Umsebenzi Online

Next year, the Communist University is going to rely much more heavily than before on the South African Communist Party’s twice-monthly (22 issues so far this year) e-mail publication, Umsebenzi Online.

We have been re-sending Umsebenzi Online to the Communist University list on a regular basis since at least January 2006. Now that Umsebenzi Online has its own dedicated distribution group (click here to see the group web site), the Communist University members will be progressively added to that list, during the next two months. Subscription to Umsebenzi Online is free.

This is to remove the necessity of duplicating the sending of Umsebenzi Online. You are getting it already. You will in future get the same thing from a separate list. If you have any objection to being put on the Umsebenzi Online list, please let the CU know (click here to send an e-mail).

At the Umsebenzi Online group web site, the publication will be made available both as web pages and as MS-Word file downloads, formatted ready for printing in the four-page (A4 folding to A5, or A3 folding to A4) booklet style that has been so well-accepted in the CU for many years now.

Umsebenzi Online is also archived at the SACP web site.

Now let’s look at Umsebenzi Online from a Party member’s point of view. It is the most immediate and current of the party’s publications, and by far the easiest to reproduce and to propagate (spread around). It carries the Red Alerts of the General Secretary, among other things.

Surely, then, it should be the duty of every Party and YCL member to increase the circulation of Umsebenzi Online? The Party may have as many as 60,000 members by now. A good proportion of these members have access to e-mail. Yet only a few hundred are receiving Umsebenzi Online on a regular basis. Why can we not have a concerted effort in the Party, but beginning with the Communist University comrades, to increase the size of the Umsebenzi Online to at least ten thousand, within the next six months, say?

There are several locations where you can find “promotion boxes” where joining a person to Umsebenzi Online is a simple matter of putting an e-mail address and clicking “Subscribe”. These are at the CU Plug-in City; the CU blog; and the SACP web site (scroll to the bottom of the left-hand panel). People can also join the distribution list at the Umsebenzi Online group web site. Or, as a last resort, you can send addresses by e-mail to the CU.

So let’s get on with it, shall we? Ten thousand Umsebenzi Online subscribers within six months! We should have done this long ago!

Meanwhile, everybody needs to read the current edition of Umsebenzi Online prior to the ANC Conference that starts in ten days’ time. Where does the snobbishness that has crept into the ANC come from? What is the political origin of the aloofness? SACP GS Dr Blade Nzimande writes about this with great clarity and the accurate, detailed recollection of somebody who has been closely involved in the most historical events of our country and of the ANC in the period in question.

Click on this link:

Umsebenzi Online, Revolution on Trial 7, 5 December 2007 (1908 words)