SA Working Class and the NDR

SA Working Class and the NDR

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We meet in the UJ Doornfontein Library. The next session will be as follows: 

• Date: 25 March (Thursday)
• Time: 17h00 sharp to 18h30 sharp
• Venue: The Library, University of Johannesburg, 37 Nind Street, Doornfontein, Johannesburg (former Technikon Witwatersrand). Cars enter from the slip road to the left of the bridge on Siemert Road.
• Topic: The Struggle for Democracy.

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For this last session of our “Basics” course, we have looked at democracy, armed struggle, and popular unity-in-action, in terms of various countries of the world. The National Democratic Revolution is not a South African invention. The NDR is a worldwide phenomenon, but it has also generated a specifically South African literature. The NDR is a bridge between the national and international struggles. 

Joe Slovo [pictured above] published the SA Working Class and the National Democratic Revolution (for a file download see the link below) at a time when he was the General Secretary of the South African Communist Party in 1988, when the Party was still clandestine. The end of the SACP’s 40-year period of illegality was to come two years later.

Like many political documents, the SA Working Class and the NDR takes shape around a polemical response to contemporary opponents who may no longer be well remembered (in this case the particular “workerists” and compromisers of the time that Slovo mentions on the first page of the document).

But as with the polemics of Marx, Engels and Lenin, so also with Slovo’s. In the course of the argument against otherwise long-forgotten foes he was obliged to set up a fully concrete, rounded assessment of the meaning of the NDR. He succeeded brilliantly and his pamphlet still remains today as the best single and definitive text on the NDR.

Slovo quickly establishes the class-alliance basis of the NDR and quotes Lenin saying that: “the advanced class ... should fight with… energy and enthusiasm for the cause of the whole people, at the head of the whole people”. This advanced class is the working class. Slovo goes on to write of the continuity of the NDR and of the institutional organisation that is the bricks-and-mortar of nation-building.

Slovo’s is a long document but it has many possibilities as the basis for a discussion, and that is always our purpose: dialogue.

Click here to download the text of The South African Working Class and the NDR, 1988, Slovo (14985 words)