Communist State
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A communist state is a state that is usually administered and governed by a single party representing the proletariat, guided by Marxist–Leninist philosophy, with the aim of achieving communism.
There have been several instances of Communist states with functioning political participation processes involving several other non-Party organisations, such as trade unions, factory committees, and direct democratic participation. The term "Communist state" is used by Western historians, political scientists and media to refer to these countries. However, contrary to Western usage, these states do not describe themselves as "communist" nor do they claim to have achieved communism; they refer to themselves as Socialist states or Workers' states that are in the process of constructing socialism.
Communist states can be administered by a single, centralized party apparatus, although countries such as the DPRK have several parties. These parties usually are Marxist–Leninist or some variation thereof (including Maoism in China and Juche in North Korea), with the official aim of achieving socialism and progressing toward communism. These states are usually termed by Marxists as dictatorships of the proletariat, or dictatorships of the working class, whereby the working class is the ruling class of the country, in contrast to capitalism, whereby the bourgeoisie is the ruling class.
Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe only the following nations persist with communism. The following countries are one-party states in which the institutions of the ruling communist party and the state have become intertwined. They are generally adherents of Marxism–Leninism in particular. They are listed here together with the year of their founding and their respective ruling parties:
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October 1949 |
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July 1961 |
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December 1975 |
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The Berlin Wall falls in 1989
Adam Smith and the Invisible Hand
The father of modern economics, Adam Smith, supported a limited role for government. He believed that, "Government should limit its activities to administer justice, enforcing private property rights, and defending the nation against aggression." The point is that the farther a government gets away from this limited role, the more that government strays from the ideal path. How this issue is handled by governments will decide whether the country can more closely follow Adam Smith's prescription for growth and wealth creation or move farther away from it.”
Adam Smith was an 18th century philosopher renowned as the father of modern economics, and a major proponent of laissez-faire economic policies. In his first book, "The Theory of Moral Sentiments," Smith proposed the idea of the invisible hand—the tendency of free markets to regulate themselves by means of competition, supply and demand, and self-interest. Smith is also known for his theory of compensating wage differentials, meaning that dangerous or undesirable jobs tend to pay higher wages to attract workers to these positions, but he is most famous for his 1776 book: "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations." This Scottish philosopher argued against mercantilism to become the father of modern free trade and was the creator of the modern-day concept commonly now known all over the world as Gross Domestic Product.
The Wealth of Nations was published during the first Industrial Revolution and the same year as the American Declaration of Independence. Smith’s invisible hand became one of the primary justifications for an economic system of free market capitalism.
As a result, the business climate developed with a general understanding that voluntary private markets are more productive than government-run economies.
Even government rules sometimes try to incorporate the invisible hand. Former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke explained the "market-based approach is regulation by the invisible hand" which "aims to align the incentives of market participants with the objectives of the regulator."
The End of Apartheid
Apartheid, the Afrikaans name given by the white-ruled South Africa’s Nationalist Party in 1948 to the country’s harsh, institutionalized system of racial segregation, came to an end in the early 1990s in a series of steps that led to the formation of a democratic government in 1994. Years of violent internal protest, weakening white commitment, international economic and cultural sanctions, economic struggles, and the end of the Cold War brought down white minority rule in Pretoria. U.S. policy toward the regime underwent a gradual but complete transformation that played an important conflicting role in Apartheid’s initial survival and eventual downfall.
Although many of the segregationist policies dated back to the early decades of the twentieth century, it was the election of the Nationalist Party in 1948 that marked the beginning of legalized racism’s harshest features called Apartheid. The Cold War then was in its early stages. U.S. President Harry Truman’s foremost foreign policy goal was to limit Soviet expansion. Despite supporting a domestic civil rights agenda to further the rights of black people in the United States, the Truman Administration chose not to protest the anti-communist South African government’s system of Apartheid in an effort to maintain an ally against the Soviet Union in southern Africa. This set the stage for successive administrations to quietly support the Apartheid regime as a stalwart ally against the spread of communism.
Inside South Africa, riots, boycotts, and protests by black South Africans against white rule had occurred since the inception of independent white rule in 1910. Opposition intensified when the Nationalist Party, assuming power in 1948, effectively blocked all legal and non-violent means of political protest by non-whites. The African National Congress (ANC) and its offshoot, the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), both of which envisioned a vastly different form of government based on majority rule, were outlawed in 1960 and many of its leaders imprisoned. The most famous prisoner was a leader of the ANC, Nelson Mandela, who had become a symbol of the anti-Apartheid struggle. While Mandela and many political prisoners remained incarcerated in South Africa, other anti-Apartheid leaders fled South Africa and set up headquarters in a succession of supportive, independent African countries, including Guinea, Tanzania, Zambia, and neighboring Mozambique where they continued the fight to end Apartheid. It was not until the 1980s, however, that this turmoil effectively cost the South African state significant losses in revenue, security, and international reputation.
The international community had begun to take notice of the brutality of the Apartheid regime after white South African police opened fire on unarmed black protesters in the town of Sharpeville in 1960, killing 69 people and wounding 186 others. The United Nations led the call for sanctions against the South African Government. Fearful of losing friends in Africa as de-colonization transformed the continent, powerful members of the Security Council, including Great Britain, France, and the United States, succeeded in watering down the proposals. However, by the late 1970s, grassroots movements in Europe and the United States succeeded in pressuring their governments into imposing economic and cultural sanctions on Pretoria. After the U.S. Congress passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act in 1986, many large multinational companies withdrew from South Africa. By the late 1980s, the South African economy was struggling with the effects of the internal and external boycotts as well as the burden of its military commitment in occupying Namibia.
Defenders of the Apartheid regime, both inside and outside South Africa, had promoted it as a bulwark against communism. However, the end of the Cold War rendered this argument obsolete. South Africa had illegally occupied neighboring Namibia at the end of World War II, and since the mid-1970s, Pretoria had used it as a base to fight the communist party in Angola. The United States had even supported the South African Defense Force’s efforts in Angola. In the 1980s, hard-line anti-communists in Washington continued to promote relations with the Apartheid government despite economic sanctions levied by the U.S. Congress. However, the relaxation of Cold War tensions led to negotiations to settle the Cold War conflict in Angola. Pretoria’s economic struggles gave the Apartheid leaders strong incentive to participate. When South Africa reached a multilateral agreement in 1988 to end its occupation of Namibia in return for a Cuban withdrawal from Angola, even the most ardent anti-communists in the United States lost their justification for support of the Apartheid regime.
The effects of the internal unrest and international condemnation led to dramatic changes beginning in 1989. South African Prime Minister P.W. Botha resigned after it became clear that he had lost the faith of the ruling National Party (NP) for his failure to bring order to the country. His successor, F W de Klerk, in a move that surprised observers, announced in his opening address to Parliament in February 1990 that he was lifting the ban on the ANC and other black liberation parties, allowing freedom of the press, and releasing political prisoners. The country waited in anticipation for the release of Nelson Mandela who walked out of prison after 27 years on February 11, 1990.
The impact of Mandela’s release reverberated throughout South Africa and the world. After speaking to throngs of supporters in Cape Town where he pledged to continue the struggle, but advocated peaceful change, Mandela took his message to the international media. He embarked on a world tour culminating in a visit to the United States where he spoke before a joint session of Congress.
Impact of the collapse of the USSR on South Africa
This article was produced for South African History Online
22 Mar 2011
There were many reasons why apartheid collapsed. The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union was another major cause of the end of apartheid.
Under apartheid, South Africa was a fascist state with a capitalist economy. The National Party was strongly anti-communist and said they were faced with a 'Rooi Gevaar' or a 'Red Threat'. The apartheid state used the label 'communist' to justify its repressive actions against anyone who disagreed with their policies.
During the Cold War, there was a contest for influence in Africa, between the US and Western powers on the one hand, and the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc countries on the other. Most of newly independent ex-colonies in Africa received military and economic support from one of the Superpowers.
Despite its racist policies, the South African government was supported by many governments in the West, particularly Britain and the USA. This was because the South African government was anti-communist. The British and American governments used political rhetoric and economic sanctions against apartheid, but continued to supply the South African regime with military expertise and hardware.
The collapse of the USSR in 1989 meant that the National Party could no longer use communism as a justification for their oppression. The ANC could also no longer rely on the Soviet Union for economic and military support. By the end of the 1980s, the Soviet Union was in political and economic crisis, and it was increasingly difficult for the Soviet Government to justify spending money in Africa.
In 1989, President F.W de Klerk, the last apartheid Head of State, unbanned the African National Congress, the South African Communist Party and the Pan Africanist Congress. He states that the collapse of the Soviet Union was decisive in persuading him to take this step:
"The collapse of the Soviet Union helped to remove our long-standing concern regarding the influence of the South African Communist Party within the ANC Alliance. By 1990 classic socialism had been thoroughly discredited throughout the world and was no longer a serious option, even for revolutionary parties like the ANC.
At about the same time, the ANC was reaching a similar conclusion that it could not achieve a revolutionary victory within the foreseeable future. The State of Emergency, declared by the South African Government in 1986, and the collapse of the Soviet Union - which had traditionally been one the ANC's main allies and suppliers - led the organisation to adopt a more realistic view of the balance of forces. It concluded that its interests could be best secured by accepting negotiations rather than by committing itself to a long and ruinous civil war."- Quote source: www.fwdklerk.org.za
The Difference between the Private and Public Sector
It is important to understand the difference between the private sector and public sector because your privacy rights will differ depending on the legislation that an organization is governed under.
The Private Sector
The private sector is usually composed of organizations that are privately owned and not part of the government. These usually includes corporations (both profit and non-profit) and partnerships.
An easier way to think of the private sector is by thinking of organizations that are not owned or operated by the government. For example, retail stores, credit unions, and local businesses will operate in the private sector.
The Public Sector
The public sector is usually composed of organizations that are owned and operated by the government. This includes federal, provincial, state, or municipal governments, depending on where you live. Privacy legislation usually calls organizations in the public sector a public body or a public authority.
The wider threat still overlooked – all roads lead to Communism…
Anthea Jeffery
Anthea Jeffery, Head of Policy Research, IRR. Jeffery is also the author of People’s War: New Light on the Struggle for South Africa and BEE: Helping or Hurting?whatsapp
With all that has happened over the past few days, it’s incredible to suggest that despite the threat to Treasury there is still a much wider and deeper problem. There are few with the insight that the Institute of Race Relations’ Anthea Jeffery holds, and what she unpacks in the piece below is most likely the final piece in the ANC’s jigsaw puzzle. And the key to her summation goes back to the 1950s when she says the ANC was in effect captured by the SACP, which also highlights why President Jacob Zuma went to them first with the news he wants to fire Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan. Jeffery says the end goal is to ultimately create a Communist state, and it’s all being achieved under the auspices of the National Democratic Revolution. This is another brilliant piece of analysis. – Stuart Lowman
UPDATE: Cape Messenger editor Donwald Pressly asked Jeffery how SACP deputy secretary general Solly Mapaila’s press conference on Thursday fitted in with her analysis. He appeared to signal SACP unhappiness with the axing of Pravin Gordhan and Mcebisi Jonas. Also the SACP also has a special meeting in April to decide on the road forward with the ANC/SACP/Cosatu alliance
This is what Dr Jeffery had to say: I think this is just a minor blip. The SACP put Zuma into the ANC presidency in 2007 to help advance the NDR, but now they are concerned that his obvious flaws and close ties to the Guptas are so reducing support for the ANC that the horse they’ve successfully ridden into power for two decades might now not win. Hence, they’d like to hold him in check, so as not to turn the electorate still more against the ANC. If they think the ANC has become too hopelessly tarnished, they might perhaps want to distance themselves from the party and they might even seriously consider standing for election in their own right.
But in the end the ANC brand that they’ve so assiduously built up for so long is too important for them to jettison, especially as their own electoral support would be very limited. Plus the ANC’s growing emphasis on radical economic transformation is exactly what they want. So I expect they’ll remain in close alliance with the ANC, no matter how much they might criticize Zuma now (effectively, for weakening the brand). Their key aim will be to influence the succession in favour of someone who can help ensure an ANC victory in 2019 (if necessary, with the help of a deal with the EFF) and who will then continue moving towards the socialist/communist end goal without evoking the public anger that Zuma has unleashed.
President Jacob Zuma’s peremptory recall of finance minister Pravin Gordhan from an investment roadshow in London shows how little Mr Zuma cares about the economy or the plight of the poor.
The president is clearly reckless as to how much his vendetta against Mr Gordhan undermines the country’s growth prospects, pushes up the costs of servicing R2.2 trillion in public debt, or brings closer a ratings downgrade to junk status.
President Jacob Zuma meets with Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan and Deputy Minister Mcebisi Jonas to discuss the final touches to Budget 2016. (Photo: GCIS)
Yet South Africa’s growth prospects are already very poor. As Africa Confidential reports, South Africa is one of the slowest growing states on the African continent, with a projected growth rate in 2017 of 1.1% of GDP. This is far below the growth rates projected for Ethiopia (8.9%), Cote d’Ivoire (8.0%), Ghana (7.5%), Tanzania (7.1%), Senegal (6.8%), and Rwanda (6.0%).
Most South Africans are of course rational beings who find it difficult to believe that the government could deliberately undermine the economy and hurt the poor and disadvantaged. Mr Zuma’s recent conduct shows that his faction of the ANC, at least, has no such concerns.
If the president can act so recklessly against Mr Gordhan at so critical a moment for foreign investor confidence, then expropriation without compensation – whether supposedly ‘within’ the Constitution as now written, or following a constitutional amendment – cannot be ruled out.
Dr. Anthea Jeffery is Head of Policy Research at the IRR.
However, the real problem is much wider and deeper than what Mr Zuma has done this week. Ever since it was captured by the SACP in the 1950s, the ANC has effectively been the junior partner in an alliance aimed at the gradual crippling of the capitalist economy in pursuit of a socialist and then communist order. This is being achieved under the rubric of the national democratic revolution (NDR), to which the ANC plans to recommit itself in December this year – and which the SACP openly describes as offering the ‘most direct’ path to communism.
The ANC has long downplayed this objective, for it knows that any open acknowledgement of this goal would greatly weaken its popular support. Most South Africans have no wish to adopt the flawed ideology and centralized controls that so signally failed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Rather, they want to retain the political and economic freedoms that the ending of apartheid ushered in.
To disguise their real goals, the ANC and its communist allies have long been masters of propaganda: the constant repetition of a narrative which includes key elements of truth that give it credibility, but which nevertheless profoundly distorts reality. This narrative shifts according to the needs of the time, but it always includes a careful choice of culprits to help deflect attention from the ANC’s own agency.
In the ten years (1984 to 1994) of the ANC’s people’s war against its black rivals, the key culprits in the narrative were initially Inkatha ‘warlords’ and ‘impis’ in KwaZulu/Natal and later a sinister ‘Third Force’ made up of Inkatha and the South African Police. Both Inkatha and the police were of course to blame for many of the killings in this period. However, the narrative was also utterly misleading in obscuring the ANC’s own major role in the deaths of some 20,500 black civilians.
Once the people’s war had brought the ANC to power in 1994, political violence came to an end and the narrative shifted once again. To increase the state’s control, weaken the economy, and prepare the way for ever more racial scapegoating, the narrative then targeted the commercial farming sector, the mines, the banks, the private health care sector, the supposedly white-owned media, and the many businesses (which despite the huge sums put into BEE and the practical obstacles to its success) had reportedly been dragging their feet on transformation.
Now that ANC/SACP policies have done so much to reduce growth, increase unemployment, and frustrate hopes of a better life for the poor, the ruling party is gearing up to fetter the economy still more firmly. It now wants ‘radical economic transformation’ to change the ‘structure’ of the economy. It is also seeking to push the BEE ownership requirement up from 25% to 51%, and is increasingly echoing EFF calls for the nationalization of land and other assets.
Not surprisingly, the dominant narrative has now shifted once again. Its current targets have expanded from the specific sectors listed above to include racism, colonialism, and ‘white monopoly’ capitalism. Increasingly, these factors are identified as the key reasons for economic malaise and worsening destitution. Moreover, as so often in the past, there are many commentators outside the ANC who uncritically endorse and echo this narrative and seek to punish those who step outside its limits.
This narrative is helping to prepare the way for ever more state ownership and control. It is also damaging the economy in other ways, by raising racial tensions and eroding the social trust vital to investment. At the same time, it is calculated to play a particularly useful role in demonizing the DA and shoring up the ANC’s failing support in the run-up to the 2019 general election.
What Mr Zuma has done in recalling Mr Gordhan from London is so obviously damaging that many South Africans will rally to the finance minister’s defence. They might even persuade Mr Zuma not to go ahead with his proposed cabinet reshuffle. But the wider threat to the country from the ANC/SACP alliance and its NDR objectives generates little opposition because it is still so little understood.
The current narrative is thus likely to continue unchecked. So too will the impetus towards the radical economic interventions which the narrative legitimates. In time, the weakening of property rights and increased racial scapegoating will help to marginalize or drive out the established middle class. This in turn will greatly weaken the new middle class. It will also (if all goes to plan) culminate in a proletarian dictatorship under the incontestable control of the ANC/SACP alliance. This, as the ANC coyly puts it in its draft Strategy & Tactics document for 2017, will help to usher in ‘a higher form of human civilisation’.
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