Red Or Strange Bed?

The first thing that must be dealt with is that it is not true, as was stated here yesterday, that the Dora Tamana Co-operative Centre (DTCC) is finished. DTCC promotes and advocates the idea of Co-ops and assists them in various ways. The CU is happy to be able to confirm that DTCC is going to carry on with this work. We look forward to hearing more from them and to further opportunities to study the revolutionary potential of the co-operative movement in South Africa.

The next thing is the long message from Mazibuko Jara (linked below). In this case there is no withdrawal or apology from the Communist University. You may judge his message for yourself, as usual. Whatever else may be said here is by way of commentary.

Jara wants to have his cake and eat it. He likes to stride the public stage but at the same time to be protected and sheltered on grounds of sensitivity and confidentiality. His is a false pretence of “public communism” that conceals, not very well, an urge to suppress and to censor that is clearly evident in this message to the CU. Jara is an experienced person who is being disingenuous. He writes as if nobody else is as experienced as himself and as if he can bamboozle anybody at will, whenever he pleases, like a kind of political J Arthur Brown. Let us look at a few examples, because they are instructive.

Jara’s previous complaint to the Communist University arose when in November 2005 he sent his “Red or JZ” paper and we published it. His request was: “I ask that you circulate it to your communist university email list.” But Jara didn’t like the response that it generated. Of course it got into the papers, including the “Hogarth” column, and Jara turned on the Communist University as if we were supposed to publicise his paper on an open list without the possibility of it getting into the press. This was complete nonsense, especially coming from Jara, who is a media specialist.

Now Jara is making the same complaint, in effect, several times over. One of them is his complaint about the e-mail he sent, he says via the SACP and COSATU, soliciting introductions in the USA. But the Communist University did not receive this message from the SACP or COSATU. It came from America, from somebody unconnected to the SACP or COSATU, asking in effect: Who is this Jara? Why should I introduce him to my contacts? Jara must know, and does in fact know, that you can fire an arrow into the World Wide Web but you cannot be sure where it will land. In this case he is relying on this very characteristic of the Internet to fetch him a virtual New World of political contacts. He is cruising in cyberspace. Who is he trying to kid by denying it?

Concerning the Mail and Guardian article “Rumblings over Blade in SACP”, Jara, Vicki Robinson, and the whole media world knows that an article attributed to “sources”, but with a direct quote at the end from a named individual, is a well-known journalistic device to create “plausible deniability” but which everybody is going to understand one way, and that is that the main source is the person quoted at the end. You may judge his denial on its merits, but whether Jara likes it or not, there are plenty of people who are convinced that he is the main source. He will have to live with that.

Comrade Slovo Majola gave no more than the plain truth when he was quoted as saying that there are groups within the Party who want to challenge the General Secretary’s leadership. These groups are strange bedfellows from opposite fringes of the Party. They are liberal reformists like Jara, for example, and ultra-left entryists like Zico Tamela. At least that is what we presume they are. We can only presume, because the main characteristic of factional activity is that it has no politics. These comrades refuse to come out in the open with their ideas for the Party. Instead they “rumble” about the leadership.

Now Jara says he is going to deliver a statement to “2,000 left activists” in the USA. Leaving aside Paulo Freire’s warning against “activism” in “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, let us say at once that we should be eager to publish Jara’s paper as soon as we get it. But why must he launch his demarche from the USA? And why to these motley “activists”? Is this a good way to approach the 12th National Congress of the South African Communist Party? Is Jara the new Tutu? You be the judge.

The two short messages linked below from Cdes Mervyn Bennun and Floyd Shivambu bring us to a profound point of concentration on the question of peace and war. We can proceed very well now with the text that is down for discussion next Wednesday, which is Bill Pomeroy’s “The Time for Armed Struggle”. This text engages precisely with the point to which our dialogue has brought us, and it can take us forward. It will also be helpful in debunking appeals to false notions of secrecy in a Party that has successfully waged a 40-year struggle to rise out of an imposed clandestinity. The picture above is of Eduardo Mondlane.

Click on these links:

Message from Mazibuko Jara (763 words)

Message from Mervyn Bennun (282 words)

Message from Nyiko Floyd Shivambu (231 words)

We want nobody who is not frightened

Mervyn Bennun is a comrade who lives in Cape Town, well respected as a veteran of the South African struggle and incidentally as a great expert on the law. Yesterday he responded to the Communist University post about the attitude of the young male comrades towards the question of war and peace.

Mervyn wrote:

“I am shocked by what the young comrades seemed to feel. War is utterly horrible…

“I remember very clearly in 1966(7?)(8?) a meeting addressed in London by Eduardo Mondlane, not long before he was killed. He spoke bitterly and with great passion about his experiences and philosophy as the leader of FRELIMO. He said that guerilla war was no romantic Che Guevara-Fidel Castro thing, with images of bearded, beret-wearers creeping through the jungle with sten guns and singing patriotic songs about freedom round campfires. What he said about his own FRELIMO really touched me: he said that FRELIMO wanted nobody who was not frightened, who did not hate and fear guns and bombs and fighting; FRELIMO just wanted people who wanted to build, to bring into being, to live.”

Thank you comrade Mervyn for taking us straight to the heart of the matter.

Also in Cape Town, as it happens, lives Mazibuko Jara, still a member of the SACP, though no longer an office bearer in the YCL. The article by Vicki Robinson linked below is incorrect in that regard and a few other respects as well. Some names are also spelled wrong.

Jara used to be the national spokesperson of the SACP and held many other positions at national level, in Johannesburg, to the point that he became a domineering, universal gatekeeper and very little could be done without his say-so. That was before his abrupt demise and resignation a few years ago. The resignation had to do with his founding role in the Dora Tamana Co-operative Centre (DTCC), and money problems having to do with that organisation. DTCC collapsed altogether in 2006.

Jara’s former position as national spokesperson has meant that he is still well known to the media freaternity. He maintains wide personal contacts and appears to have every intention of regaining his former dictatorial position within the Party. Vicki Robinson’s article does not come out of the blue. Together with "sourcings" by Jara, it amounts to factional lobbying by. Jara is clearly the main source, as he has often been before in such articles about the SACP.

Next time, Vicki Robinson should ask Jara about the DTCC, instead of just swallowing Jara’s skinder about other people in the Party.

For her information and yours, Jara is right now busy trying to expand his profile internationally. He recently circulated the following e-mail:

“I request info on names of comrades in the US (specifically New York) in unions, organisations and individual comrades you would suggest I contact and try to meet whilst there from 07 to 12 March. I would need to get email addresses, etc. I will be attending the Left Forum from 09 to 11 March in New York.”

The trademark of Jara and his factional allies is revealed by Jara’s threat to “investigate” a meeting held in Khayelitsha. These stalkers hunt for advantages in procedural wrangles. Especially, they love to gag their opponents and their perceived rivals, while they whisper like the grass to the bourgeois media.

They will not write of their politics openly. They conceal their aims, and communists are not supposed to conceal their aims. They are the cell-phone politicians. This phenomenon is normal prior to a Congress, and a Congress is a good way of dealing with it. The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.

Click on this link:

Rumblings over Blade in SACP, Vicki Robinson, Mail and Guardian (634 words)

The Revolutionary Struggle For Peace

It is fair to say, without mentioning any names, that the medium-sized group that gathered yesterday to discuss the summarising Chapter 1 of Carl von Clausewitz’ “On War” yesterday were broadly agreed that war was “necessary” for revolutionary purposes.

Others did not find it exceptionable that South Africa might consider using armed force to effect “regime change” in neighbouring countries, such as Swaziland and Zimbabwe.

Talk of the possibility of nuclear war by the USA/Israel alliance, against Iran, produced little response from these comrades. If they were not indifferent, they were certainly detached.

The comrades have familiar memories of the South African armed struggle, including the names of many of the leading personalities and events of that struggle. Yet all present except one were far to young to have taken part in these events as military actors.

So the legacy of the South African armed struggle has clearly left us with a conception of war that is far from revolutionary. War is regarded favourably by the young men of South Africa. War is not regarded by them as it is regarded by most ex-combatants, i.e. as a hateful thing to be avoided by all possible means.

It is not the first time in revolutionary history that this terrible error has arisen in the minds of the revolutionaries. It is an error that has had disastrous consequences in the past and in different places. Next week we will study the case of the Philippines, with the assistance of Cde Hepworth Moyikwa, using Bill Pomeroy’s 1974 text “On the Time For Armed Struggle” (linked below).

Pomeroy was one of the thinkers who influenced Umkhonto we Sizwe commanders during our armed struggle, and was personally in contact with them. At the time that he was writing this piece he was living in exile in London, like many South African exiles at the time.

Here is part of the conclusion of Pomeroy’s paper:

“The PKP is the party of the Filipino working class. It rejects putschism, coup d'etat, foco guerrillaism and anarcho-terrorist revolutionism that stands apart from the sentiment of the masses. It does not sanction any political activity that attempts to split the masses from their vanguard party.”

“The conditions for violence are necessarily determined by those who possess the instruments of violence, namely, the ruling circles of imperialism, feudalism and monopoly capital.”

“The PKP and all revolutionary forces must be vigilant and must always be in a state of preparedness in every way to prevent the enemies of the people from obstructing the people's way to peaceful revolutionary transformation of our society. The PKP upholds the right of the people to use force against those who use force against the people.”

This is not a simple matter, comrades. Please read the linked text below, and join us next week on February 21st in the SACP boardroom, third floor, COSATU House, 1 Leyds Street, corner Biccard, at 17h00 for a good discussion of this question of war.

Click on this link:

Pomeroy, On the Time for Armed Struggle (6800 words)

CU Flyer for 21 February 2007 (44 KB MS Word file download)

Class Struggles

“Class Struggle: An Answer To Its Critics” was the unforgettable title of one of many of pamphlets published in Britain in the 1980s during the battle to save the Communist Party of Great Britain from the liquidationist Euro-Communists. The battle was lost. The Morning Star newspaper survived, though, and there is now a growing refounded British Party, the Communist Party of Britain (CPB), and a new British YCL.

Concerning the Communist University, here are some various “Answers To Its Critics”:

• Cde Floyd Shivambu was wrongly blamed yesterday and has received an apology. His prior meeting is at 14h30 and it may well be possible for him to make it to the CU in COSATU House by 17h00 today. Let’s hope so. He is very familiar with Clausewitz’ “On War” and we need his input.


• The CU definition of Fascism is: the continuation of bourgeois class dictatorship by other than democratic means, including the suspension of the rule of law and its replacement by direct coercion.


• The electronic CU is invariably a comment on some texts that are simultaneously archived and linked from the message. In the Freirean method of critical pedagogy there is no equivocation. Nor is there any presumption of dogma or authority. Categorical statements are made in the full expectation of categorical contradiction, which is frequently forthcoming. That is not arrogance. Arrogance deliberately kills dialogue, whereas the CU is a proven generator of dialogue.


• Yesterday the texts were the extraordinary three from Moneyweb on the arrogance of J Arthur Brown, a young man who took hundreds of millions of rands from the mouths of widows and orphans of deceased mineworkers, and who is still at large. The CU’s assertion was that Brown’s kind of arrogance is commonplace in South Africa. He got “lucky”, but was stopped in the end because people, and especially one particular unpaid trustee, Frans Mahlangu, stood up to him.

It is clear after Fidentia that the professional “financial advisor” industry’s credibility is in tatters. The justification for their existence is that they supposedly protect the interests of lay persons and non-experts. In the event it was a businessman, Derek Sumption, and then the volunteer Mahlangu, who tripped up Brown’s vile career. The professionals were nowhere to be seen. This is why Alec Hogg called it “Our worst nightmare” (where “us” clearly refers to the financial services industry professionals).

When Sumption confronted Brown (and consequently pulled half a billion rand out of the Fidentia orbit) it was the beginning of Brown’s end. Yet it took a further 18 months before Brown was fully exposed thanks to Mahlangu’s brave sacrifice. The strong were protected while the weak were being plundered.

Nobody came back to the CU with any remarks about Brown, yet this was the main underlying matter of the CU post yesterday. Why do so many people read only the crib, and not the main texts? The CU’s implied contract is to give you the goods in full, plus a commentary if you want it.

Concerning the internal dynamics of the SACP before its Gauteng Provincial Congress next month and 12th National Congress in July, the CU regrets the absence of more texts. The situation is becoming difficult to comment upon. Although the SACP is a legal and not a clandestine party, and although any pre-Congress period is one of free debate, yet it appears (as Cde Dinga Sikwebu remarked at the last SACP Johannesburg Central BGM) that cell-phones are currently the medium of choice through which political matters are settled, as opposed to open debate, pamphlets, or Internet blogging. This is a pity.

Please note that the CU is not being muzzled but is going to be less frequently seen for reasons of lack of resources, mainly time. Today there is also a shortage of a certain text. The one we want is the South African Road to Socialism, from the last SACP Augmented Central Committee. The electronic version is strangely unobtainable. Instead, here below is Dominic Tweedie’s roundup of coming political events this year, published this week in the London Morning Star. Now that the CU has an opening to this internationally famous publication, how about us showing them some more samples of what we can do? Comrade Floyd? Comrade Castro? Anybody?

Click on this link:

The SA NDR and Socialism, Dominic Tweedie, Morning Star (1100 words)

Arrogance

J Arthur Brown is not vain. There are no pictures of him on the Internet. But vain and arrogant are two different things. Arrogance is not the same as greed, either. The story of the 32-year-old ex instant lawn “entrepreneur” who got his hands on the life-support system of 47,000 widows and orphans of dead South African miners is not a story of greed. It is a story of arrogance and of how far arrogance can take you down the road to hell.

Read of the arrogance of J Arthur Brown and think what it means. See the linked articles below. These are three superb pieces of journalism by Moneyweb.

Alec Hogg, summing up, says: “The Fidentia cupboard is bare.” He says it is: “Our worst nightmare.” Who is that “we”? It is not the 47000 widows and orphans. They are not likely to surf the net to Moneyweb’s site. It is the exposed bourgeoisie of whose nightmares Hogg writes. Its system protects the strong but leaves the poor to swing in the wind. It is a system that celebrates and rewards arrogance. And this arrogance infects every part of bourgeois society. It even affects the labour movement and it tries to creep into the Communist Party. In South Africa, arrogance is a national disease.

Arrogance is alas only one of the many problems suffered by the Communist University in recent days. Others include the effects of crime, death, taxes and the common cold. But the arrogant denial of resources is still the most relentless problem the CU has faced all along, and on every side. People demand, and expect to receive, but don’t give. People hog resources and fail to make use of them, and for one main reason: arrogance. Resources that could be put to use for the people go to waste. Time is dragged out endlessly and uselessly. Opportunities are squandered. Life slips away.

The SACP at the level of Gauteng Province can send e-mails, but does not. The SACP Johannesburg District would like to, but says it cannot. These two home-turf structures are more opaque to the Johannesburg Communist University than millions of other structures on the Internet. The SACP Johannesburg Central Branch Executive Committee sends hard copy, with no return address to which you can send an apology. The following paragraph is from such a letter, received today:

“We are urged to call this meeting among others by a growing concerns and complaints by members of the branch around the circulated emails under communist university – which is part of branch sub-committees, the previously agreed disclaimer on the circulated emails, quoting and misquoting of issues and matters discussed in branch meetings.”

Comrades, people need to understand that the Communist University is, for want of a better word, virtual. It is no bigger or smaller than the work that goes into it. It will continue to meet on Wednesdays for as long as it is permitted a venue. Tomorrow (Wednesday January 14th) it will discuss the tremendous Chapter 1 of “On War” (Vom Kriege) by Carl von Clausewitz. Unfortunately the senior YCL figure who was committed to open the discussion tomorrow has given apologies for lateness, just like George Raphela did last week. It seems like the CU is condemned to death by half-measures.

On the CU flyer for the past couple of years the following has been written: “Openers should be on time to open the discussion”. For people to take the publicity and then give apologies at the last minute “for lateness” is a sick joke. Thanks for nothing, Floyd Shivambu.

As for the electronic side of the CU, it will continue as and when time permits. People, you have to think about what you want. The Internet is a socialist place. Whatever is there is only held up by work. There is no neutron bomb for the Internet. You can’t beat down the people and steal the goods. If you beat down the Internet people, you will find there is nothing there to steal, just emptiness where before there was life.

Sincere thanks to those who asked where the CU had gone.

Click on these links:

Moneyweb opener on J Arthur and Fidentia (641 words)

Arrogance More Than Greed, Alec Hogg, Moneyweb (2662 words)

Fidentia, our worst nightmare, Alec Hogg, Moneyweb (575 words)

For Peace And Love

SACP GS Dr Blade Nzimande has just returned from Bolivia and written of the expedition in the latest Umsebenzi Online, which came out yesterday, and is linked below. The combined delegation included ANC SG Kgalema Motlanthe and COSATU GS Zwelinzima Vavi, and three other distinguished ANC comrades including one each from the Leagues. As Cde Blade points out, this is the first time since 1994 that the Alliance has carried out an international visit as a collective in this way.

In the general post-colonial and Imperialist situation of the world South Africa and Bolivia have many common preoccupations. The last third of Cde Blade’s article concerns the crucial relationship between the Party and the masses. It is instructive to study a similar situation that is also remote in place or time. This is a good way to start to conceive of the concrete nature of a situation.

In this spirit the Communist University is still watching the news for a suitable text that can open up the situation in Nepal for our study. We can report that Secretary General of the Socialist International, Luis Ayala, arrived in Nepal on Wednesday to take part in the Asia Pacific Regional-level meeting of the Socialist International to be held from February 10-11. The ANC is a member of the Socialist International.

Ayala said that the meeting of the Socialist International was being organised in Kathmandu to express solidarity to the ongoing peace process and democracy in Nepal.

Ann Crotty is a great journalist but she has become infected with the same disease as Xolela Mangcu. In the article below she relies on US solecism and neologism and unquestioned assertion from Citigroup, the Rockefeller bank, as if they were gospel. In spite of a strange nod in the direction of the Marxists right at the end, Crotty seems to have no clue that she is in territory that has been well studied by Karl Marx and his successors. If she had only read a few chapters of Capital she would have known that their conclusion is the reverse of Citigroup’s, and then at least she could have thrown up the contrast. Thus do great journalists start down the slippery slope.

Marxist scholarship has always been able to clearly demonstrate the opposite of Crotty’s assertions. Because the bourgeoisie are ripping surplus value off each worker on a daily basis, the workers all together cannot possibly have enough spending power to purchase their own product in full. Nor can the small bourgeoisie possibly spend enough to make up for the deficit. So Marx contradicts Crotty at its very core, and vice versa.

Banks like Citigroup, and especially central bankers like Tito Mboweni, are charged with fiddling the books in an effort to prevent the recurring overtoppling phenomenon called the “crisis of overproduction”. The result is structural poverty and “jobless growth”. Like many a good but bourgeois journalist, Crotty is having a bout of not being able to see the wood for the trees. She should re-read Capital, or at least “Value Price and Profit”, (redacted here), which is Marx’s short 1865 study of these phenomena. So should all the reformist proponents of the hopeless holy grail of capitalist economics, a “fair” labour market. Some of these are still found in the ranks of the labour movement. Such a thing as a “fair” distribution of wealth under capitalism will never be seen on this earth.

The US Imperialists are having another “launch” of their grandiose and arrogant “Africa Command” which could be comical if it had not already resulted in the tragic slaughter of innocents in Somalia. It is boosted on the back of the Al Qaeda scare. The linked article below at least carries the merit of the following final paragraph: “Critics of US policy however say that Washington is inflating the influence that Al-Qaeda has in Somalia in order to pursue its own geo-political goals in the Horn of Africa.” Thanks for that small mercy. At least SAPA did not quite swallow the nonsense whole. See the link.

Next week on Valentine’s Day, February 14th, the Communist University is going to study the first, summarising chapter of Clausewitz’ “On War”, with an opening by Floyd Shivambu of the YCL National Committee. We study war because we want peace. We study Clausewitz in particular because he shows that war is not an alternative to politics, but only a tragic interlude between negotiations. The greatest folly of the US Imperialists is to think that they can secure unconditional military victories. That is another fallacy that will never happen, anywhere. See the link below.

Click on these links:

Umsebenzi Online, Vol 6, No. 2, 7 Feb 2007, Bolivia and Latin America (2592 words)

Hope for a narrower wealth gap, Ann Crotty, Business Report (814 words)

US creates Africa Military Command on Al Qaeda excuse, Sapa (632 words)

Clausewitz, Chapter 1, What is War (7916 words)

Dogs Bark, Caravan Moves On

Today at 17h00 in the SACP Boardroom at the third floor of COSATU House, 1 Leyds Street Braamfontein, Cde George Raphela, National Organiser of the YCL, will open a Communist University discussion of the 2005 version of the SACP Constitution.

There are several points of interest. One is the famous Rule 6.4, which is the key that has unlocked mass democracy on a huge scale in South Africa. Another is the rights of members and the procedure of Provincial and National Congresses. There is supposed to be a Gauteng Provincial Congress on 24th and 25th March (i.e. next month) and the 12th SACP National Congress is scheduled for 11th to 15th July 2007. Another point of interest is the quorum rules.

There are some comrades in the Party, and outside it, who think it is fine to make up arbitrary new rules as they go along. These are the types of people Karima Brown calls “flunkies”, referring to ANC flunkies in the first article linked below. But there are also some flunkies in the SACP. Ebrahim Steyn, for example, objected to the CU post of 29th January where Zico Tamela was criticised for attacking COSATU in public print for not doing organising work when he himself had conspicuously neglected that same work while wearing his SACP hat. Steyn’s attack was backed up by his fellow-YCLer Bigboy Kekana. This was in last Sunday’s SACP Johannesburg Central Branch meeting.

These comrades, and Cde Tamela in particular, had previously insisted on the disclaimer that nowadays hangs over the Communist University, as you may have seen. But now Tamela accuses the CU of “getting around” the disclaimer! This piece of political lunacy would be laughable if Cde Tamela was not currently the Chairperson of the SACP Gauteng Province, an ANC PR Councillor in Johannesburg, and the International Secretary of COSATU affiliate SATAWU.

The demand last year for a disclaimer means that the Branch and the Province have disowned the CU and this is not a reversible situation. They have made their bed and they must lie in it. The Branch Executive Committee (BEC) will meet this evening at the same time that the CU is busy studying the Constitution. There will be sound and fury at the BEC but it will signify nothing. The disclaimer is there at their insistence and it will not be withdrawn. The SACP Constitution is also in place and it will not be re-written in any way until the 12th Congress in July, if at all.

Brown was commenting on the FNB demarche on crime that never was. She thinks, on balance, “the democratic space is not only there, but it is widening.” Well, fine, but the democratic space is only widened by effort, and as the above example shows, there are always plenty of flunkies around who want to close it down again. The struggle must be taken up again with each new day.

The Business Report led well yesterday with further material on the terrible Fidentia scandal, where it appears that the promoters of the company, who came from nowhere but were highly recommended, simply helped themselves to hundreds of millions of rands of money belonging to deceased mineworkers’ widows and orphans, and may well have shipped the money abroad. This is international monopoly finance capitalism. It is not a distant theory. It is a daily, predatory reality. See the linked item below from Tonny Mafu.

Finally, the imperialist war hysteria against Iran has spread to France. Diana Johnstone reports from there that whereas that country (together with South Africa, we recall) was one of the main opponents of the war on Iraq four years ago, now the French media and the main bourgeois political parties there are singing the same tune as their US counterparts (see the link). Johnstone puts this down to a shift in the allegiance of the very large Jewish population of France. But the foundation of belligerence against Iran or any other country that is outside the direct sphere of Imperial dominance is not ethnicity. It is only the same capitalist Imperialist driving force that has tortured the globe with warfare for more than a hundred years.

Click on these links:

Bank on patronage, not principle, Karima Brown, Business Day (812 words)

Fidentia sent funds offshore - FSB, Tonny Mafu, Business Report (525 words)

War frenzy in France against Iran, Diana Johnstone, Counterpunch (2454 words)

Build Democratic Structures Now

At the Communist University, we live and learn.

Linked below is the COSATU response to Christelle Terreblanche’s article on the Nairobi World Social Forum (WSF) as printed in the Sunday Independent, and followed by their Editor’s Note. The latter basically says that Christelle and the “Sindy” did not have information from COSATU and its affiliates in advance. Fair enough. No doubt COSATU could do more than it already does in this regard, even if it is probably the most transparent and media-friendly combine in the country, as well as by far the biggest.

The CU’s speculation that COSATU might have had more representation in Nairobi than South Africa’s other social movements put together turns out to be well wide of the mark, to say the least. We now know of more than 200 individuals in 60 or so SA organisations that took part in the WSF, many of them listed by name in the document linked below. If you want a report-back, you know where to go.

Also linked, and also from Nairobi, from Pambazuka News, an article by Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem contains the following great couple of lines, among many others:

“And this issue of dependence on foreign donors is not just because there are no resources. How come the nationalists freed this continent from the yoke of colonialism without writing proposals to any funder?”

This is closely followed by the comrade’s hilarious listing of MONGOs, BONGOs, GONGOs and PONGOs. If you want to know what they all mean, please read this wonderful article, linked below.

It is the job of a Communist Party, with its mission to educate, organise and mobilise, to build the kind of popular, democratic, allied unity-in-action structures that can secure peace and social progress. The SACP has done a great job at national level with its Red October campaigns, for example. The YCL, too, has formed exemplary relationships with other progressive youth movements nationally.

But at provincial and city level, and at the international level of the African continent, the necessary structures are still rudimentary, or non-existent. Local Party and YCL members must not point fingers at others for this deficiency, or attack people who point it out to them.

The internationalism “franchise” is certainly being milked and manipulated big-time by the Imperialists. It provides acres of newspaper copy all over the world. The ringmasters of the show, of which the WSF is only a tiny part, can press buttons at any moment, producing uproar to order. When the purpose of the uproar has been served, the “issue” goes right back into the closet again.

The issue of Myanmar was certainly used in this way to create an uproar that would mask the invasion of Somalia by the US and Ethiopian military at Christmas time. Now Myanmar is back in the media closet, and Somalia with it. Except that South Africa’s Ambassador to Cuba, Thenjiwe Mtintso, has written an explanation for dummies of why this kind of manipulation must be opposed and confronted. See the link below.

If you still have doubts that games are being played at the UN to make up seem like down and white seem like black, please read the final linked item from Brian Cloughley of Counterpunch.

Click on these links:

Cosatu was in Nairobi, COSATU DGS Bheki Ntshalintshali, Sindy (644 words)

Who went from SA to WSF Nairobi, 2007 - an incomplete list. (lists)

MONGOs, GONGOs and BONGOs, Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, Pambazuka (1245 words)

Myanmar vote critics missing UN aim, Thenjiwe Mtintso, Sindy (818 words)

Irony of Bush Indignation, Brian Cloughley, Counterpunch (1273 words)

Made Man

Today is the day of the first 2007 meeting of the SACP Johannesburg Central Branch. It is at 10h00 in SATAWU office, 13th floor, Old Mutual Building, 29 Kerk Street, between Loveday and Harrison.

Following the Thursday revelation of a huge and dodgy deal involving Saki Macozoma by Rob Rose on the front page of the Business Day, we speculated on the nature of such vast enrichments, and what their raison d’etre (their function within the system) might be. In passing we remarked on the book Executive Pay in South Africa - Who Gets What and Why, by Ann Crotty and Renée Bonorchis. Ms Bonorchis objected to what was written here about that book. She wrote:

‘I need to point out that Ann and I at no point in the book ever just 'put it down to greed'… We looked at the lack of independent directors, the lack of clear disclosure, the lack of shareholder activism, the growth of cronyism, the lack of transformation and much much more in order to try and explain growing levels of wealth in the top echelons of the corporate world.’

So the book was obtained and read. Indeed it is true that the word greed is not noticeable. So to that extent Ms Bonorchis must prevail. But let us look a little closer. Her statement shows the way. The book examines a number of “lacks”. Even the presence of cronyism appears not as an end, but as an enabling circumstance.

In other words the book is much stronger on the lack of restraint than on the nature of the force that needs restraining in the first place. Concerning that force, the last words of the main text are about as close as the authors get to a description, or a definition. They say:

“It would seem that in the vagaries of the human heart, there is no such thing as enough money and that pay, in a broader perspective, has little to do with true worth.”

It is quite easy to read “the vagaries of the human heart” to mean greed. Or not. In fact the statement itself is literally vague. To cover this, the authors have in the first part of the final chapter (Chapter 11) created a fantasy of the life of a male chief executive officer. They work out that the poor fellow probably needs a salary of at least R8 million just to get by. But then, because of “the vagaries of the human heart” he might want a lot more. This is how the book’s line of thought proceeds.

In South Africa at large the topic of who gets to be a real capitalist is quite widely discussed, and particularly in relation to Black Economic Empowerment (BEE). But in this book the difference between a chap who is getting and spending R8 million per year (or even more), and one who has actually joined the ranks of the people who personally possess real, “serious” capital, is ignored. Capital does not mean the possession of a mansion, or even of many mansions. It means the ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.

To compete or just to coexist with the big-scale owners of inherited wealth requires an enormous, sudden, and heroic accumulation. From reading the business pages of newspapers over time it is possible to see that a few people do graduate from the ranks of the merely salaried to the ranks of the true bourgeoisie. It is even possible to see this as a necessary part of the system. It is also possible to see the great advantage that attaches to inherited wealth.

Crotty and Bonorchis do not even consider the transition from striving “piker” to serene “made person” as a relevant part of the answer to their question “Who gets what and why?”. This is a major weakness and a failure to recognise the compulsive driver of the capitalist system, which is the urge to be a capitalist. To earn money is not really to be free. But to have capital, in a capitalist system, is to be as free as you can be under capitalism. The name of the game is capital. This failure makes the book more like a titillating, ephemeral piece of gossip than the tremendous Shakespearean drama that it could have been, like a modern Macbeth, or a Julius Caesar.

Speaking of poets, below you will find a link to Ron Press’s excellent latest.

Click on this link:

A poem for reason, Ron Press (poem)

Widows And Orphans

When David Gleason was unfortunately fired a couple of years ago from the Business Day for supposedly putting too much politics into his copy, a young spiky-haired white kid was hired to take his place. This is Rob Rose, who has now come up with two huge financial scandal stories within a matter of days. One was the Macozoma – Liberty scandal, where the Liberty company had sold part of its business to Saki Macozoma and his friends, left them to enjoy the fruits of it for four years, and then bought it back for R297 million more than they sold it in the first place. The big shareholders forced this deal through over the objections of the minorities.

The story that Rose broke on Friday is even worse. It involves another “asset management” firm. This one is called Fidentia and it has just been put into curatorship by a court of law. These people were taking the clients’ investments and using them to buy, for example, a football team (Manning Rangers).

Most of the money (nearly R1.5 billion) Fidentia was in charge of came from the Living Hands Umbrella Trust, which was set up by the Mineworkers Provident Fund to pay money to families of people killed in mining accidents. That is to say, to the dead miners’ widows and orphans.

National Union of Mineworkers General Secretary Frans Baleni wrote last November in the Mail and Guardian that: “Between 1984 and 2005, more than 11,100 miners died underground in South Africa. While the overall number of deaths has been on a generally declining trend over the past two decades, the number of miners killed below ground has exceeded 200 each year since 2000.”

“If this is not a crime, then what is?”, Baleni asked.

Now it is a double crime. Money given in compensation for the awful slaughter on the mines has been stolen by crooks. The assets will have to be sold. Read the story in the two linked articles below.

SA Deputy Foreign Minister Aziz Pahad has availed himself of the letters columns of the Business Day to hit back at Karima Brown’s article of 30th January. He does a good job of defending his department but he does not say anything about the other source of foreign policy action in South Africa, which is the President’s office.

Click on these links:

Millions missing at Fidentia, Rob Rose, Business Day (497 words)

Buying spree masked Fidentia woes, Rob Rose, Business Day (720 words)

SA is no US proxy, Aziz Pahad, letter,Business Day (381 words)

None So Blind

The idea of sending flyers through the e-mail and printing them locally at the point of distribution is a good one. It becomes theoretically possible, without heavy expense and waste, to cover a town or a whole country in a matter of minutes. See the first item, which is a flyer for next Wednesday’s Communist University. The link will take you to a file download icon.

Further to the CU response to Christelle Terreblanche’s report in last Sunday’s Independent, in which we pointed out the absurdity of what ZicoTamela told her (and which he has not denied). COSATU has now dealt comprehensively with the main allegation if the report, which is that COSATU was “invisible” at the World Social Forum in Nairobi last week. There are none so blind as those who will not see. Check the linked item below.

It now appears that COSATU may well have had more representatives in Nairobi than the all the other South African social movements put together. Not only that, but COSATU’s historical and organisational involvement is far more substantial than that of any other SA social movement. All of these things are clear but they will not stop people repeating the same old lies in future, because the counterposition of the Trade Union movement against other popular forces in society is what they want to project. But newspapers should not be printing people’s wishful thoughts or taking the snide remarks of disappointed individuals at face value.

In the coverage of Somalia, the facts are not favourable to the Imperialists, and text sources have reflected this to a considerable extent. But the power of the US press-relations machine is so relentless, and the attraction of their message so seductive to those who would prefer to believe them, that these articles are almost invariably disfigured by paragraphs of unsubstantiated “boilerplate” about Al Qaeda and so forth.

In the case of the attached item, even the headline is affected. In what sense is the imposed gang tenuously placed in Mogadishu a “government”? This is a travesty of the truth. Yet in the article it is reported that this gang, which supposedly came from a “stronghold” in the town of Baidoa, has now had to impose a curfew in its very own stronghold. "Somalia is not a place where you will earn a salary - it is a place where you will die," said one man, addressing himself to the African Union. "The salary you are seeking will be used to transport your bodies."

"We will not be intimidated," said the US Deputy Secretary of State “for Africa”, Jendayi Fraser. Until a few months ago Fraser was the US Ambassador in leafy Pretoria, where she seems to have done a good job of annoying a lot of people. Her chances of making a name as “Fraser of Somalia” are exactly zero. It is a measure of the nature of the thing that in spite of all the spin-doctoring, boilerplate propaganda, and bluster from the representative of the supposed “superpower”, it is the gunman whose words are more believable, by far. History backs him up.

Frank Furedi is a philosopher living in England who has spent time working out why liberals think the way they do. His essay on “Denial” from Spiked is good but too long. He could have said as much in a page. Here it is, anyway, linked below.

One can usually be quite sure that whatever cause is being displayed in the most agonising way in the general bourgeois media is certainly not the one where the crisis of capitalism and Imperialism is manifesting itself in most critically. In Nepal there has been a real National Democratic Revolution, similar to ours in many ways, good and bad. Right now they are in a stage corresponding to our CODESA, and the Imperialists are contriving a replay “IFP”-type scenario where atrocious murders are arranged in a bid to promote “ethnic strife” or “black-on-black” violence and so to obscure the class nature of the revolution. The article linked below reports the press conference of the Communist (which the journalist changes to “Maoist guerrilla”) leader Prachanda.

Click on these links:

CU Flyer for 7 February 2007 (Notice)

COSATU and the WSF (1094 words)

Somalia government starts implementing martial law, Sapa (524 words)

Denial, Frank Furedi, Spiked, (4413 words)

Indian fundamentalists abetting Nepal riots, Prachanda, RxPG (304 words)

Last Stage Of Imperialism

The Communist University stands corrected. Concerning what was written about the book Executive Pay in South Africa - Who Gets What and Why, by Ann Crotty and Renée Bonorchis, Ms Bonorchis writes:

‘I need to point out that Ann and I at no point in the book ever just 'put it down to greed'. The statement you have made is, I am afraid, a complete fabrication of what the book says and is trying to say. We looked at the lack of independent directors, the lack of clear disclosure, the lack of shareholder activism, the growth of cronyism, the lack of transformation and much much more in order to try and explain growing levels of wealth in the top echelons of the corporate world.’

In view of this challenge we had better not say a lot more about this until the book has been read more thoroughly. Meanwhile, there is a review of it here. The book does seem to be a success for the two authors, both of whom are excellent journalists writing for the Business Report and the Business Day respectively.

An article of Ann Crotty’s from yesterday’s Business Report is linked below. It is about “private equity”. What is that? The term refers to private companies as opposed to those whose shares are traded publicly in a Stock Exchange. Is this new? Not really. It is an old bourgeois tactic, one among many. It is enjoying a season of popularity, especially among capitalists with “serious money” to play with.

There is only a short distance between the fat world of the bourgeois deal-makers and that of the “Africa Command” and the Secretary of State “for Africa”, mentioned yesterday. Big-money capitalism is the ground from which Imperialism grows. In that connection, Jean Bricmont wrote the following in Counterpunch (see the full article below):

‘Westerners do not always appreciate the fact that the major event of the 20th century was neither the rise and fall of fascism, nor the history of communism, but decolonization.’

Bricmont’s new book, Humanitarian Imperialism, Using Human Rights to Sell War, will be published by Monthly Review Press in February 2007. Such a book could be a very good antidote to the Desmond Tutus of this world. He concludes his article by condemning:

‘…the ideological misrepresentations that have spread widely throughout the left during the period of imperial ideological reconstruction that followed the end of the Vietnam war, specially concerning the "right" to "humanitarian intervention."’

Peter Vale, in a splendidly brief letter to the Business Day, writes in similar spirit against South Africa’s perennial pundit of Imperialism (these days directly funded by the Oppenheimer interest through the Brenthurst Foundation) Greg Mills. The latter’s article “reads like a poorly written guide to installing a cupboard”, writes Vale. See the text of his letter, linked below.

The Communist University had a great kick-off yesterday evening, with SACP National Organiser Cde Solly Mapaila opening the first discussion of the year. Next week’s session will be on Wednesday, February 7th, when we will discuss the SACP Constitution (linked below). YCL National Organiser George Raphela will open. The outstanding feature of this constitution, different from other Communist Parties that we know of, is Rule 6.4. This is the rule that underpins the successful relationship between the Party and the mass movements in South Africa. In other words it is the blueprint for the relationship of unity in action that liberated this country in the past, and can continue to do so in the future.

Click on these links:

Private equity moves offstage, Ann Crotty, Business Report (954 words)

The Decisive Clash of Our Time, Jean Bricmont, Counterpunch (1726 words)

Time to say sorry, Peter Vale, Letters, Business Day (96 words)

2005, SACP, Constitution (5637 words)