p I would like to begin with what Com. Erich Trevett said. If I understood him correctly, he said something like: ’you cant hare socialism unless you have common ownership.” Is that correct? Yes. But mat seems to me to give rise to a aeries of other questions - what do we mean by common?. And what do we mean by ownership? It seems to me that, it is not only interesting but a critical question -1 do not know what the answer is.

p I also want to comment on the question of revisionism. If I had posed this question five years ago -1 am sure I would have been labeled a revisionist What Com. Surjeet said on this issue is very important - The experience of communist movement has been that when we have internal problems, it becomes very easy to defeat the argument by labelling somebody either a dogmatist, sectarian, a revisionist - sometimes people leave us and then we discover that they were revisionist from the time they were bom. And I do not think that has been useful in helping us as a Communist movement - in developing political tolerance, in terms of debating within our own parties, never mind between ourselves.

p The second question that I try to understand is, what happened specifically in the Soviet Union? May I speak as somebody who has written many articles praising the Soviet Union to the skies, and I still read them sometimes. My own party was very dosery kfent£ fied with the Soviet Union as many other parties who had similar positions. And it does worry me, if we seem to approach the problem whether or not revisionism begin in 1936 or began in 1956, of Gorbachev is the Judas of the world communist movement and may be he was a revisionist the day he came out of his mother’s 356 womb. And it concerns me, because it seems to me that it still seeks to identify the fundamental weakness at the level of individual idiosyncracies. And a class approach seems to be missing from this approach. The question which we need to ask ourselves- and I ask myself this question, mat even in the space of the last few years of what happened in the Soviet Union, what happened in the other East European countries, where was the organised working class? Where was the organised working class in whose name socialism was being developed, and in whose name the policies of socialism were carried out? It seems to me that unless we try to grapple with this problem we will keep oh falling back into blaming individuals or individual idiosyncrasies in terms of fundamental policy making. And how in the future do we try to develop a system in which the class mat we claim to be speaking for can actually act, if necessary, independent of the political parties’ position. Now this for me becomesa critical area for discussion. I do not know what the answers are. But it seems to me that it becomes very important for us to begin to try to understand what actually had been going on in those countries. Having lived in Prague for over ten years it always astonished me as to why the Czechoslovakian Communist Party could not bring out its own people’s militia, to oppose the other demonstrations that were taking place in the streets of Prague. I am really posing the question from the point of view of not individuals but from the point of view of social forces and the incapacity at significant momenta in history for the social forces to be brought to the fore in order to achieve certain objectives. So I seriously do not believe that it takes our own analysis a great deal further, even if it is proved that revisionism in the Soviet Union began in 1936.1 seriously do not believe that in 1993 it takes our own understanding that much forward in trying to understand what is for us anyway probably one of the greatest blows, the progressive movement has received in a very long time.

p May I just touch upon two other issues because it seems to me that they reflect directly on some of the problems we face in South Africa. The question that Comrade Indrajit Gupta raised, the question of how we relate to believers. In my own party we have a history of being intolerant towards believers and partly as a result of what happened in the socialist countries. And I think this had an impact on the way believers saw us. We have now changed and quite dearly have recognised that atleast in South Africa, and I am 357 sure that it applies to India and other places, that it would be quite impossible to conceive of building any kind of new society if weare not going to take the believers with us. In fact the majority of the people, whether we likeit not are still believers. And that is why we need to find the ways and means in which we would be able to convince the believers, mat our perception, vision, perspective of socialism is one which is not in contradiction to their own humanist beliefs which derives from a religious background.

p The second point is to do with decentralisation of power. Com. Indrajit Gupta, posed the issue of decentralisation of powers to regions. In South Africa we face the problem - that we have a white minority, an Afnkaneer white minority that actually demands selfdetermination on the basis of language and culture- but we are opposed to that We have a group called the Inkahata freedom Party which calls for a federal system in South Africa. And we are opposed to that But at the same time we are for decentralisation of power. And in my view, we allowed ourselves to debate this issue only within the framework of the difference between an unitary state and a federal state. And I think our lawyers were largely responsible for that. Indeed we needed to change the framework of the debate. To move away from posing the question of whether to be a federal state or a unitary state, but to pose the question from the stand point of communists, we should be interested in a decentralisation of powers to regions and to local authorities.

In our own conditions in South Africa it would not be possible to begin to deal with the fundamental socio-economic problems facing the masses of our people if we do not have a strong central government for it. It should have the capacity and the political will to allocate resources in a way that would ensure the balanced development of the whole country and in a way which would ensure that the allocated resources go to where they should go. So it might seem in that sense that you come to some kind of contradiction on the one hand asking for a decentralisation of power - which I think is correct, but at the same time asking for the central government to have sufficient powers to be able to act on behalf of the largest group of people. It seems to me, that in an election we go to the country as a whole, with a broad programme which we design to try to deal with national problems. And if we do get elected on the basis of that programme it would seem to me 358 that it would be the responsibility of that political party or organisation to actually fulfill the programme it has put to the masses of the people. In that case you may well come into conflict with those regions where your opposition parties exercise power and they are opposed to your policies. This is a very complicated problem, of trying to define the kind of relationship that needs to exist between a central authority, the regional authorities and the local authorities.