Back by popular demand

The Communist University (CU) was last published as a blog on 19 July 2008. There has been constant demand for its return. So here it is.

The blog, just to remind you, feeds by e-mail to a list of over about 2250 CU e-mail subscribers. The blog has generally carried a selection of links to documents, which are archived at the CU wikispace web site.

Weekly CU discussions were held for more than five years (2003-2008) at different venues. With help, these can also be revived. This revival of the CU blog and e-mail distribution is done to facilitate the possibility of comrades coming together to discuss the documents it carries. Dialogue is the essence of the Communist University. Such dialogues can be convened anywhere, by anybody.

YCL

In November 2007, a few weeks prior to the Polokwane ANC Conference that elected Jacob Zuma President of the ANC, the YCLSA Discussion Forum took off. It has kept going vigorously. It has about 900 subscribers plus a large number of non-subscribing readers.

At the same time (November 2007) a distribution group for the SACP’s “Umsebenzi Online” was set up which has since been grown to about 9000 effective subscribers. If you need help getting on to this or other lists, please e-mail me at dominic.tweedie@gmail.com.

There is a clear demand for political documents, and most especially for the “classics”, on the YCL forum. There has been no other steady stream of such material, other than the CU. So the CU mailing will now be sent to that forum, so as to stimulate dialogue there, and so as to adopt the YCLSA Discussion Forum as a de facto e-mail discussion forum of the CU.

Comments on the CU posts can also be published at the blog at http://domza.blogspot.com/.

Backbone

The backbone content for now and for a year or so will be a revival and re-examination of the “generic” programmes of the CU, with a view to building a simple selected resource bank of classic political education material, which will then be made permanently available on the Internet and other media.

The first of this “generic” backbone material will be the remaining five parts of the CU “Ghost Course”, the “Spectre of Capital, Volume 1”, which we did not quite complete last year. This is a 24-part “easy reading” breakdown of Karl Marx’s greatest work: “Capital”. Today’s part consists of Chapters 19, 20 and 21 of the book, all of which are about wages.

For a bonus I am also putting in Engels’ great summary called Socialism, Utopian and Scientific.

Click on these links:

CU Backbone posting:

1867, Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 19, 20 and 21, Wages (7291 words)

CU additional posting:

1880, Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific (16229 words)

Note that nearly all the Marx, Engels and Lenin texts of the CU have been downloaded from Marxists Internet Archive, which is a vast store of revolutionary literature.