Get It Straight

SACP GS Dr Blade Nzimande’s speech yesterday to the North-West Provincial SACP Congress – linked below – is a good and extensive round-up for the times.

It covers criticism and self-criticism; the Party’s clear existing strategic perspective; the Medium Term Vision (MTV) in terms of the state, the economy, the workplace, the community and of ideological struggles; the so-called question of State Power; the general tasks of the Party, and the so-called succession struggle in the ANC. Concerning the latter Cde Nzimande said, among other things:

“SACP cadres who are also ANC members have a full right to go to the ANC National Conference, as ANC delegates, to argue and vote for whatever individual or collective they wish to vote for. This has nothing to do with the SACP.”

The speech is intense, detailed, concrete, necessary and timely. All the more so bearing in mind the fiasco surrounding the Gauteng SACP Congress and the new Gauteng PEC’s statement issued on Thursday, then roundly contradicted by the YCL on Friday.

The Communist University has to be pleased that the SACP GS has stressed the importance of political education in the following terms:

“It is also important that we ensure that the SACP becomes the focal point for Marxist-Leninist education. Every branch must at least have a fortnightly political class and debate and that we organize these systematically and on a continuous basis. It also means that communists actively participate in the COSATU socialist forums.”

We may find ourselves to be more optimistic than the GS when he says: “We do not have control over the media and other critical platforms of communication”. Perhaps the CU is kidding itself, but it does seem from here that it is possible to have some degree of control over some mass media of communication. What is more, as Communists we have “content” that is extraordinarily powerful and second to none in every way.

Yet we would have to agree that it is not at all clear whether the bourgeois media are currently aware of what is at stake between the Party and those whom Cde Nzimande refers to as “the hired hands of the 1996 class project within our own ranks”. The treatment in those media of the debates leading up to SACP 12th National Congress has so far been as trivial as the “hired hands” would prefer them to be. Let us deepen and sharpen this debate!

Violet Seboni is First Deputy President of the clothing and textile workers’ union, SACTWU and also the Second Deputy President of COSATU. In a speech to the National Bargaining Conference of the chemical, energy, paper, printing, wood and allied workers’ union, CEPPWAWU, Cde Seboni sticks to the point and lays it down powerfully, clearly and simply. See the linked document below.

It is a cause of enormous distress that the Imperialists can take over cultural things and pervert them to the opposite of their true meaning. So far beneath contempt are such atrocities that is difficult to criticise them. The vomit rises in the throat and chokes the words. Therefore it is with gratitude that we are able to reproduce a measured but resounding criticism of the film “300” by Gary Leupp from Counterpunch.

This film stands everything on its head that it can get within its scaly grasp. It even taints the story of Esther, the origin of the Jewish festival of Purim. It substitutes the vicious Spartans for the Athenian founders of the intellectual (as opposed to the martial) part of the Ancient Greek culture. It renders the Persians, who are the modern Iranians and who are by any standards “white” people, as black, the better to demonise them and to prepare war-hysteria against them. These things are repellant to recall, especially knowing that the distribution of this film “300” has been expedited so that it is already showing in South Africa. How disgusting! Why should South Africa be importing and showing US fascist war-propaganda? It should be stopped! Please, at least, read Gary Leupp’s good article, linked below.

The image above is of Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically-elected prime minister of Iran/Persia, overthrown by an Anglo-American plot in 1953 and replaced by the monstrous bloody dictator “Shah”. The US Imperialists now want to do it all again!

Click on these links:

SACP GS Dr Blade Nzimande, build the Party, address to N-W Congress (5277 words)

COSATU 2DP Violet Seboni to CEPPWAWU Bargaining Conference (1430 words)

300 is a racist and insulting film, Gary Leupp, Counterpunch (2067 words)