I had sight of the Cronin paper “Admit nothing, learn nothing- Mbekism in 2025″. I also had sight of the paper, “On the Configuration of the Tripartite Alliance” published on Radio Freedom by Geraldine Fraser–Moleketi, Mdumiseni Ntuli & Lennox Klaas. Including its extended version.
In this submission, I would like to restrict myself to a single observation of what one might call a condescending attitude that lies at the heart of Cronin’s paper. It is this ‘condescending tendency’ posited against our patron in the Thabo Mbeki Foundation that invites me to the arena. The rest of the contentious issues related to the state of the NDR and SACP’s decision to contest 2026 Local Government Elections independently, are better left to members of the ANC and the SACP. Needless to say, none of these members have shown any outrage at Cronin’s racism since publication of his paper.
Incidentally, the Black Consciousness Movement had a very direct dissection of this tendency in late 1960s. Criticising the role of white liberals in racially integrated organisations and the non-racial approach, Steve Biko wrote that in this framework white liberals often claim “‘monopoly on intelligence and moral judgement’ and setting patterns and pace for the realisation of the black man’s aspirations.”(i)
As a non-racial and racially integrated platform, the ANC alliance has not been immune from this challenge.
It is actually the subject in question, the Native Republic, that occasions this tendency in what we now know as the ANC alliance. The history of how the then CPSA (now SACP) comes to adopt the Native Republic resolution reveals this serious problem between white and black thinkers in the movement. Needless to say this 1928 Comintern resolution on South Africa was directed at a ‘white dominated’ communist party.
Imagine the magnanimity of white people being directed to pursue the establishment of a Native/Black republic; clearly, this should immediately say to them, they cannot be principal actors or leaders in such a struggle and future society.
Both papers understate the historical facts within the Party over this debate.
It starts with posing a simple question; Why was the Party blind to the fact that it was white dominated in a black majority country under white supremacist colonial rule? Why did it take the Comintern to point out this fact to them, and that it meant the struggle had to be pursued on nationalist and not class terms? That as a result, they had to ensure black people were in its leadership ranks, and work with and in the ANC? Meaning, they have to prioritise progressive nationalism and work with African nationalists to realise a Native Republic?
The historical facts are even more damning to this white dominated communist party. We know that a directive by the Comintern’s Secretariat following the 1927 First International Congress Against imperialism and Colonialism in Brussels communicated a resolution on South Africa to the CPSA.
The white communists rejected this resolution and its slogan; “an
independent Black South African Republic as a stage towards a workers’ and peasants’ republic, with full autonomy for all minorities.”(ii)
We know that a delegation consisting of Sydney and Rebecca Bunting and Edward Roux, was sent to the 1928, Sixth Congress of the Comintern to fight for the repeal of this resolution.
All of them were white and all of them were opposed to the resolution. Yet, the Comintern had already been exposed to South African communists of colour with whom the idea of a Black Republic had been canvassed by key figures in the Comintern, including especially Bukharin.
Historian Doreen Musson states this about that;
“Black members of the Party such as Gomas and La Guma, as well as the young
Communist League was beginning to question the conventional wisdom of the Party leadership with regard to white workers. In June 1927, La Guma left to attend the Conference of the League Against Imperialism in Brussels, as a CPSA delegate.
Another delegate was Gumede from the ANC, in whose place Gomas was then acting as president of the ANC (Western Cape).
In Brussels the two had the opportunity of meeting with nationalist leaders from colonial countries and discussing the South African question with them. Among these were Madame Sun Yat Sen from China and Pandit Nehru from India… The conference adopted the resolution of the South African delegation on the right of self-determination through the complete overthrow of imperialism.” (iii)
For the Comintern, the struggle in South Africa had to be about establishing a Native Republic. The CPSA rejected this for many years, in what was essentially a white rejection of the Native Republic in fear that it would alienate white workers. To understand properly the attitude of white communists in those years, Doreen Musson recalls the report of Ivon Jones, the central communist responsible for providing and formulating an initial perspective on South Africa to the Comintern. She states that;
“Until 1924 the CPSA was a white party, a situation which arose from its basic belief
in the revolutionary potential of the workers and the backward character of black
workers. In his 1921 report to the Comintern on Communism in South Africa, Ivon
Jones wrote inter alia:
Owing to their heavy social disabilities and political backwardness, the natives are
not able to supply any active militants to the Communist Movement.
The immediate needs of white trade unionism in which a number of our members are actively engaged tend to throw the more difficult task of native emancipation into the background. The white workers movement moves only spasmodically and is neglected. It requires a special department with native linguists and newspapers. All of which requires large funds which are not available.” (iv)
Of course, this reading by Jones is prior to the formation of the CPSA in the same year.
However, this was a view shared largely amongst white communists at the time,
ultimately forming the central basis for CPSA’s early political programs. Moreover, it is also a view they would use, in its advanced form, to counter the adoption of the Native Republic resolution in 1928, Sixth Comintern Conference.
In 1928, states Musson, the whites only delegation of South African communists which sought to reverse the 1927 resolution of the Black Republic were “treated… at best with suspicion, at worst with cold hostility, a fact confirmed by all commentators about the Sixth Congress.
Delegates at the Congress replied by insisting that the CPSA propose and work for the creation of an “independent, Native South African Republic with full and equal rights for all races as a stage towards a workers’ and peasants’ republic.” (v)
This was to be accompanied by the slogan ‘Return the land to the Natives’. (vi)
Another historian, Tom Lodge confirms this in his work on the 100 years history of the Communist Party. Lodge actually demonstrated that the Native Republic resolution of the Comintern in 1928 on South Africa was attributed heavily to the influence by James La Guma and Josiah Gumede who had formed part of the South African delegation to Brussels in a Conference of the League Against Imperialism. Lodge states that in Bunting’s view “James
La Guma prompted the resolution, that ‘the slogan would never have been born’ if La Guma had not travelled to Moscow, and, moreover, that La Guma himself ‘was a bit of a racialist’.
La Guma has certainly co-drafted and signed a resolution on behalf of South African delegates in Brussels which called for self-determination. The resolution included in its phraseology the demand of Africa for the Africans, not a language customarily used by the party, though it contained nothing about a Negro or Native republic.”(vii)
Lodge also adds, that in Moscow Josiah Gumede, who was then President of the ANC, “was hosted by the civil war hero Marshal Budenny at a special banquet held in his honour, and subsequently met Stalin.” (viii) This demonstrated the seriousness with which the South Africans, in particular the ANC was received by the Soviet Union.
The 1928 resolution also stated that Communists must transform the ANC into a fighting revolutionary nationalist movement. We must underscore the fact that earlier drafts of the resolutions never reflected in this manner on the ANC. Nevertheless, it is easy for a white liberal or a racist to translate this part into a historic mission to subject Africanists within the movement into perpetual tutelage. Where the “revolutionary” or “progressive” kernel in ANC ideological praxis is a depository of the white communists.
However, this will be entirely misleading and altogether wrong if you consider the character of the ANC at the time, and that it was black communists, often members of the ANC in the party who were key advocates of Native Republic resolution in the CPSA.
It goes without saying that the ANC leadership of the 1920s, which up to 1985 was exclusive to Africans, already adopted and published the African Bill of Rights. In it they advocate for universal suffrage, equality before the law, equal citizenship for all races. This is half a decade before 1928 Comintern resolutions.
An honest delegation would amongst other things, use this ANC 1923 African Bill of Rights to provide in ANC’s own words, what the ANC stood for, and what brand of nationalism it represented.
Africans, on their own, as Africans, already were progressive, advocated for a progressive nationalism that sought, already in 1923 to build a national identity that was non-ethnic (anti-tribalist) and non-racial.
Without stating this historic and correct history, we are left with the wrong idea that it is communists of the CPSA (often meaning white communists), who turned the ANC into a progressive or revolutionary party.
In addition, these Africans who were intellectually leading in the ANC were Pan-Africanists, meaning their Africanism was already internationalist in character since it was committed to the liberation of Africans of the whole continent and the world. This comes out clearly in their African Claims document authored in 1943. And also traced from earlier thoughts of Soga and Seme.
The important nuance related to “anti-imperialism”, which got emphasised at the Brussels’ conference that La Guma and Gumede attended. This has to do with the idea of an independent republic of natives, black people, that is completely autonomous from the British empire.
In fact, at this Sixth Comintern’s conference, delegates alluded to the British imperialist orientation of white workers; that this ruled them out as the primary motive for the South African struggle (ix.)
The ANC had to be persuaded to pursue a struggle where they move from fighting for rights to fighting against British imperialism and pursue “self-determination” – and a sovereign black republic. This point about ‘anti-imperialism’ was directed at the CPSA itself as well since white workers, in view of Comintern delegates, espoused British imperialist supremacist tendencies.
The white communists’ essential fight back lies here; we cannot accept to live
under a black or native republic. The convenience of conducting the struggle along class lines meant they could hold on to white privilege; the “natural” superiority over blacks.
Let us take as an example what Lodge states about Bunting and his other white comrades who were delegates to the Sixth Comintern’s conference:
“South Africans proposed an amendment to the slogan. They should mobilise for an “independent workers and peasants republic”, in which ‘all tailors’ enjoy equal
rights. A movement for a specifically Native republic ‘risks race war’, they explained, and in any case ‘no native nation exists today, there are only various rival tribes.
Their audience was unreceptive and in certain cases derisive. Referring to a
comment by Rebecca Bunting on whether natives had stronger claims to the land over ‘Aboriginal Hottentots’, Manuilsky of the Soviet Communist Party retorted that if white comrades were unwilling to fight for native rights, then “Who knows? They too may be driven to the sea.’ (x)
If one was not paying attention, you could have mistaken this to have been a Pan-Africanist Congress comrade, retorting to a white communist in South Africa somewhere in the late 1950s about the Freedom Charter.
You can clearly see Bunting’s sorry views about there being “no native nation” that exists but “rival tribes”, as the basis for rejecting the formation of a native republic. ANC stood firmly against this view. Most importantly, is the sensitivity on how the resolution will cause a “race war”.
Even if we were to accept that the idea of “self-determination” came with La Guma from his interaction with communists in Brussels, it still bears the fact that La Guma was black and an ANC member. It is an idea for which he was isolated and marginalised in the party. He and Gumede were responsible to insert in the movement, both CPSA and ANC, an idea to break from British Empire and seek an independent republic of natives in South Africa.
The ANC never adopted the Comintern’s Native Republic resolution, despite the fact that Bunting and his fellow white communists would later reconcile themselves to the resolution.
Gumede, who was passionate about this, including the idea that the ANC should consider a working alliance with the CPSA was later defeated at the ANC conference in 1930 when Seme took over. It would take Xuma, a full decade later, to return to the idea of a working relationship between ANC and Communists, including Self-determination.
Notice that in the 1943’s ANC Africans’ Claims document, the ANC states:
We believe that the acid test of this third article of the charter is its application to
the African continent. In certain parts of Africa, it should be possible to accord
Africans the sovereign rights to establish administrations of their own choosing. But in other parts of Africa where there are the peculiar circumstances of a politically entrenched European minority ruling a majority European population the demands of the Africans for full citizenship rights and direct participation in all the councils of the state should be recognised. This is most urgent in the Union of South Africa.
This is before apartheid was established in 1948. Xuma’s drafting team also included well known African communists at the time, Moses Kotane and Thabo Mofutsanyane. The CPSA, then SACP, in 1962 would adopt the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) in its document titled “The Road to South African Freedom” as its theory of struggle in South Africa, emphasising the objective of establishment of a “national democratic society” instead of a Native Republic.
This phrase also made its way to the 1969 Morogoro resolutions of the ANC
in its Strategy and Tactics. In essence, the idea of pursuing the objective of a “national democratic society” in South Africa was in line with the above section of the African Claims document as it relates to South Africa; i.e. in the Union of South Africa there should be accorded to Africans full citizenship rights and direct participation in all councils.
It is further consistent with 1923 African Bill of Rights sections demanding full equality regardless of race. The difference lies in a full break from the British empire, sovereign republic.
The condescending attitude carried in the pages of Cronin as he mocks what he calls Mbekism must be located in this historical context. The parallels between him and early white communists is striking even 100 years later.
When he says Mbekism, he does so to dismiss the authors of the paper he is addressing. His intimation that “anyone familiar with the past three decades will know that Cde Mbeki has a track record (even when he was ANC
president) of producing organisationally unmandated and lengthy polemical interventions – but behind the screen of nominal authors”. In essence, he erases these comrades, dismissing them as “nominal”.
Singling out Mbeki as the real author is actually not in any way out of respect for him or his ideas. Cronin doesn’t think Mbeki has any thinking, hence the title of his paper; learn nothing. Meaning he deploys the concept to point out not a theoretical line as one would when they say Leninism or Marxism. But in a way to describe a bad pupil who learned nothing and fails to admit this about themselves.
Mbeki, in Cronin’s eyes, must not think or write outside what the organisation mandates him to think and write about. Only him, Cronin, maybe even Slovo that he references, have this privilege. This is precisely to exercise tutelage over Mbeki since organisationally mandated means he, Cronin might approve, amend or improve Mbeki’s document, so that it does not result in this unlearning (unlearned) situation he now has to irritatingly correct.
It would not be important to Cronin that intellectuals who founded the ANC were Pan-Africanists, concerned about Africans liberating themselves, thinking for themselves and avoiding the patronising gaze of white intellectuals.
Therefore, for the Comintern to say the CPSA must “turn ANC into a revolutionary nationalist”, to Cronin this means monitor, tutor and guide these natives into line.
What Cronin is ignorant of the most, and perhaps many other activists in the liberation movement, is the historic importance of the fact that it was always already black people, members of the ANC inside the CPSA who turned the CPSA into a progressive communist party by inserting “self-determination” and the establishment of a non-racial Black Republic as its objective in the struggle for socialism in South Africa. Thus, beating their white companions into submission on the international stage.
Cronin would also not know that in 1934, Moses Kotane was still complaining about how white the CPSA was when he wrote:
[The] Party has and is suffering owing to being too Europeanised. That the Party is
beyond the realm of realities, we are simply theoretical, and our theory is less
connected with practice.
If one investigates the general ideology of our Party members (especially the whites), if sincere, he will not fail to see that they subordinate South Africa in the interests of Europe, in fact, ideologically they are not South Africans, they are foreigners who know nothing about and who are the least interested in the country in which they are living at present, but are valiant ‘servants’ of Europe.
To this end the party would have missed this very point made by Lenin at the Eight Congress of the Russian Communist Party held in March 1919, addressing the national question, when he said that:
All nations have a right to self-determination…Every nation must obtain the right to self-determination, and that will make self-determination of the working people easier…To reject the self-determination of nations and insert self-determination of the working people would be absolutely wrong, because this manner of settling the question does not reckon with the difficulties, with the zig-zag course taken by differentiation within nations…
Communism cannot be imposed by force.
Owing to his irrational obsession with Mbeki, Cronin missed an important opportunity to contribute to the discussion on the important strategic relationship between the struggle for socialism and the struggle for national liberation. The debate which ‘nominal authors’ he condescendingly dismissed sought to elevate.
What my generation should keep in mind about Cronin’s irrational obsession with Mbeki is the historic part he played in the design and execution of an anti-Mbeki campaign that resulted in the rise of the destructive Zuma years. In this era, the ANC Alliance which had attained a 70% electoral hegemony deteriorated, alongside the destruction of the ANCYL, marginalisation of key activists and affiliates in COSATU, and the destruction of state institutions like NPA, SAPS, Eskom, SARS, Transnet, SAA and municipalities.
Seemingly, Cronin, who was in this government, remains committed to that campaign and its misguided irrational dismissal of Thabo Mbeki. Which raises the question, whose agenda does he serve?
We are still to see a Cronin paper reflecting on his own contribution to these destructive Zuma years, or even an exegesis of how, together with his elevated false hero, they drove unemployment from 22% in 2007, to 27% in 2017, and now to 31%; they took the debt to GDP ratio from 26% in 2008 to 51%, and now at 79% amidst broken state institution, massive corruption and deindustrialisation.
Until then, Cronin must be unburdened of the responsibility to be the white messiah tasked with saving Natives from imagined self-destruction and ignorance. Needless to say, the rest of the contents in his paper should be fed to the rats as they represent a decorating decoy from the condescending kernel in its heart. His true point, his objective with his paper was precisely this anti-Mbeki condescending tendency, “learn nothing, admit nothing”, and
since we have addressed it for what it is, the rest fall off.
Sela.
MQ Ndlozi,
November, 2025
End Notes
i Biko S, 1978, Black Souls in White Skins, in I Write What I Like, Picador Africa, pages: 22-23
ii Resolution of the Politseccretariat ECCI, 27 July, 1927;
iii Musson D, hJps://sahistory.org.za/archive/chapter-three-black-republic-ques?on-and-third-period
iv Ibid
v Resolution on ‘The South African Question adopted by the Executive Committee of the Communist International following the Sixth Comintern congress.
htps://www.marxists.org/history/interna?onal/comintern/sec?ons/sacp/1928/comintern.htm
vi Ibid, Musson
vii Lodge T, 2024, Red Road to Freedom; A History of the South African Communist Party, 1921-2021, Jacana,
page 118
viii Ibid, page 128
ix Ibid
x Ibid
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