ANC Strategy and Tactics, Polokwane

National Democratic Revolution, Part 10a

Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma

ANC Strategy and Tactics, Polokwane

This is the last item of the CU series on the National Democratic Revolution. It will be followed by a ten-part series constructed around Lenin’s “The State and Revolution”.

Static or revolutionary?

This, the second in this final part, where the main document is the SACP 2009 discussion document, is the current version of the ANC Strategy and Tactics - amended several times since the original was adopted in Morogoro in 1969 - as passed by the 52^ndANC National Conference at Polokwane.

The ANC 52^nd National Conference was otherwise considered a victory for the popular forces within the ANC. But from paragraph 90, this document launched a revision of the previously much clearer understanding of class and colour in South Africa.

Now, in the latest S&T, all are ranked in a single notional table, as “motive forces”. “Blacks in general and Africans in particular” become commensurate with “The Working Class”.

In the draft, monopoly capital, too, was going to be included as a “motive force”, thereby removing even the most oppressive factor from anti-popular side of the equation, but this was changed in commission at Polokwane. Monopoly capital is not officially part of the alliance.

This version of the S&T document remains above all marred by its static and non-revolutionary conception of “National Democratic Society” as a “Holy Grail” and final steady-state condition of what Thabo Mbeki used to call a “normal” society. The NDR has to be more than a set of tick-boxes.

The idea of closure on the NDR without its becoming something more, is close to Francis Fukuyama’s provocative 1992 “post-Cold-War” essay “The End of History and the Last Man”. History has not ended; and the “Last Man” is only a nightmare of the proto-fascist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900).

We have not yet arrived at a closure of the NDR. The struggle continues.Hi

Please download and read the text via the following link:

Strategy and Tactics, Polokwane, 2007, ANC (17523 words)

Further reading:

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