A Great Cause

Here are four texts, all by women, as it happens. Women did take part in our armed struggle but the organising of non-military people was more crucial. The political struggle is always primary over the military struggle (e.g. see Bill Pomeroy’s “On the Time for Armed Struggle”). Women have always been prominent in the mass political movements. Professor Virginia Tilley is the author of “The One-state Solution”, published last year. She has been working in Gauteng, South Africa for some time. With a Johannesburg by-line she has written for Counterpunch this weekend as follows: “It is finally time. After years of internal arguments, confusion, and dithering, the time has come for a full-fledged international boycott of Israel”. Read the full statement in the document linked below. Christabel Gurney was an activist in the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) in Britain from very early on. She was an organiser of the West London Anti-Apartheid, and the editor for a long time of the national publication “Anti-Apartheid News”. The linked document of hers (below) about the origins of the AAM contains many lessons, explicit and implied, about principles of organising, boycotts in particular, and the specificity of struggles and the individual personalities that must always be involved in any movement. Esther Barsel is active in the South African Communist Party (SACP) Johannesburg Central branch, and is a Central Committee member of the Party. One of her first assignments years ago was to work for the Friends of the Soviet Union (FSU) on the Witwatersrand. This was an international solidarity movement with specific and general characteristics, from which lessons can be learned. See the linked document below. The short paragraph at the end of her document, extracted from a longer and general memoir written by Mosie Moolla, is significant. Cde Moolla has had a long diplomatic career which included the Afro-Asian Soldarity Organisation in Egypt, ANC Chief Representative in India, and since liberation, South African Ambassador in Iran and in Pakistan. When he says that the FSU “played a seminal role” he knows what he is talking about. Such movements can at times seem mundane to the participants at the time but they have a huge historical effect. They have a long historical tail. Cheryl Walker published “Women and Resistance in South Africa” in 1982. This book stands out among all the literature on South African women, and especially for the attention it gives to organisational matters. The passages in the linked extract below concerning the NEC of the Federation of South African Women (FedSAW), and the question of mass individual membership versus federal structure, mirror discussions still taking place this week around the nature and constitution of the new Progressive Women’s Movement, to be launched on Wednesday in Bloemfontein. The Communist University distribution has taken shape under a number of constraints. One is that about 5% of recipients still want the documents as attachments, in addition to links to the archive at http://amadlandawonye.wikispaces.com/ . It is unreasonable to send much more than about 200KB of files in this way. Hence the documents sent out with any single posting are limited; and this turns out to be a good discipline. For this reason some documents that would have been sent today, will be held over, although they have already been archived (here). These include SACP GS Blade Nzimande’s Sunday Times article and Jeremy Gordin’s reflections on the Zuma court case hearing last Monday, which court will reconvene on September 5th. Click on these links: The Case for Boycotting Israel, Virginia Tilley, Counterpunch (2831 words) A Great Cause, Origin of Anti-Apartheid Movement, Christabel Gurney, 1999 (13863 words) Friends of the Soviet Union, Esther Barsel and Mosie Moolla (350 words) Federation of SA Women, NEC and Membership problems, Cheryl Walker, 1982 (3259 words)