SOUTH AFRICA’S communists resolved in principle at the weekend during their 14th national congress in Boksburg to contest elections separately from their African National Congress revolutionary alliance partner.
The alliance brings together the ANC, SACP, trade union federation Cosatu and the Sanco civics organisation, but anger over corruption at the highest levels of the ANC has stoked existing fires within the SACP that the party should stand in its own right.
Second deputy general secretary Chris “Che” Matlhako, who was elected for the first time at the congress, stressed that “the exact modality in which we do so needs to be determined by way of concrete analysis and through the process of active engagement with worker and progressive formations.”
JOHN CALLOW examines what went wrong for the Czech communist party in the recent parliamentary elections, where it failed to meet the threshold to return deputies and some now talk of the party abandoning its commitment to socialism
The shared path of the South African Communist Party and the ANC to the ballot box has found itself at a junction. SABINA PRICE reports
The charter emerged from a profoundly democratic process where people across South Africa answered ‘What kind of country do we want?’ — but imperial backlash and neoliberal compromise deferred its deepest transformations, argues RONNIE KASRILS
The plan is to stigmatise and destabilise South Africa in preparation for breaking it up while creating a confused and highly racialised atmosphere around immigration in the US to aid in denying rights to non-white refugees, explains EMILE SCHEPERS



