Writing in the SACP newsletter, Umsebenzi, deputy general secretary Jeremy Cronin warned against treating nationalisation as a standalone issue and as a rhetorical badge for radicalism.
Rather, “any progressive call for nationalisation needs to be a coherent and do-able part of an overall democratic programme”. Cronin said the discussion around the transformation of the mining sector needed to account for the broader challenge of putting SA on a new job-creating path.
It also needed to focus on the role of a transforming mining sector in the government’s emerging industrial policy. “How we transform the mining sector should be located within such a broader discussion and not be based on one- third of a de-contextualised clause in the Freedom Charter.”
Cronin’s comments come amid an African National Congress Youth League proposal for a state company that would own 60% of all new mines.
His views are likely to ignite old tension with the league, which labelled him a “white messiah” when he suggested that those who called for nationalisation did not have a full grasp of economics.
Cronin wrote that the SACP was not “in principle” opposed to state ownership in advancing social ownership. But the concept needed qualification since it was hardly about rolling back the logic of private profits for a few in the interests of meeting the social needs of the majority.
While the apartheid regime, along with various “fascist” states and recently bailed-out financial institutions in the US and UK, all had extensive state ownership, these were mainly bureaucratic interventions to save capitalism.
Cronin wrote that public sector ownership on its own was no guarantee “that this public property will not be plundered by senior management for their own private accumulation purposes”.
Source: Business Day
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