We Are All Hizbullah

The Johannesburg Central Branch of the SACP will hold its Annual General Meeting (AGM) from 10h00 to 14h00 on August 20th, 2006, at the SATAWU offices, 13th floor, Old Mutual Building, 29 Kerk Street, between Loveday and Harrison Streets, Johannesburg. The Johannesburg Communist University distribution list is up around 850 members and the number of CU web page views is approaching a quarter of a million. Our weekly study circle is consistent and high quality. The CU is a serious labour movement phenomenon and is widely emulated. Yet no mainstream academic has ever studied it. Probably there would be no funding for such a project. Bolshevik political studies are disregarded in the official groves of academe. Reformist workerism is orthodoxy there. So the wide world must be our university if revolution is our aim. In London on Saturday there was a fine march in solidarity with Lebanon and Palestine. See pictures of it on the home page of the Communist University wikispace web site. COSATU is pushing for a change in the electoral system towards constituencies and away from gross proportional representation, or PR, the national party list system that we have now. See the linked article from the Sunday Times, below. All electoral systems have their disadvantages and advantages depending on your point of view. Constituency elections will be better for democracy and for parliament, as COSATU points out. Louis Luyt was a former fertilizer, beer and rugby tycoon and partner of Eschel Rhoodie in the Infogate corruption scandal of the 1970s. This particularly corrupt relationship gave birth to the English-language Citizen newspaper using taxpayers' money slipped secretly to the conspirators by the National Party government of that time. Luyt later showed what was possible with the present SA electoral system. Even though the political party he launched had the ridiculous initials (to English-speakers) “FA”, Luyt successfully picked up small fractions of votes all over the country in 1999 and got into parliament. If the South African Communist Party put up candidates under the present system it would do a lot better than Louis Luyt did. For this reason COSATU’s proposal for constituency-based elections may be heard with considerable interest by the ANC . Yet, as Rob Amato points out in the article from the Sunday Independent linked below, the constituency system also holds good possibilities for proletarian candidates. In addition, Amato in effect reviews the HSRC book “Trade Unions and Democracy”, launched last Thursday. You can find the text of the book on line here. The Johannesburg Young Communist League Political School will convene from 11h00 to 13h00 on Sunday July 30th at the SATAWU offices, 13th floor, Old Mutual Building, 29 Kerk Street, between Loveday and Harrison Streets, Johannesburg to discuss Jeremy Cronin’s paper “Neo-liberalism, reformism, populism, ultra-leftism”. See the link below. Click on these links: COSATU pushes for electoral changes, Sunday Times (684 words) COSATU wants constituency-based electoral system, Sindy (907 words) Neo-liberalism, reformism, populism, ultra-leftism, Cronin, 2005 (5550)