Negation Of The Negation, Or Not?

The YCL Congress is going to be held between the 13th and the 17th of December, 2006. Three discussion documents for it were published yesterday. They will be featured here on the Communist University today, tomorrow and Monday. The YCLSA Discussion Forum is open for all to express themselves fully for the Congress period. Please subscribe – it is free, it just takes a small amount of time. You will also find that the discussion documents are available there, both as pages and as file downloads. If you have a problem to subscribe, please send an e-mail saying that you want to join the YCL discussion forum. The Communist University will be discussing the first of the three documents (Towards YCL Strategy and Tactics) on Friday, November 17th, 2006 in COSATU House, at the first floor. The Strategy and Tactics document (linked below) says: “The SACP-COSATU-ANC Alliance-led National Democratic Revolution (NDR) has been predicated on the conceptualization of the South African racial and patriarchal capitalist society as Colonialism of a Special Type.” Communist University and SACP Johannesburg Central Branch discussions have demonstrated that this formulation of the authors of the YCL document is not universally shared within the SACP. We have heard the view that the NDR is not an intellectual exercise that has been “predicated” by a formal alliance of structures. Rather it is a concrete but temporary political economy, different from Colonialism of a Special Type (CST) and also different from Socialism. The author of the document feels that the ghost of CST is still walking at our side and asks: “what has actually happened to Colonialism of a Special Type since 1994?”, even going so far as to call this “the key question that needs to be posed”. Yet a whole section further on is headed “Reclaiming the Socialist-oriented character of the NDR”. Whether the NDR has ever had a Socialist-oriented character or not is also disputed, not only by ANC NEC member Joel Netshitenzhe, but also by Party members who reject a gradualist or piecemeal conception of the line of march towards Socialism. Such critics would say that socialism will only be achieved through deliberate intent of the class as a whole in a revolutionary historical process. They say that socialism cannot grow in the interstices (gaps or cracks) of a bourgeois state in the way that capitalism grew in the interstices of the feudal state. There is no municipal or other kind of partial socialism. There is either a dictatorship of the proletariat over the whole of society, or there is not. So they say. The discussion continues! According to reports (see the link below) the Swaziland Solidarity Network (SSN) held an enjoyable seminar yesterday. SSN also has a discussion forum which you can subscribe to and exchange views about the seminar, the documents, or the general Swazi situation and the South African mass response to that situation. Click on these links: YCL discussion document on Strategy and Tactics (5982 words) SSN-CHI - PUDEMO document launch success (568 words)