POLITICS : Communism Alive and Well in S. Africa : Banned 30 years ago, the party is in the midst of a revival. Its leaders say they’ve learned from the Soviet Union’s mistakes.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa —  Communist parties have crumbled in Eastern Europe and have been banned in the Soviet Union, but the ideological descendants of Karl Marx aren’t in trouble at Communist Party night school in South Africa.

Several dozen of the party faithful and the merely curious gathered one recent evening beneath a giant poster of V. I. Lenin and a no-smoking sign that carried a message for the masses: “There Shall Be Clean Air for All.”

Jeremy Cronin, a party Central Committee member, was teaching about what he called the “trick” of capitalism--that the boss, “without doing anything,” is hundreds of rand richer at the end of each day thanks to his workers. And he also reminded his students that America’s car makers created plants and jobs in this country several decades ago, “not to help South Africa but to make more money.”

Communism is in the midst of a revival in South Africa, where the party was legalized last year after three decades underground. It counts 15,000 card-carrying members today, up from about 3,000 when the party was banned.

Although total membership remains small, its influence has swelled. The party holds an important and controversial position in Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, the most powerful black organization in the country. Ten of the 50 elected members of the ANC’s National Executive Committee are publicly declared Communists, including Cronin, party leader Joe Slovo and Chris Hani, the ANC’s military chief of staff. Analysts estimate that as many as 20 more are undeclared Communists.

Communism’s appeal to blacks in South Africa has little to do with Karl Marx, a name unknown to many of the party’s supporters. Instead, it is rooted in the party’s 70 years of staunch opposition to apartheid and to white-minority governments.

“We’ve made horrific mistakes on international policy, and our nose keeps getting rubbed into those by the local press,” Cronin said in an interview. “But, for the factory worker in South Africa, what we said--and now regret saying--about the (Soviet) invasions of Afghanistan, Czechoslovakia and Poland is pretty insignificant.

“It’s our domestic policy for which we are particularly proud,” he said.

While communism is discredited in the eyes of many across the world, attacks on the ideology have triggered an upsurge in party membership here, officials say.

“Working people see those as an assault on us by big capital,” said Charles Nquakula, 49, a former ANC guerrilla and now the party’s national organizer. “When that happens, our people all stand up.”

The base of the party’s support remains among unionized black workers. ANC officials acknowledge privately that the ANC’s alliance with the Communist Party has hampered efforts to recruit whites, Indians and mixed-race Coloreds. And it has ordered its leaders not to answer questions about their Communist affiliations.

Mandela has strongly defended the ANC-Communist Party alliance, saying that the two groups share the same ultimate goal--the removal of apartheid. But even Mandela, who is not a Communist, says the alliance may not last forever.

“After the overthrow of the apartheid state,” Mandela told a local newspaper a few months ago, “they (the Communist Party) will take their own line . . . which we will not follow. We won’t follow socialism.”

Nevertheless, the ANC does support a strong central government and state control of key industries.

Like Communists in much of the rest of the world, party leaders here are softening their hard line. They admit that communism has failed in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and they blame that on attempts to impose socialism without democracy. Communist leaders here now speak of a multi-party democracy, with a mixed economy.

“We think socialism is the way to go. But we are very realistic,” said Cronin, 42, a soft-spoken, white poet who joined the party underground in college and spent seven years in prison.

“We’ve got plenty of examples of heroic revolutions (in black Africa) that tried to pole-vault into Utopia far ahead of what the objective situation allowed,” he added.

But that new thinking has yet to filter down to the rank and file.

A few weeks ago, when the right-wing Soviet coup temporarily sidelined President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Cronin and Slovo were at ANC headquarters, preparing to release the party’s condemnation of the coup. A group of young ANC members, spotting Slovo, gave him the thumbs-up sign and said: “Long live the coup.”

“A lot of black South Africans, understandably but incorrectly, still see the Soviet Union as a kind of godfather figure,” Cronin said. “These are people who need to be told, ‘Why yes, we believe in socialism, but there are profound lessons that have to be learned.’ ”