Tyranny of Structurelessness

Induction, Part 2

The Blob, film poster, 1958

Tyranny of Structurelessness

“Always in the bourgeois mind is this legend of the golden age, of a perfectly good man corrupted by institutions. Unfortunately not only is man not good without institutions, he is not evil either. He is no man at all; he is neither good nor evil; he is an unconscious brute.”

Christopher Caudwell, “Liberty”, from “Studies in a Dying Culture”, 1938

Jo Freeman is from the Women’s Movement in the USA. At a certain point in its development a crisis developed in this movement, and a confrontation between those who were trying to organise, versus those who were proposing that the movement should be “structureless”.

Jo Freeman took the side of organisation. Her experience, words and argument can help us in our Induction course to understand the fundamental reasons why organisation is necessary. Her full article, Tyranny of Structurelessness, is attached.

The case that Jo Freeman makes should be born in mind as we proceed later on in this Induction course to look at organising skills, processes, rules, ways and means. Such things are not trivial. They are the material substance of our work. Without them there is no politics.

Organisation does not of itself trap people; it liberates them. Organisation is also unavoidable. Says Freeman:

“Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed...”

Freeman is not unaware that hers is a criticism of bourgeois ideology. She goes on:

‘This means that to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an "objective" news story, "value-free" social science, or a "free" economy. A "laissez faire" group is about as realistic as a "laissez faire" society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of "structurelessness" does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones. Similarly "laissez faire" philosophy did not prevent the economically powerful from establishing control over wages, prices, and distribution of goods; it only prevented the government from doing so. Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power, and within the women's movement is usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful...’

The communists, like Christopher Caudwell, quoted above, advocate for organisation, and more specifically for democratic organisation. The National Democratic Revolution is a process of the democratic organisation of society in all necessary ways, and especially as mass democratic organisation. The NDR is not solely concerned with representative state democracy. Representative democracy without mass democratic organisation will revert to something like structurelessness, where the power structures are either hidden, or are out of reach of ordinary people.

Freeman continues:

“For everyone to have the opportunity to be involved in a given group and to participate in its activities the structure must be explicit, not implicit. The rules of decision-making must be open and available to everyone, and this can happen only if they are formalized. This is not to say that formalization of a structure of a group will destroy the informal structure. It usually doesn't. But it does hinder the informal structure from having predominant control and make available some means of attacking it if the people involved are not at least responsible to the needs of the group at large. "Structurelessness" is organizationally impossible. We cannot decide whether to have a structured or structureless group, only whether or not to have a formally structured one.”

In this Induction course, starting from Part 3, we will look at how structure can be made “explicit and not implicit”, by formal means, and at how this works in practice.

Meanwhile in the remainder of this Part 2, we will reflect on the role of political education within the organisation, as a generator and a regenerator of organisation. We will look at the specifics of Trade Union organisation, and at the nature of Unions as mass (not vanguard) organisations.

We will finish the part with a consideration of the relationship between Mass and Vanguard, including the limitations of what the Party can do, but which must be done by the mass movement.

·        The above is to introduce an original reading-text: Tyranny of Structurelessness, Jo Freeman, 1973.

Joining the Party

Induction, Part 1c

A Chinese Party Card

Joining the Party

Attached are two documents. One is the SACP’s advice, given on its web site, but slightly edited, as to how to join. The other document is the SACP’s application form. Let us hope that you are already through the process of joining the SACP, because it can be full of pitfalls. One reason for studying it as a process is so that one can assist others to come through successfully, and in good time.

Apart from the difficulty of joining the Party, one may also take a critical view of the “duties” and the “pillars” as described on the SACP web page, because for the purposes of this course, we need to develop an integrated (i.e. “concrete”) understanding of the nature and the purpose of the Party, of the ANC and of COSATU and its affiliates.

The SACP is a vanguard Party, not by claim, or by inheritance, but only by virtue of study. What we call “political education” is not merely a re-telling of the laid-down nature of the existing Party, but it is the very essence of the process that the Party is engaged in.

There is no higher authority than the Party that could award it the franchise of revolution. Nor does the Party gain its leading role by competitively destroying the efforts of others. From the beginning, for example in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, the communists have said they would not do that. The communists do not claim any kind of monopoly.

The foundation is study

It follows that whatever role the Party may play is founded upon nothing else than study. It is because we study that we are able to see the whole picture, if we can at all. It is because we study that we are able to see beyond our immediate self-interest, whereas the mass organisations are less well equipped to do so. The mass organisations are based on simple, mutual, sectional self-interest.

This is what distinguishes the mass organisations from the vanguard Party. The mass organisations, including trade unions, rest on the immediate self-perceived self-interest of the participants, and this is how it should be.

The Party encourages people to organise democratically, according to their lights, even though limited in the first place to common self-interest.

It is we as the Party who have made ourselves professionally responsible, by virtue of study, for being able to see wider than immediate self-interest of sections, towards the best interests of the whole society.

Therefore Party membership becomes an obligation to study, because, other than what is gained by study, the Party has no rights whatsoever. If you are not prepared to study and to continue studying, then you have no business to be joining the Communist Party.

Not a numbers game

Nobody is compelled to be a communist. Nor is it crucial that there are very large numbers of communists. The numbers that are required are those that are sufficient to maintain the Party's country-wide mission to educate, organise and mobilise; and no more.

The Party does not set out to “convert” the whole population. The Party does not, for example, set out to convert every sports club into a political cell. To the extent that a Party member has a communist duty in a sports club, it would be, firstly, to help make it a better sports club, and then, perhaps, a more democratic one; but not to try to annex it to the communist party.

In the next part of this course we will look more deeply into the necessity for mass democratic organisation. We will draw out further, the distinction between, and the functional organic relation between, the democratic mass organisations and their vanguard Party of professional revolutionaries.

The work of communists in any country is done outside their Party, among non-communists.

·        The above is to introduce an original reading-text: How to join the Party; SACP application form.

History of the SACP

Induction, Part 1b

History of the SACP

The leading political institutions of South Africa in 2014 - those that form the National Democratic Revolutionary Alliance - all have their origins in the second decade of the 20^th Century, around a hundred years ago. The earliest of these was the South African Native National Congress (SANNC), established in 1912. The SANNC became the African National Congress (ANC) in 1923.

The second was the International Socialist League (ISL), established in 1915. The third was the Industrial Workers of Africa, a black workers’ union established by the ISL in 1917.

The Industrial Workers of Africa was overtaken by the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union, established in 1919, which also received communist support. In the 1940s, the Congress of Non-European Trade Unions (CNETU) was founded, in the 1950s SACTU, and in the 1980s, COSATU, all with communist support.

The ISL was the main component of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), formalised as such in 1921. After it was banned in 1950, the CPSA became the South African Communist Party (SACP).

The ANC received communist support throughout, and this support was returned. When the CPSA was banned in 1950, the ANC protested on the first Freedom Day, June 26^th of that year, and later with the Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign that began in 1952.

One history

The history of the CPSA and its successor the SACP is woven together, from the beginning, with the history of the liberation movement, and with the history of the trade union movement, of which the biggest component is presently the COSATU federation. The history of the Party cannot be told separately, without reference to these other two.

Nor can this history be separated from the history of the world in a century of great wars, of the appearance of capitalist Imperialism, and of the October, 1917 Russian Revolution, which changed everything, but which also arose out of the same global circumstances.

These global circumstances included the aftermath of the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902, and the first wave of capitalist Imperialism of which that war was a major part.  The circumstances included the subsequent outbreak of intra-Imperialist conflict over the entire globe, known as the First World War, of 1914-18.

The First World War began with the betrayal of the Second Workers’ International by its components in Britain, Germany and France, who agreed to fight and to produce for their bourgeois governments. Without this betrayal, the war was not going to be possible. Those who did not sell out in this way in 1914 included V I Lenin and the Bolsheviks; Rosa Luxemburg and the Spartacists; and our South African International Socialist League, the ISL.

In April 1917 at the Finland Station in Petrograd, Lenin proposed, among other things, the formation of a new International, which would demand that its affiliates were fully communist. This became the Communist, or Third, International, also known as the Comintern, founded in 1919. Within two years of its founding, in 1921, the Communist Party of South Africa, based on the ISL, was admitted to Comintern membership.

Time Line

The attached document is a “time line”, or list of events, with dates given, and very brief remarks. It is partly derived from “The Red Flag”, a popular history of the Party compiled around 1990, after the unbanning. Other sources are also listed in the document, which is designed for printing on A4, back to back, and not as is usual with the CU, as a booklet.

An earlier version of this document, in a different format again, and containing detailed references, is also attached.

Summary

The 1920s were marked by the decisive turn to the “Black Republic Thesis”, strongly influenced by the Comintern. The 1930s were marked by sectarianism, and then by the escape from sectarianism. In the 1940s, according to the book “The Red Flag”, the CPSA was larger than the ANC. The African Miners’ Strike of 1946 changed everything. So did the election of the National Party to power, two years later.

In the 1950s the ANC took off, and one of the reasons was the strong involvement of the communists, whose own party had been banned. The ANC spoke to the world from the 1950s onwards, and it continued to do so after the banning of the ANC that came ten years after the banning of the Party, following the Sharpeville massacre of 1960.

It is necessary to see South African history together with that of the continent. There was never a lull. Extraordinary things happened, throughout.

The liberation struggle pushed onwards through the 1960s, 70s and eighties until at last in February, 1990, the unbanning of both organisations occurred.

Our timeline document goes up to 1994. Since then, the Party and the ANC have both grown and are now organised across the entire country. COSATU has also grown, but at a slower rate. The Womens’ Movement as such has not grown. The rendering of the country into an organised, democratic mass is therefore proceeding, but in an uneven way.

This is not a full history of the Party. It may be sufficient for the purposes of Induction, so that comrades have an idea of the outline of our history. But you need to read more of it, and in more detail.

The struggle continues.

·        The above is to introduce an original reading-text: History of the SACP, version 1 and 2.

SACP Constitution: Structure

Induction, Part 1a

Tower of the Third International, Vladimir Tatlin

SACP Constitution: Structure

The attached document contains from clause 8 to the final clause 26 of the SACP Constitution.

Clauses 8 to 23, in length more than half of the entire constitution, are taken up with the structures of the Party, from the National Congress down to Branches and Units. All of these clauses are straightforward and easy to understand, but they are detailed, and the detail is necessary and should not be taken for granted.

Clauses 8 to 23 should be read in the light of Clause 6, which is in the previous item of this part of our Induction course.

The SACP functions according to the principles of democratic centralism (Clause 6.1).  This means that all decisions taken by higher structures are binding on all lower structures and on individual members (Clause 6.2). All higher structures shall be accountable to lower structures via suitable councils and congresses (Clause 6.3).

The basic structure of the SACP is the branch, to be formed at a residential area or workplace, and every member shall be obliged to belong to a branch (Clause 22). The Central Committee sets a policy framework for the determination of the boundaries of branches that takes into account the ward and voting district boundaries within a municipality (Clause 22).

Here is a diagrammatic, simplified representation of the structure of the SACP:

Committee	Accountable to	Term	Subsidiary	Office Bearers
Central	National Congress	5 Years	Political Bureau	General Secretary + 5
Provincial Executive	Provincial Council, Congress	3 Years	Working Committee	Provincial Secretary + 5
District Executive	District Council, Congress	2 Years	Working Committee	District Secretary + 4
Branch Executive	BGM, ABM	1 Year	-	Branch Secretary + 4
Unit	BEC	1 Year	-	-

Members who are elected to positions at a higher level may not stand for election to positions at a lower level in the SACP (Clause 6.6).

Delegates are members of Congresses that they attend. Delegates have a duty to fairly and effectively convey to Congress the mandate of the constituency that elected them, but they are not rigidly bound by such mandates (Clause 6.7).

As a rule, Units are not supposed to exist for more than one year in total (Clause 23.1). Units may be formed for several purposes, the most common being preparation for the launching of new branches.

The rules of the SACP are simple and clear. This brief summary represents the essence of them. Please refer to the actual Constitution and do not use this summary to rule in any situation.

Clause 24 deals with “quorum” rules. Clauses 25 and 26 are on disciplinary and amendments procedures.

·        The above is to introduce an original reading-text: SACP Constitution, Structure, 2012.

SACP Constitution: Definition and Rules

Induction, Part 1

SACP Constitution: Definition and Rules

Clauses 1 to 7

The jewel of the SACP Constitution is Rule 6.5, which says:

“Members active in fraternal organisations or in any sector of the mass movement have a duty to set an example of loyalty, hard work and zeal in the performance of their duties and shall be bound by the discipline and decisions of such organisations and the movement.

“They shall not create or participate in SACP caucuses within such organisations and the movement designed to influence either elections or policies.

“The advocacy of SACP policy on any question relating to the internal affairs of any such organisations or the movement shall be by open public statements or at joint meetings between representatives of the SACP and such organisations or the movement.”

This means that SACP members active in any part of the mass movement, including the workers’ trade unions, and including the ANC, do so in the utmost good faith.

SACP members serve the mass organisations on the terms of those organisations.

This clause is the backbone of the Alliance of the SACP with the ANC and COSATU, including COSATU’s affiliates.

The rule means that SACP members can be trusted, and they are in fact trusted. It is because the mass organisations understand this rule that the alliance has been so solid, for so long.

Aims of communism

The first aim (Rule 3.1) of the SACP is that:

“The SACP strives to be the leading political force of the South African working class whose interests it promotes in the struggle to advance, deepen and defend the national democratic revolution and to achieve socialism.”

What newly-inducted communists need to grasp, more than any other thing, is that the fruit of the work of the communists is born on other trees, and not in a private communist orchard.

The communists are concerned with what the non-communists are doing. The Party’s business is to educate, organise and mobilise masses of people who are not communists. Among the SACP’s “guiding principles” are the following:

“4.2 Organise, educate and lead the working class in the struggle for socialism and the more immediate objectives of defending and deepening the national democratic revolution and of achieving national and social emancipation. The main aim of the unfolding national democratic revolution is to complete the national liberation of the African people in particular and black people in general, to ensure the destruction of the legacy of white supremacy, and the strengthening of democracy in every sphere of life...

“4.3 Organise, educate and advance women within the working class, the poor and rural communities in pursuit of the aims of the SACP; and to raise the consciousness of the working class and its allies around the integral and oppressive nature of gender relations within South African capitalism.”

The Communist Party is not a sect. It has no interests separate from those of the working class. The working class, as the most advanced class, represents the best interests of the entire society. As the vanguard of the working class, and via the working class, the Communist Party is the vanguard of the nation.

By its constitution, therefore, SACP members are bidden to mix with and to partake in the political life of the whole population, outside of the Communist Party itself. The Party’s rules tell you how to behave when you are doing so.

This concern with the ways and means of SACP work within the broad movement will continue throughout our Induction course.

Mastering the SACP Constitution

The SACP Constitution, as a whole, is a model of how a constitution needs to be written. It is as brief as it can be, and as direct as it can be. Where necessary, it is sufficiently detailed. It is a very fine document, of which SACP members can be justly proud.

The attached brief document contains clauses 1 to 7 of the SACP Constitution. The next item will carry the remainder of the clauses (8 to 26).

Broadly, clauses 1 to 7 contain the political prescription for the Party, and the distinguishing features of the Party, while the remainder describes the Party’s structure.

Clause 7 enables the establishment of the Young Communist League of South Africa (YCLSA) - the autonomous youth organisation of the SACP. We will return to the YCL in more detail in a later part of this Induction course.

·        The above is to introduce an original reading-text: SACP Constitution, Definition and Rules, 2012.

Induction: What it is, and what it is not

Induction, Part 0

Luca Pacioli, 1445-1517

Induction: What it is, and what it is not

“Induction” is the process of making a new recruit, or a promoted person, aware of everything necessary for an individual to perform normal duties in an organisation, at any level.

Induction is therefore not the same thing as “Political Education”, and this course will contain relatively little of what is usually regarded as politics, as compared to other Communist University courses. (For an introductory course in political matters, please use the “Basics” course that we have just completed.)

History of organisation

On the other hand, the material of the course is far from being without political consequences. Organisation is not class-neutral, and it is not apolitical. It has a history, and it has a pre-history of social structure even if unselfconscious and only led by “organic intellectuals”.

The conscious principles of organisation are as old as the origin of the family, private property and the state. The oldest forms of organisation within class-divided society are religious, legal and military, corresponding to the necessities of the original state (when society first divided into antagonistic classes).

Among the oldest still-existing corporations in the West are the Church of Rome and its orders. Notable among them is the order of St Benedict (480–547), originating shortly after the fall of the Roman Empire of the West. The Benedictine model relied, not on allegiance to a central power, but on adherence to a common set of rules (“St. Benedict’s Rule”). In other words, it was truly “organised”. It relied on organisation more than it relied on what is nowadays called a “power structure” or central command. In this course, we shall continue to sustain the critical distinction between power and organisation, or in other words, between the mechanically hierarchical and the socially organic.

The monastic tradition that St Benedict successfully codified had earlier been brought to Europe from Africa, and it may have originated further East, possibly in India. With this donation, Africa helped to rescue Europe. It was the monasteries that eventually brought Western Europe back from its descent into barbarism. The Church provided the clerical framework and bureaucracy that the European states needed while they grew again slowly, over a period of a thousand years, in the centuries of feudalism that are called “The Dark Ages” and “The Middle Ages”.

Companies

Secular trading corporations and permanent military organisation (standing armies and navies) did not arrive until the bourgeoisie became (first in Italy) a prosperous and powerful class, and at last, from the 16^th and 17^th Centuries onwards, a ruling class in the Netherlands and in Britain.

The word “Office” comes from the Italian “Uffizi”, notably used in Renaissance Florence. Double-entry book-keeping was developed during the Italian Renaissance, in Florence and in Genoa, and was for the first time described as a system by Luca Pacioli, a Franciscan Friar and friend of Leonardo da Vinci’s, in Milan.

The bourgeois ability to organise on a large scale, and to project its organisation overseas, meant that European culture at last surpassed, in many ways, the level of development that the ancient Romans had achieved and then lost, more than a thousand years before. Unfortunately, bourgeois society was also no less brutal and cruel than that of the Romans. In the beginning of its ascendency, it relied, as the Romans had done, on chattel slavery.

The ways and means of bourgeois organisation were among the reasons for the success of capitalism over all other systems, most spectacularly so following the French Revolution of 1789, its export by force of arms under Napoleon Bonaparte, and the contemporaneous bourgeois “Industrial Revolution” in England.

By the fifth decade of the 19^th Century, bourgeois capitalism (that is, wage slavery as opposed to chattel slavery) was set to rule the world, such that in the same historic moment, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were able to observe in the Communist Manifesto of 1848:

“All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.... the bourgeoisie... must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.”

Enter the grave-digger

So long as the opponents of capitalism have less-well-developed means of organisation, they are very unlikely to be able to succeed in overthrowing the bourgeois class from its seat of power. But the working-class proletariat that the bourgeoisie brings forth from the old agrarian society that it has ruined, is drilled and organised - by the bourgeoisie - like no other before it.

All that remains is for the working class to become a self-conscious class for itself (the political task of the communists) and then to seize hold of all the means that the bourgeoisie has developed, and forced the working class to learn. The working class must become better at all kinds of organisation than the previous masters of organisation, the bourgeoisie, have been.

And this is very possible.

Therefore, although we may appear in this course to be considering other matters than politics, yet our motives for doing so are extremely political. These are some of the indispensable means to political power, and that is why we want to possess them.

Attached, please find Amilcar Cabral’s pamphlet “Apply Party Principles in Practice”. In it, please note that a “watchword” means the same as what we would call a “slogan”.

·        The above is supported by an original reading-text: Amilcar Cabral, 1924-1973, Apply Party Principles in Practice.

SA Working Class and the NDR

Basics, Part 10c

Joe Slovo, 1926-1995

SA Working Class and the NDR

In this final part of our “Basics” course, we have looked at democracy, armed struggle, and popular unity-in-action, in terms of various countries of the world. Now we look again at South Africa, in the context of National Democratic Revolution. The NDR is not a South African invention. It is a worldwide phenomenon. But it has generated a specifically South African literature.

Joe Slovo published the SA Working Class and the National Democratic Revolution (see the link below) at a time when he was the General Secretary of the SACP. The Party was still clandestine. The end of its 40-year period of illegality was to come two years later.

Like many political documents, this pamphlet takes shape around a polemical response to contemporary opponents who may no longer be well-remembered (in this case it was the particular “workerists” and compromisers of the time that Slovo mentions on the first page of the document).

But as with the polemics of Marx, Engels and Lenin, in the course of the argument against otherwise long-forgotten foes, Slovo was obliged to set up a fully concrete, rounded assessment of the meaning of the NDR, which still remains today as the best single and definitive text on this matter in South Africa.

Slovo quickly establishes the class-alliance basis of the NDR and quotes Lenin saying that: “the advanced class ... should fight with… energy and enthusiasm for the cause of the whole people, at the head of the whole people”. This advanced class is the working class. Slovo goes on to write of the continuity of the NDR and of the institutional organisation that is the bricks-and-mortar of nation-building.

Slovo’s is a long document but it has many possibilities as the basis for a discussion, and that is always our purpose: dialogue.

This instalment ends the “Basics” course.

·        The above is to introduce the original reading-text: The South African Working Class and the NDR, 1988, Slovo, Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

The Armed People

Basics, Part 10b

Dedan Kimathi, 1920-1957

The Armed People

A practical, actually-existing alternative to the bourgeois State – The Commune – arose in Paris, France, in the beginning of 1871.

It was more than the right of recall, and it was more than the whole people collectively in power and in perpetual democratic session. It was also the reappearance of The Armed People in a new kind of societal framework.

So-called Primitive Communism is an Armed People. Primitive Communism has been destroyed, and continues to be destroyed, by the simultaneous rise of property relations and fall of the women. But here, in the Paris Commune, was an Armed People in advanced productive circumstances. The Paris Commune prefigured the end of the bourgeois State’s monopoly of violence, and the consequent eventual fall of the bourgeois State in the world as a whole.

The security forces (army and police) existing in France prior to the Paris Commune had been paid by the bourgeois State to guarantee its survival. They were tasked with suppressing the working class, whenever they found suppression to be necessary, by any means of suppression they thought necessary, and they were therefore constantly prepared for bloodshed and slaughter. These forces were disbanded by the Commune and were not replaced until the Commune fell.

With hardly any exceptions, all “separations of powers” were abolished in the Paris Commune, leaving one main and constant power: The Armed People.

A century later in Chile, in the time of the Popular Unity government that fell on 11 September 1973, instead of an Armed People, a virtue was made of disarmament, and a “Peaceful Path” was worshipped as the new political Golden Calf.

In the document linked below, Volodia Teitelboim gives a brief description, from the point of view of one of those who was involved in the Chilean Popular Unity government, of its disastrous end. The fascists used the national army to overthrow the national government on behalf of the bourgeoisie. It was a shocking reminder of the real purpose and nature of the “special bodies of armed men” that are part of The State. They are intended to preserve the allegiance of the State to the bourgeoisie.

Teitelboim calls for “A Reappraisal of the Issue of the Army,” meaning a return to the view of the Paris Commune, which is mentioned in the first line of Teitelboim’s document. This document is sufficient as the basis for a very good and necessary discussion in South Africa at this time.

Like the Chilean Popular Unity government, ours in South Africa today is a multiclass government underpinned by a class alliance for common goals. It is a unity-in-action, otherwise called a Popular Front.

Why has the South African NDR survived for nearly 21 years, while the Chilean Popular Unity fell after 1,000 days?

The answer could be that we are not pacifists, as so many of the Chilean Popular Unity politicians were.

Or, the answer could be that our crisis has just not arrived yet.

Or, that we have passed at least one crisis, which may not yet be the last. That was in mid-2008, and it was resolved by the recall of President Mbeki and the resignation of various ministers including Terror Lekota and Mluleki George, Minister and Deputy Minister of Defence, respectively.

Also attached is Dimitrov’s famous intervention at the 7^th Congress of the Communist International (Comintern), in 1934, which readopted popular front tactics - tactics that proved successful in mobilising the anti-fascist alliance that was by 1945 victorious in battle.

Picture: There are very few images of freedom fighters in formation, in action, or ready for action, to be found on the Internet, whether of MK or of any other liberation army, but there are many photographs of freedom fighters in captivity, or dead.

Full justice has not yet been done. Alive or dead, the revolutionaries are still rebels and outcasts in the minds of the “respectable” bourgeoisie. For our part, we are still singing the Internationale, composed in Paris in the days of the Commune by the communard Eugène Pottier.

The picture is of a statue of the freedom fighter Dedan Kimathi, under the blue sky of Kenya.

AMANDLA!

·        The above is to introduce the original reading-text: 1,000 Days of Popular Unity Rule in Chile, 1977, Teitelboim; Intervention on Popular Front, Dimitrov, 1934.

Political and Military Struggle

Basics, Part 10a

William and Celia Pomeroy

Political and Military Struggle

Presuming that we have by now established that we are not pacifists, but are revolutionaries who intend, by all means necessary, to assist the working class to expropriate the expropriator bourgeois class; then why can we not move with speed, and without any restraint, towards an armed overthrow of the oppressors?

Why are we bothering with democracy? Are we not being “stageist”????

The late William “Bill” Pomeroy started his essay “On the Time for Armed Struggle” (linked below) from exactly this point of departure, as follows:

“Because of the decisive results that can follow from an armed smashing of the main instruments of power held by a ruling class or a foreign oppressor, some of those who acquire a revolutionary outlook are eager to move to the stage of armed struggle; and their concept of it as the highest form of revolutionary struggle causes them to cast discredit upon other forms as 'less advanced', as amounting to collaboration with or capitulation to the class enemy.”

But:

“Too often the aura of glory associated with taking up arms has obscured hard prosaic truths and realities in the interplay of forces in a period of sharp struggle.”

And later:

“The experiences of the revolutionary movement in the Philippines offer an interesting example of the complex, varied and fluctuating processes that may occur in a liberation struggle.”

Pomeroy writes that “analysis and understanding of the revolutionary experiences of others is indispensable”. He proceeds to offer some of his own rich and extraordinary experience as a military combatant and revolutionary, including the disastrous experience of the Philippines, when the military began to act independently of political control.  

Pomeroy’s main lesson is that the military must never think that it can cease to be subordinate to the political power. The political organisation must always rule over the military.

His writing and his advice helped the ANC in the exile years, when Pomeroy was exiled in London. It is important that younger comrades read these things and understand some of the problems that had to be negotiated.

William Pomeroy passed away on 12 January 2009 and Celia Pomeroy passed away on 22 August 2009.

·        The above is to introduce the original reading-text: On the Time for Armed Struggle, 1974, Pomeroy.

National Democracy

Basics, Part 10

Issa Shivji

National Democracy

In this, the last part of the CU Basics set, we touch upon the single biggest historic task of the Communists in the period since the founding of the Communist International (a.k.a. Third International) in 1919, namely National Liberation (decolonisation).

In 1920 the Comintern organised a Congress of the Peoples of the East. It was the first international anti-colonial congress. The Comintern recognised Communist Parties in many countries (including South Africa’s CPSA in 1921). In 1928 the Comintern and the CPSA adopted the “Black Republic” policy for South Africa, making the CPSA the first South African party to call for black majority rule. The CPSA was also the first non-racial party South African in terms of its own membership.

This is some of our part in the story; but the worldwide story of the past century, under the impetus of the Communists more than any other single political component, has been a story of political independence of the former colonies worldwide. The masses of the world have risen time and again in National Democratic Revolutions, with the invariable support of the Communists. Our internationalist duties still continue. Any political education “Basics” series must mention this.

Ever since the anti-colonial victories in so many (150-plus) countries, constituting the vast majority of the population of the globe, that set those countries free from direct colonial rule, the Imperialist powers have sought to re-impose themselves by other means.

One who has made the anti-Imperialist case very well in this regard is the Tanzanian professor Issa Shivji [pictured], to remind us that it is we freedom-fighters who are the humanists now, and it is the Imperialists who are the barbarians.

“African Socialism”

Kwame Nkrumah, 1909 - 1972

From the time of Eduard Bernstein and his 1899 book “Evolutionary Socialism”, and Rosa Luxemburg’s 1900 response to Bernstein, “Reform or Revolution?”, the same question has been put, in one way or another.

In the history of the struggle for liberation from colonialism in Africa, the question “Reform or Revolution” was once again put. To sound better and to deceive the people more easily, false “Socialism” was dressed up as “African Socialism”, and was widely used as a smokescreen for neo-colonialism from the dawn of African Independence in the 1950s and 1960s, onwards.

Dr Kwame Nkrumah spoke out firmly against this false so-called African Socialism more than forty years ago. See the linked article below. Although Kwame Nkrumah and his adversary Leopold Senghor are both long gone, yet Nkrumah’s words appear to carry as much relevant meaning as they did when they were spoken in Cairo in 1967.

·        The above is to introduce the original reading-texts: The Struggle for Democracy, Shivji; African Socialism, Nkrumah.