore, is a different story.

There is of course much debate about the nature of this crises, whether it is a popular rejection of socialism itself or Stalinism - socialism without democracy, or of state capitalism masquarading as socialism, or if these 'distortions are the inevitable outcome of socialist theories. Whilst this is not the occasion to go into any of these I would still caution against a knee-jerk defensive response. Presently most activists are hastening to defend socialism and constructing all arguments on the premise that - in the words of Slovo - 'the theeory of Marxism, in all its essential respects remains valid and provides an indispensable theoretical guide to achieve a society free from all forms of exploitation of person by person. The major weaknesses that have emerged in the practice of socialism are the results of distortions and misapplications. They do not flow naturally from the basic concepts of Marxism whose core is essentially humane and democratic and which project a social order with an economic potential vastly superior to that of capitalism.’ This dogmatic assertion of the superiority of Marxism is problematic for two reasons: a) The present crisis of Socialism is far too profound for any knee-jerk defensive response. What is required of socialists is a radical, scientific and intense analysis of what had gone wrong rather than appeals to the 'moral superiority of Marxism'. b) The immediately defensive position smacks of idealism more appropriate to religious believers rather than those who regard themselves as adherents of dialectic materialism. Committed and enlightened Muslims may argue that Iran is an aberration and a distortion of the message of Islam - as indeed I do - and that the ideal Islamic state is yet to materialize. A materialist, though, would have to go beyond that and question the legitimacy of Islam as a workable force for enlightenment. If they don't then - if I may paraphrase Comrade Slovo again - 'truth becomes more and more inhibited by deadening dogma; a sort of catechism taking the place of creative thought'.

The struggle before glasnost

I would like to reflect on two issues here: Some of the 'darker features' of our struggle that were later impacted by glasnost and secondly the relationship between our struggle and those countries directly affected by it. The most ominous dark feature was the substitution of genuine democracy for formal democracy. Three factors militated against genuine democracy developing in our organizations, one entirely of the state's making, the second a bit of the state's making and a bit of ours and the third, I believe, entirely of our own making:

The first is repression. 'Our years of illegality, and the drawbacks of exile', acknowledged a recent article in 'Umsebenzi - Voice of the South African Communist Party - 'have unavoidably taken their toll on some of the principles of democracy and accountability. Special conditions made certain departures unavoidable.' Three states of emergency, a plethora of security laws and the host of extra legal repressive and intimidatory mechanisms ranging from a monkey fetus to fake tablets to the silent guns of hit squads have indeed necessitated what Umsebenzi refers to as 'special measures'. Our continued survival and, with that, our struggle and aspirations, depended on it. Secrecy became the norm and consultation - especially with the people in whose name we continued to act - became the exception. 'Secret control', as Fatima Meer says, 'also meant secret manipulations'. 'The state became reflected in us.' We survived and so did our struggle but not without a price.

The second factor is the one of foreign funding. Foreign funding removed whatever expedient need we may have had to remain accountable to the local communities or constituencies in whose name we spoke and act. Millions of rands came - and continues to come - into the country with little demands for a precise accounting of its use. "Repression" precluded us from keeping proper accounts. This absolute lack of accountability greatly militated against a determined move to develop organic and dependent links with our communities and at the same time facilitated the emergence of a good few entirely unaccountable personal fiefdoms.

The third factor is one of ideology. The ideological factor is one that is greatly underplayed at present. Indeed, I am yet to come across it being mentioned as an element that militated against the growth of genuine democracy in our organizations. 'Above all', says Umsebenzi, 'we must in the new period make a clean break with those limitations on inner democracy and accountability which underground life and the drawbacks of exile imposed'. The stated intention to make a clean break is indeed laudable, but I would suggest that it does not go far enough in that it fails to assume organizational and ideological guilt for what it describes as limitations on inner democracy and accountability. No doubt, the 'blame it all on the state syndrome is alive and well'. Many of our activists openly espoused the Stalinist position of democratic centralism whereby even inner party democracy was smothered and effective power concentrated in the hands of a political bureau. The Soviet Bloc for them was the role model and it was not uncommon to hear people referring to street and area committees as the basis for future basic soviets.

I am also not convinced that the seeds for totalitarianism does not in fact lie within the ideological paradigm of national democracy (NDS). The two-stage theory whereby the present stage is the national democratic one which is to be followed by the socialist phase necessitates the present vanguard role of the party. The national democratic stage requires as broad an array of anti-apartheid forces as possible but at all times under the ideological leadership of the socialism vanguard. Only, this it is argued, will ensure a transition to socialism - and not just any kind of socialism, but socialism as it has been practiced until recently in the Warsaw Pact countries and Cuba. How does one sell tickets to as many people as possible who want to go as far as Paarl knowing that only once they are on the bus then you will try to persuade them to come along as far as Johannesburg, and if they refuse to do so then - irrespective of the financial contribution that they made in getting the bus as far as Paarl - they will invariably be dismissed (hopefully only dismissed and not destroyed) as enemies of the revolution? Ok, one can do that, but how does one do so without undemocratic manipulation? I have great difficulty in reconciling vangaurdism and its inevitable corollary of manipulation with the democratic ideal. Albie Sachs in a recent paper prepared for an in-house ANC seminar is certainly at variance with national democracy as we have come to know it. Our struggle was never one of 'fighting to give our people the right to choose what kind of society they want' as he suggests, but one of ensuring that they choose a particular kind of society. The kind that now lies in ruins in Eastern Europe.

How did these factors impact on our organizations?

Comrade Slovo could well have been writing about virtually any of them when, referring to extra-state bodies in the Soviet Bloc - he wrote

The enormous membership figures told us very little about the extent to which individual trade unionists, youth or women was able to participate in the control or direction of their respective organizations. At the end of the day these organizations were turned into transmission belts for decisions taken elsewhere and the individual members were little more than cogs of the vast bureaucratic machine.

Democracy thus became a useful cliché with little organizational relevance as so many an activists would wait for 'the line' from Lusaka. Needless to say bitter squabbles often ensued between various claimants of 'the line and it made little difference that Lusaka had never arrogated to itself the right to unilaterally determine 'lines'. CST - Colonialism of a Special Type - became the acceptable pass word and every slight deviation was dismissed as workerism. Not only was the idea dismissed but also the person. 'Problematic' and 'divisive' were the key words here. Gone were the days when the 'liberatory ethos managed to maintain these differences on a rhetorical level and the political integrity of the dissidents respected'. Petty tyrannies, vilifications and rustications' to quote Fatima Meer, became the internal order of the day. At an external political level this translated into a belief that we in turn are going to be the sole determiners of the line for the masses. ' Far too often' I said three years ago in the 21st Richard Feetham Memorial Lecture, have "the people" become a convenient but dishonest reference point to implement ideas and plans that have never been canvassed amongst those very people in whose name we act'. 'How often' asked Salim Badat at a recent UDF Education and Training Forum 'do we not hear activists talking about "the community". "The community" feels this or "the community" feels that'. Recently I had a letter - mistakenly delivered to our house - laying in my room for three months until I got around to ask a neighbour - whose name I did not know - if he knew whom this letter was for. 'For the people staying next to you', he replied. Given that I have lived there for more than two years and that it is in a lower middle class area where everyone know each other, how come I have always been acting as a spokesperson for the community when I do not know the name of a single neighbour? This symbolizes the grassroots manifestation of the routine rubbishing of parliamentary democracy and civil liberties as bourgeoisie luxuries that cannot be accommodated under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Blend this ideological arrogance with the megalomania of a Zulu chief in the service of the apartheid regime and the misery of poverty and deprivation. The result is present-day Natal.

All of this affected us in two very serious ways: First, the worth of people as people declined and they were reduced to utilitarian means, thereby eroding whatever morality is at the basis of our struggle. No small wonder Albie Sachs was moved to ask 'Can it be that once we join the ANC we do not make love any more, that when comrades go to bed they discuss the role of the white working class?' Second, we fell victim to organizational delusions whereby we - the axis around which the earth rotates - became victim to our propaganda. We became the liberation movement rather than the most significant and effective component thereof, the only generation of revolutionaries rather than the carriers of an intra-generational struggle which had its genesis in the first resisters who met Van Riebeeck in 1652. Many a young activist - who has undoubtedly made an enormous contribution to the destabilizing of apartheid - have no objective sense of their contribution and believe that the present vulnerability of the regime and our looming victories are entirely the result of the struggles of the last few years.
 

Glasnost arrives in South Africa

A brief overview of the relationship between our movement and the Soviet Union would be pertinent before proceeding. The Soviet Union and its allies have always been consistent in their material and moral support for the anti-colonial struggles of the Two-Third world and in particular of our struggle. Reflecting the closeness of our fraternal ties is the fact that until fairly recently the ANC did not even have an office in the Soviet Union. Soviet non-governmental organizations (NGO's)- especially the Afro Asian Solidarity Organization fulfilled all the functions expected of an ANC mission abroad. Sechaba gets published in the German Democratic Republic without cost and those countries were the first to offer us unconditional assistance including arms and training. At home the Soviet Union was extensively eulogized with other East Bloc countries such as Vietnam and Cuba in our publications. The applause for only one speaker possibly matched that for the then newly released Walter Sisulu at the CDF - that for Irina Filatova from the Soviet Union. That she - by the contents of her speech - could easily have been speaking on behalf of Idasa whose guest she was - hardly mattered. She was from that country that had materially and diplomatically - and for some also ideologically - nurtured our struggle and that was all that was of consequence. The East could do no wrong - from the crushing of Poland's Solidarity to the invasion of Afghanistan. When unpleasant truths surfaced we turned the other way. The Call of Islam - one of the few 'struggle' organizations with a truly universalist perspective - maintained a curious silence on Afghanistan and 'New Era' carefully edited my negative observations regarding the position of women in the Soviet Union. When the weekly 'South' did publish it I was denounced for providing 'sweet music for the racists.'

The first signs that events in Eastern Europe were beginning to affect us were fairly late in coming and extremely reluctantly acknowledged. There was the inability of President Gorbachev to meet Comrade Oliver Tambo during the latter's last visit to Moscow, the appearance of a number of articles in Soviet journals by academics questioning whether our struggle is one for liberation rather than one for civil liberties and arguing for the consideration of white minority rights in a new constitution, a senior Soviet functionary asking 'What armed struggle?' in a response to a question as to whether the Soviet Union will continue supporting the armed struggle of the ANC and the indifference of the Soviet Union to the pleadings of the Organization of African Unity and SWAPO that the UNTAG police forces be increased to cope with the Koevoet menace in Namibia.

Most of 1989 - especially the early part - was characterized by an extraordinary silence on our part regarding the breathtaking events in Eastern Europe and the collapse of socialist regimes. It cost the embarrassing nightly TV spectacle of thousands of fleeing - but nonetheless euphoric - citizens from the German Democratic Republic throwing all their useless ostmarks from departing train windows to jolt us into smelling the coffee. It wasn't, after all, just an embarrassing nightmare symbolizing the collapse of so much that we hold dear. It was for real. Only then did activists begin to talk about events in Eastern Europe. Even then, our responses were limited - and still are - to finding excusses and being satisfied with glib rationalizations. Publicly, though, the first time that I heard any approving reference to those events by way of a passing comparison between that and our struggle was as late as the February 2 march in Cape Town. It must be said, by way of mitigation, that South Africans have an appalling indifference to developments in the rest of the world. A recent visiting Nigerian was appalled that very few activists knew where her country was and fewer still knew the name of its president.

More directly, two articles reflected its immediate and direct relevance for and impact on own struggle: Joe Slovo's 'Has Socialism Failed' and Albie Sachs' 'Preparing Ourselves for Freedom'. Comrade Slovo's paper written in January of this year, 'not as a final (South African Communist Party) collective position but as launching pad for further critical thought and debate', set the tone for the glasnost debate and caused a stir amongst activists - not without criticism and reservations though - and a number of workshops have been conducted around it as well as articles commenting on it. Two brief quotes from that paper will give us an idea of its basic thrust:

...Where a single party state is in place and there is not even democracy and accountability within the party, it becomes a short-cut to a political tyranny over the whole of society. This is what happened in most socialist states.

The way forward is through thorough going democratic socialism which can only be charted (Chartered?) by a party which wins support through democratic persuasion and ideological contest and not, as has too often happened up to now, by a claim of right.

Comrade Slovo's article was followed by Comrade Sachs' which was prepared for an ANC in-house seminar on culture. Sachs argues that 'true leadership position lies in being 'non-hegemonic' and in 'showing the people that we are fighting not to impose a view upon them but to give them the right to choose what kind of society they want...'In the meantime, he urges: 'We need to accept broad parameters (in culture and art) rather than narrow ones: (It) certainly ill behooves us to set ourselves up as the new censors of art and literature, or to impose our own internal states of emergency in areas where we are well organized. Rather let us write better poems, make better films and compose better music.' Sachs later admitted that he took a chance with his article. and was surprised and excited at reaction to it 'Van die stellings was bedoel om mense te skok en ek was eintlik besig om myself te skok.' 'It was necessary, though' he says, for 'the situation was worse than what he thought'. 'Recently a in Lusaka a comrade told me, 'Albie, It is true what you said. We do speak about the role of the white working class when go to bed at night. We even talk about the role of the black working class!'

The immediate cause of this openness is a direct consequence of events in Eastern Europe. 'Our shift', says Slovo, undoubtedly owes a prime debt to the process of perestroika and glasnost which was so courageously unleashed under Gorbachev's inspiration.' Slovo's article especially provided the impetus for our own internal glasnost that is presently being born. I also believe that the relative absence of state repression presently provides much of the material conditions facilitating local glasnost. We are freer to discuss our shortcomings because the need to close ranks in the face of a ruthless enemy had diminished. This is not to deny that tyranny is still present, even if in an enlightened form. Not everyone in the MDM shares Slovo and Sachs enthusiasm for glasnost. Professor Jack Simons, the newly returned exile who headed the ANC's commission on the constitutional guidelines recently decried some of the 'unfortunate developments under the guise of reform' in Eastern Europe and Harry Gwala, in a recent interview, defended the Brezhnev Doctrine under which Soviet intervention in Afghanistan was justified. In the same interview he defended the 'achievements of Stalin' and denied that Marxism-Leninism is in any crisis.

And so I am aware - as stated earlier on - that glasnost is only being born for, as Slovo says: 'In the socialist world there are still outposts which unashamedly mourn the retreat from Stalinism and use its dogmas to 'justify' undemocratic and tyrannical practices... Those who still defend the Stalinist model - even in a qualified way - are a dying breed; at the ideological level they will undoubtedly be left behind and need not detain us here.' There has been little internal tension around the issue inside MDM circles despite the reality of differences in approaches to it. I say regrettable because it shows the scant attention being paid to international issues and, more importantly, the issue is at the heart of what a new South Africa is all about. The absence of tensions around it means the burying of fundamental differences and even the perpetuation of Stalinists modes of organizational practice.
 
At a recent UDF Education and Training forum dealing with the issue there were a number of oblique and gentle references to 'Stalinist practices in organizations which must come to an end'. It is, however, too early to assess to what extent this openness is going to prevail. People are, after all not taps to be turned on and off at will and they have become accustomed to non-democratic ways of operating for a number of years now. Freedom and openness may sound more exciting but is the unknown and the unknown is invariably feared and even resisted. (I gave a draft of this paper to some activists and, when approached for comment, a not unusual reply was: “I haven’t read your paper properly so I am not able to comment on it.” Rather, I suspect, it was the fear of the unknown and, of course, 'the line' on my paper is not out yet. Another said: "Brilliant comrade, absolutely brilliant! I am fully behind you although incognito.")

One can also understand the gentleness of the rejection of Stalinism because its erstwhile adherents or present-day sympathizers are still all within the ranks of our organization - even at a leadership level - and we certainly do not want to risk losing them, nor of getting lost because of them. We do, however, run the counter-risk of a return to non-democratic practices or totalitarian visions of a new South Africa if the break with our own past is not decisive and the acknowledgement of our own responsibility - such as ideology - in it. Presenntly the political field has been thrown wide open and intense debate are the order of the day. Much of the courage for this wave of glasnost has been fueled by Slovo's paper. Whilst I welcome this wave - it is not without some concern that, by and large, it had to wait for the emergence of Slovo's paper and later Sachs' for fundamental issues of socialism and fascism to be debated. My concern is around the following two issues:

First, how far have we really come in terms of the battle for ideas? The truth is that there have been activists within our ranks who have been saying the exact things for the last six years - if they were allowed to remain in our ranks for that long - that Slovo is now saying but we refused to listen to them, not listening to in the sense of swallowing what they mouth but listening to in the sense of reflecting on what they mouth with the possibility of accepting or rejecting. This is problematic because socialism claims to be based on pure reason whilst eschewing the personal factor in the shaping of a political discourse. This brings me to the second problem: Comrade Slovo attributes 'the courageous unleashing' of perestroika and glasnost' to Gorbachev's courage and fails to take cognizance of - or at least mention - the material conditions which made perestroika and glasnost inevitable. Similarly in South Africa our own glasnost is seen as the result of Slovo's paper. The leader has said 'Openness!' and the crowd says 'Openness!'. What if the leader tomorrow turns around, or if the present good king is followed by a bad king? Are we all going to turn around? Surely there must to be more to it than this? And if there isn't, then what does it say about us - and about leaders? 'You see comrade' said the comrade from the Soviet Union when I asked him about the chances of glasnost meeting with approval by the people, 'The one advantage that we have is that our people respect and follow our leaders and so it shall be now also'. I could easily have been in Khomeinist Iran.

I raise these issues in the full understanding that they are uncomfortable and provocative but sincerely believe that we need to confront them now if our glasnost is to experience a healthy birth and if it is to grow - and alongside it a truly democratic South Africa.

WHERE WERE WE?

This, to me, is the most fundamental question upon which rests whatever credibility we have as people and as revolutionaries. This will determine the depth of our commitment to freedom and the extent to which past totalitarian tendencies are genuinely rejected. Slovo does ask 'why so many communists allowed themselves to become so blinded for so long' and 'why so many millions of genuine socialists and revolutionaries became such blind worshippers in the temple of the cult of the personality' but makes no attempt to answer it. It is told of Krushchev that someone shouted at him from the audience in his famous speech denouncing the excesses of Stalinism: 'Where were you?' He, in a seemingly angry manner, shouted back: 'Who was that?’ and there was no response. He then said: 'We'll, now you know where I was'. It is not just a question of where we were when Ceaucescu and his wife were living it up whilst thousands of AIDS infected babies were languishing in unknown homes or Brezhnev's son was enriching himself whilst Soviet miners were being underpaid, but also a question of where we are today.

Hungary is leading the way in teaching us some very bitter lessons about our collective narcissism. We have been wrapped up in our struggles and are indifferent to those of others. They or their governments are only of consequence to us when our immediate political ends are being served. Without the basic diplomatic niceties of informing the ANC mission in Bucharest, Pik Botha rocks up there for a high profile visit and the next moment their Director General of Foreign Affairs is in Pretoria singing the praises of the Nats. Painful as it is, they are telling us that 'you cared for our regimes and they cared for you. They walked over us and you were blinded by it - indeed you sang their praises. So, what do you expect from us?'

Alas! It is also a question of where we are today.

Zimbabwe is moving towards a one-party state and all strikes by workers are outlawed there. Most of Africa practices torture and detention without trial as a matter of course, including our generous host country - Zambia - and in that leading country on oour continent, Nigeria, state celebrations heralding the freedom of Comrade Mandela were disrupted by activists demanding freedom for its own countless political prisoners. Where are we when the trade unions are being rapidly marginalized in newly independent Namibia and when Swapo has dismally failed to account for more than a thousand of its prisoners? Resorting to the policy of non-interference in the affairs of fraternal countries is out of the question since one of the pillars of our struggle is international solidarity. Invoking it only when our short term political interests are at stake puts us in the same league as the USA.

Accusations have recently come to the fore of torture in our own training camps in Angola and elsewhere. We cannot wish these away like a bad dream or the machinations of the Apartheid regime. We do not dismiss the possibility of these accusations being invented in Pretoria or of the tortures and witchunting - if they did take place - being perpetrated by their agents who infiltrated our ranks. However, nothing less than getting to the bottom of the whole truth - our truth, even if it stinks - is going to exonerate us. Blaming it all on apartheid or the war is not going to help much. We, after all, have consistently, and quite rightly so, claimed the moral high ground. A gentle and quite transition into our own glasnost is not going to absolve us from the responsibility of having to admit complicity - yes complicity. We were/are an intrinsic part of a worldview (having one of its tenets working class internationalism) which itself - or colossal distortions of it, if you prefer - is being rejected by virtually everyone who experienced it. The Nationalist regime has a notorious inability to say 'we were wrong' and 'sorry'. Verwoerd, for example, is an embarrassment to them and much of his legacy lay in ruins. Yet, none of the regime's spokespersons have openly denounced him. Airports throughout the country are still named after petty tyrants who, even by their standards, are now disgraced wash outs ala Vorster. For some reason or the other they have the need to cling on to the nameplates. Let us learn from the east (with a small 'e', which does embrace the capital 'E'.) whereby repentance is public and denunciation of past evil practices explicit and unambiguous.

CONCLUSION: FORWARD TO DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM.

There has been considerable glee and gloating in the west about the very serious reverses suffered by socialism and in their self-centeredness this has been interpreted as a vindication of capitalism as 'if the latter gives adequate scope for the fulfillment of democratic ideals' (Slovo). Whilst a critique of capitalism is obviously outside the ambit of today's presentation I do not want my own criticism of the fascist tendencies within the Mass Democratic Movement or the socialist world to be construed as overt support for it. I would, therefore, still want to address myself to two elements which are conveniently ignored whenever the trumpet of capitalist democracies are blown: i) The dubious nature of democracy in the capitalist world and ii) the fact that capitalism is not only the story of the USA but also the story of its impoverished protégé, Pakistan, not only the story of Belgium but also the story of its client, the Congo, not only the story of the creation of wealth but also the story of its inevitable corollary, the destruction of eco- system.

Capitalist Democracy

Bismarck’s description of Napoleon III is most applicable to capitalist democracy: 'At a distance it is something, but close to it is nothing at all.' Its objective is the consolidation of the power of the few by creating in the minds of many the idea or myth that they themselves are the creators of their own destiny, that they have a real place in the decision making processes. Parliament's essential role is largely symbolic and merely legitimizes decisions taken elsewhere - usually in the boardrooms of major corporations. The forms, the external trimmings of democracy are emphasized at the expense of its essence. Comrade Slovo correctly points out that 'a society ruled by profit and social inequality and in which power over the most vital areas of life is outside public control can never be democratic'.

Democracy implies a faith in people. A real democratic society is one in which people have a sense of community, of relatedness, and in which mutual liking and trust flows between them like  a thousand invisible threads so that people feel they belong together with no need to be watchful, competitive or tough. In the developed capitalist countries this sympathetic flow has collapsed completely and with it, the real spirit of democracy. Democracy and exploitation are mutually exclusive. The one destroys the other.

The formal democracy of capitalism is concerned only with rights and monetary interests. Its sense of human relatedness is extended only to those who, for the time being, happen to be on  'our side'. The rest are enemies. I do acknowledge that for all its imperfections it does provide a voice for the dissident and the freedom to espouse unpopular ideas. Provided, of course, that protest never poses a serious threat to the established order. A multi- party democracy can never be the objective of our struggle. It can be - and at the moment there appears to be no alternative - the foundation on which to build a people's democracy.

The Flip Side of Capitalism

Beyond the razzmatazz of the Statue of Liberty and Piccadilly Circus hides another reality; the squalor of the inner cities, the 28 million unemployed in the developed countries, the overall degeneration of society. Capitalists may argue along the lines of Joe Slovo's paper that these are merely distortions in free market policies and not intrinsic to it but until we have not seen the emergence of market oriented societies essentially concerned about people - a contradiction in terms really - we are not going to buy that. When viewed against the background of the squalor and poverty of other capitalist states in the Two Third world which are in reality mortgaged to the developed world then the 'distortions of capitalism' in the latter pales into insignificance. The populations of countries such as Brazil, Argentina, Pakistan, Bangla Desh and numerous other vassal states of the developed countries are existing or dying in
conditions of unimaginable wretchedness and poverty because of the razzmatazz and glitter of the Statue of Liberty and Piccadilly Circus.

Let us not ignore the impoverishment of the environment created by the ruthless exploitation of the earth's resources. The total product of Belgium with a population of 10 million equaled that of the entire Sub Sahara Africa with a population of 450 million in 1980. How many Belgiums can the earth sustain? Let us therefore not be fooled into thinking that one of the lessons from developments in Eastern Europe is that Capitalism is ok. A system which entrenches socio-economic inequalities as the norm can never be ok. I for one am convinced of two things: The inherent immorality of a free-market economy and the inherent moral superiority of socialism. Not being a materialist, I can freely appeal to the moral superiority of a worldview without being contradictory. The yearning for egalitarianism and a common humanity runs too deep in the human spirit for the ideal of socialism to be abandoned.

I know that all of those committed to a classless society are presently in deep troubled waters. The troubled waters of those of our ideological adversaries are a lot more murky and indiscernible but that is besides the point. That much of our woes also stem from those quarters must be recognized although even that is bedsides the point. We have failed ourselves and the people in whose name we speak. We must openly acknowledge our complicity in the local manifestations of Stalinism. Eastern Europe - particularly glasnost - has an enormous amount to teach us. We, however, require the integrity to say we were wrong and the courage to get to the bone of errors - even if they were deeply cherishhed ideological convictions.
 

Ps: Will the comrades who find my ideas problematic kindly be good socialists and tackle them whilst leaving me unscathed?

Badat, S. 'Learning from Eastern Europe' in New Era, (March, 1990)

Gwala, H. 'The Socialist Path is the Only One Open to the Oppressed Everywhere' (African Communist No.120 )

Karon, T. 'After Eastern Europe: Where now South Africa? in New Era, March 1990.

Meer, F. Address on the occasion of the 1989 Indicator Human Rights Award, Johannesburg, (unpublished)

Sachs, A.  'Preparing Ourselves for Freedom' (unpublished)

Sachs, A. 'Albie Sachs se wat hy gese het', Interview in Vrye Weekblad, 30 Maart, 1990

Slabbert, V.Z. ' State of the Nation' in Annual Report 1989 (Idasa, Mowbray)

Slovo, J.  'Has Socialism Failed' (SACP n.d.)

Slovo, J. 'The Crisis in the Socialist World' interview with New Era (unpublished)

'Build the Party' in Umsebenzi - Voice of the SACP Vol.6, No 1, 1990