Uyindoda eMadodeni

In pure class terms, the working class has two possible choices of alliance partner, or it could try to “go it alone”. One option is for the working class to go with the big bourgeoisie in a corporatist pact. There was a small group of enthusiasts who promoted this idea in the early 1990s, led by Professor Eddie Webster. The product of that agitation was NEDLAC. Corporatism has never been fully consummated in SA, however, because neither partner really fancies the other one. Plus it has a bad name, inherited from Benito Mussolini’s association with the term “corporatism”. The Italian Fascist version was the descendent of anarcho-syndicalism, just as ours is the descendent of South African “workerism”. But nobody wants corporatism any more. “Going it alone” as a class would simply mean the working class abandoning the other main section of our population, namely our long-time allies the peasant and urban petty-bourgeoisie. These are the ones referred to as “the poor” in the SACP’s slogan: “With and for the workers and the poor”. Such an abandonment would result in a liberal or reformist pan-bourgeois pact against us, of the kind that exists in many so-called “social-democratic” countries. Such a pact would at first exclude the revolutionary proletariat from power and then infiltrate it, splitting it and “bourgeoisifying” it until bourgeois ideology rules supreme over all three main segments: monopoly-bourgeois, petty-bourgeois, and working-class. “Going it alone” is just another form of liquidationism. The only revolutionary road is an alliance of the workers and the poor petty-bourgeois against Imperialist monopoly finance capital. This is what our tripartite alliance (institutionalised around the African National Congress) has been in the past and can be in the future. Those who think that the popular movement that we have built can be abandoned are forgetting that this would put the actually-existing ANC straight into the hands of the monopoly bourgeoisie as a free gift, and leave the task of building another institutional vehicle of popular alliance to take its place, or rather to compete with it. The clear realisation of the necessity of a popular anti-monopoly alliance in South Africa, and hence the defence of and strengthening of the presently institutionalised Tripartite Alliance, is personified in the full array of senior alliance figures in Durban on June 16th (see first linked article). The only significant exception was the outgoing ANC and State President, Thabo Mbeki. He was in Soweto on that day, doing an artificially-contrived walkabout for the cameras. The big headlines, however, were correctly given to the Zuma-Nzimande-Vavi Pact. We have seen the future, and it rocks! None of the above precludes the SACP standing its own separate candidates in elections. On the contrary, an elected SACP will be a stronger component of the present Tripartite Alliance, making the whole alliance stronger. But the important thing is the underlying class alliance, of workers with the poor, (which is to say with the petty-bourgeoisie), against monopoly capital. The three discussion documents of the ANC, SACP, and COSATU are all now downloadable as PDF files from a page on the Sunday Times web site. They are still available, with links to other historic and relevant documents, from the Communist University’s amadlandawonye site, here. The Sunday Times’s three separate commentaries (linked below together in one document) constitute the first contribution to all three discussions (which are really one discussion) at the same time. Well done, Sunday Times! Christelle Terreblanche’s article in the Sunday Independent (linked) is not as good. The Sindy does much better with the case of Khalid Rashid, in its editorial and in its report of the Wits Law Centre’s research on the whole question of renditions from South Africa. See the linked document below, which contains both articles. Finally, the son Neil, of two South African revolutionary stalwarts, Ben and Mary Turok, has reinstated a materialist theory of the universe that looks like putting the mystical “Big Bang” theory into the dustbin of history (science section). See the last link below. As Bishop Tutu might exclaim (but probably not in this particular case): Wheeeeeee! Click on these links: Zuma stars as saviour of the movement, Harper, Sunday Times (782 words) COSATU laments, ANC tackles, SACP mulls, Xundu and Boyle, S Times (1758 words) Cosatu will have to make friends, win influence, Terreblanche, Sindy (1037 words) Khalid fiasco undermines the rule of law, plus Wits Law Clinic, Sindy (1405 words) South African gives radical history of time, Philp, Sunday Times (726 words)