Hegemony within the NDR

[CU for Monday, 28 September 2009]

On 14 September 2009 the South African Communist Party released a main discussion document (click on the link below) in preparation for the SACP Special National Congress that is to take place in December 2009 at the Turfloop campus in Polokwane, Limpopo Province.

Further discussion documents are to follow on the following topics:

• The State and the Future of Local and Provincial Government
• Industrial Strategy and Rural Development

The main discussion document (linked below) is titled “Building working class hegemony on the terrain of a national democratic struggle”. It is therefore directly in line with the previous eleven parts of this series on the National Democratic Revolution, and presents us with an ideal way to conclude the series in an open-ended way that is situated in the present conjuncture.

The most relevant parts of this document to our discussion so far are Part 2.4 (“The politics of working class hegemony...versus the politics of a multi-class balancing act”) and the whole of Part 3 (“Towards a politics of mass-driven, state-led radical transformation on the terrain of a National Democratic Revolution”).

In an echo of Lenin’s “The State and Revolution”, the SACP document notes that the “sectarian left” (equivalent to Lenin’s “anarchists”) and the “centrist reformists” (Lenin’s “opportunists”) are alike in their subjective denigration of the NDR. Lenin said that the anarchists and the opportunists are twins.

This document is work in progress. The challenge, prior to the Special National Congress, is to see how the document can be improved.

Asikhulume!

Click on this link:

Building hegemony on national democratic terrain, 2009, SACP (13222 words)