Abstract
M.A.
The following dissertation examines the political and economic policy approaches of the South African Communist Party for, in main, the period 1993 to 1996. The study is an exploratory one and relies largely upon the policy expressions that have emanated from the SACP, in official or related documents, during the period 1993 to 1996. Although interviewees are acknowledged in the appended source list, these have not been explicitly referred to in the text. The dissertation opens with the submission of an hypothesis, towards the tentative substantiation of which it works throughout. The hypothesis should none the less be subject to further consideration and critique. The central argument made in the dissertation is that: It is a product of the revisionism
within the SACP that followed the upheavals in the Soviet bloc and the Apartheid state in the period 1989 to 1993, that the Party should no longer be understood according to older Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy or the two-stage revolutionary theory that sustained it during the exile period of 1950 to 1990. Moreover, the Party's fusion with the ANC by means of common programmatic platforms, in 1955 and again in 1993/1994, has allowed it to neglect the development of its vision of a post-apartheid socialist transformation. These factors resulted in the elimination of tangible
benchmarks according to which the Party could have measured progress towards socialism in the period after the South African democratic election of 1994, and have exacerbated the Party's inability, by itself, or as part of a Left vanguard, to engage effectively with the Rightward shift that the post-apartheid democracy has taken since 1996. The study concludes, however, that there is some scope for the Party to engage with the global 'neo-liberal' order and South Africa's essentially liberal democracy. This engagement might be based upon the Party's now secular political agenda and should be aimed at deepening South Africa's democracy.