1 January 2007

Tricontinental


The Communist University programme of live discussions is always a draft, until it has been carried out. Action fixes it as history, but until that point the plan can be changed. So by all means feel free to comment, object, or make alternative suggestions for the CU 2007 Programme, published for the first time today. See the link below. The programme contains clickable links to most of the prescribed texts.

There are a few changes. We are now scheduled to meet on Wednesdays. The regular venue is to be COSATU House, I Leyds Street, Braamfontein. The precise meeting place within the will be notified as soon as a firm arrangement can be made.

The form of the schedule follows the previous two years in being divided into topical sections. These represent an attempt to anticipate as best as possible the requirements of the year to come. 2007 will be the occasion of a COSATU Central Committee, an SACP Congress, and two ANC Conferences (a policy Conference, and then towards the end of the year, a full elective Conference).

COSATU will be re-launching the
Jobs and Poverty Campaign. The SACP State Power debate will have to be resolved into a decisive form. The ANC will struggle to produce a political line that can dynamise the National Democratic Revolution in the interest of the popular masses. This struggle will be accompanied by even more distracting noise than before about specific personalities.

This cacophony, called succession struggle, is a tactic of the bourgeois ruling class designed to create as many difficulties for the proletarian forces as they can. So far, the South African proletariat has passed every test with flying colours. The purpose of political education is to make it likely that the proletariat will continue to pass such tests.

Long term considerations are not neglected. As usual we take some parts of
Capital, Volume 1, by Karl Marx, not forgetting that the purpose of this work is not to produce more clever economists, but rather to find ways of returning humanity, stolen by the capitalists, back to the common people.

In the course of searching for suitable texts we have got from the
Marxists Internet Archive the translation into English of the Message to the Tricontinental by Che Guevara, given forty years ago this year, as well as the above picture of El Che addressing the CTC, of which the South African equivalent is COSATU. A CTC representative, Leonel Gonzalez Gonzalez, addressed COSATU’s 9th Congress in September 2006. Other, closer links between the life work of Che Guevara work and the liberation of South Africa liberation should become more apparent in the course of our studies in 2007.

Che Guevara is also associated with the educational methodology we call
Critical Pedagogy, which is a deliberate way of escaping from the oppression that is reproduced by the received bourgeois methods of teaching and learning. The 2007 CU programme will be the first that does not include an explicit session on this, our underlying theory. Therefore please avail yourself of the link to the critical pedagogy resources collected on our CU web site. The CU will never be a banking or a bucket-and-tap institution. You should know what that means.

From time to time we take an opportunity to acknowledge the work of the
Marxists Internet Archive, without which the CU would hardly be possible in its present form. A large proportion of the texts we use come from the MIA, which is the prime revolutionary archive source in the world today. If you don’t have broad band Internet, you can order it on DVD.

Click on these Links:

1967, Che Guevara, Message to the Tricontinental (5559 words)

2007 Study Group Draft Programme, revised, with links (table)

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