Lenin to Women

[CU for Tuesday 18 August 2009]

Comrades, we are now in to the “No Woman, No Revolution” series and out of the “Basic Communism” series.

The following words were written by Lenin for the second anniversary of the Great October Revolution.

On the second anniversary of the Soviet power:

“Equality between what sex and what other sex?

“Between what nation and what other nation?

“Between what class and what other class?

“Freedom from what yoke, or from the yoke of what class? Freedom for what class?”

Down with the liars who are talking of freedom and equality for all, while there is an oppressed sex, while there are oppressor classes, while there is private ownership of capital, of shares, while there are the well-fed with their surplus of bread who keep the hungry in bondage. Not freedom for all, not equality for all, but a fight against the oppressors and exploiters, the abolition of every possibility of oppression and exploitation-that is our slogan!

Freedom and equality for the oppressed sex!

Freedom and equality for the workers, for the toiling peasants!

A fight against the oppressors, a fight against the capitalists, a fight against the profiteering kulaks!

That is our fighting slogan, that is our proletarian truth, the truth of the struggle against capital, the truth which we flung in the face of the world of capital with its honeyed, hypocritical, pompous phrases about freedom and equality in general, about freedom and equality for all.

Lenin, Soviet Power and the Status of Women, November 1919

In the document linked below you will also find that in September of that year (1919) there was already a “Fourth Moscow City Conference Of Non-Party Working Women”, addressed by Lenin (and Trotsky).

Without the women “it is impossible even to build democracy, let alone socialism” wrote Lenin in 1917, between the two revolutions of that year, and before he had returned to Russia. This statement is the same as to say: No Woman, No Revolution. It also prefigures our National Democratic Revolution in general, with its clear implication that democracy is a prerequisite of socialism.

Here is more along these lines from Lenin:

The proletariat cannot achieve complete freedom, unless it achieves complete freedom for women.

Lenin, To the Working Women, February 1920

If we do not draw women into public activity, into the militia, into political life; if we do not tear women away from the deadening atmosphere of household and kitchen; then it is impossible to secure real freedom, it is impossible even to build democracy, let alone socialism.

Lenin, Letter from Afar, Zurich, March 1917

Click on this link:

Lenin on Women, 1919 – 1920 (4097 words)

Picture:

“On Monday the 10th August 2009, Lusaka Branch of the SACP held a Lekgotla a normal gathering of the branch that is convened after the AGM. The Lekgotla takes a form of induction to the general members of the branch and develops a program for the year. The lekgotla ends with a walk by all members and a door to door for 30 minutes in the community, asking community members about their priority needs. Luckily I managed to capture the walk for history, using the advantage that technology comes with. Viva the South African Communist Party Viva!!!”

Diteko Moreotsenye

No Woman, No Revolution

[CU for Monday 17 August 2009]

Feminism, particularly in the field of politics itself, has often proved to work to the advantage of the bourgeoisie. Examples would be the elevation of Helen Zille, Margaret Thatcher, Condoleezza Rice, Madeleine Albright and Hilary Clinton to leadership.

What happens in those cases is that agitation leads to a correct requirement that more women be promoted to leadership. But then, at the critical moment, no female candidate appears, except the well-prepared female candidate of the reactionaries. The result is a catastrophe for all, and especially for the women

In the Umsebenzi Online of 6 August 2009 the SACP General Secretary, Dr Blade Nzimande, wrote that the majority of the membership of the Young Communist League at present is young black women.

This remarkable achievement ranks alongside of the achievement of the 52^nd National Conference of the African National Congress which elected a National Executive Committee that consists of 50% women and 50% men.

This indicates that there is now an established stream of women cadres at an equivalent scale to men, and that their placement in leadership is happening. These achievements are the result of consistent work and determination over many years. They cannot be regarded as extra, or simply “nice-to-have”. They are necessary building blocks of Socialism.

The proletarian revolution is inconceivable without the involvement of the more than 50% of the population which is female. That is the general situation.

But the particular situation is that the working-class movement and its allies must be able to find winning female candidates at all levels and must never again be put in the position of seeing a reactionary being elected because she is a woman, only because there is no working-class woman candidate.

Alexandra Kollontai [pictured] understood all this very well. In 1908 she wrote: “The feminists seek equality in the framework of the existing class society, in no way do they attack the basis of this society.” (the full document is linked below). “Where, then, is that general “woman question”? Where is that unity of tasks and aspirations about which the feminists have so much to say? A sober glance at reality shows that such unity does not and cannot exist,” wrote Kollontai.

This text will be followed in coming days by others relating to women, under the general series title of “No Woman, No revolution”.

Click on this link:

Social Basis of the Woman Question, abstract, Kollontai, 1909 (6619 words)

No end of basics

[CU for Friday, 14 August 2009]

This is the last of the series called “Basic Communism”. It is an arbitrary finish. In fact the quest for “basics” is a false quest. All communists need political education, all the time. There is no point of final arrival, and there are no definable intermediate resting-points.

There is one common thing that characterises all political education, and that is dialogue. Political education is social, or it is nothing. Politics is always a dialogue between people of varying degrees of prior understanding. This is why the Freirean method, where the educational process is understood as residing in the dialogue, is so ideal for politics in general and for the Communist University in particular.

In political education, we are not seeking a tested, examined or qualified performance of the individual. We are seeking to create a widening social dialogue. Education and politics have no dividing line between them. Fidel Castro once said that Cuba has become one vast university. This is how it should be.

Even so, the desire expressed last month by the comrade who wrote in, for “basics”, or in other words for a checklist of a minimum number of topics to be equipped with, represents a serious subjective desire and we have responded to it. We have brought the matter to the point where it can itself be examined.

Will the comrade now feel satisfied, or at least comforted? What else could have been included?

One would be the communist theory of National Democratic Revolution, and the related lesson of class alliance. We are accustomed to hearing the working class referred to as a majority. But the working class is not in a position to do without allies. If all other class forces are lined up against it, the working class will never reach its goals. Hence the working class must be allied with some, but not all, of the other class forces in society at any time. The effective alliance is one of classes, and not of organisations. The tripartite alliance of the ANC, COSATU and the SACP only has meaning to the extent that it represents a real unity-in-action of class and class.

A last one would be the question of the time for armed struggle. In its exile, our liberation movement had contact with many experienced revolutionaries. One of them was Bill Pomeroy, the exiled US/Philippines revolutionary who lived for many decades in London, until his death this year. Pomeroy’s theoretical contribution, based on his own role in armed struggles in the Philippines, was of great assistance to the ANC, to the SACP and to Umkhonto we Sizwe. Pomeroy emphasises that the link between the political and the military must never be broken; and that the superior of the two is the political.

Click on this link:

On the Time for Armed Struggle, William Pomeroy, 1974 (6800 words)

African Socialism Revisited?

[CU for Thursday, 13 August 2009]

“Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”

Communist Manifesto, 1848

The battles of the past years have been fought, Jacob Zuma is President, and everyone is asking the question: So where to?

From the time of Eduard Bernstein and his 1899 book “Evolutionary Socialism”, and Rosa Luxemburg’s 1900 response to Bernstein, “Reform or Revolution”, the same question has been put, in one way or another.

In 1914, in each country, the reformists supported the warmongers. Lenin led the revolutionaries at that point, then led the revolutionaries of Russia in 1917, and then was the de facto leader of the Communist International from 1919 until his death in 1924.

The reformists expropriated the old struggle name of “Social Democrat” and called themselves “Socialists”. Many West European countries elected such anti-communist “Socialists” to run their bourgeois states in the service of “their” bourgeois ruling classes for varying lengths of time.

In the history of the struggle for liberation from colonialism in Africa, the question “Reform or Revolution” was again put. To sound better and to deceive the people more easily, false “Socialism” was dressed up again, but now as “African Socialism”, and was widely used as a smokescreen for neo-colonialism from the dawn of African Independence in the 1950s and 1960s.

Dr Kwame Nkrumah spoke out firmly against this false so-called African Socialism more than forty years ago. See the linked article below. Although Kwame Nkrumah and his adversary Leopold Senghor are both long gone, yet Nkrumah’s words appear to carry as much relevant meaning as they did when they were spoken in Cairo in 1967.

It remains for us now to carry the struggle forward. What kind of “socialism” will we have in South Africa? Will we have reform, or will we have revolution, or will we have both?

Click on this link:

African Socialism Revisited, Kwame Nkrumah, 1967 (2587 words)

Democracy is ours

[CU for Wednesday, 12 August 2009]

We are still working through the CU’s Basic Communism series. We have dealt with workplace matters, with class politics, and with the crucial question of The State.

Exactly what is “Basic Communism”, and how far it extends, could be a matter of discussion. Part of any “basic” exercise is surely to keep things brief and simple. It does seem essential, however, to touch upon the single biggest historic task of the Communists in the period since the founding of the Communist International (a.k.a. Third International) in 1919: National Liberation.

In 1920 the Comintern organised a Congress of the Peoples of the East. It was the first international anti-colonial congress. The Comintern recognised Communist Parties in many countries (including South Africa’s, the CPSA, in 1921). In 1928 the Comintern and the CPSA adopted the “Black Republic” policy for South Africa, making the CPSA the first South African party (it was also the first South African non-racial party) to call for black majority rule in South Africa.

This is some of our part in the story. But the worldwide story of the past century, under the impetus of the Communists more than any other single political component, has been a story of political independence of the former colonies worldwide. The masses of the world have risen time and again in National Democratic Revolutions, with the invariable support of the Communists. Our internationalist duties still continue. Any “Basic Communism” series must mention this.

Since the victories in so many (150, or more) countries, constituting the vast majority of the population of the globe, that set them free of direct colonial rule, the Imperialist powers have sought to re-impose themselves by other means. Some of those means are false claims and plain, blatant, shameless lies. Some of these lies came from the mouth of US President Barack Obama very recently when he spoke in Ghana to the effect that Africa’s problems are self-induced. This is an old story, which we can say is just an attempt to blame the victims of Imperialist aggression, while the Imperialist perpetrators get to stand in the positions of judges and advisors, and even “donors”, as if they are not thieves, in fact.

As an example of one who has made the anti-Imperialist case very well in this regard, we use the Tanzanian professor Issa Shivji [pictured], to remind us that it is we who are the humanists now, and it is the Imperialists who are the barbarians, a message also reinforced by Kenan Malik’s short linked piece.

Click on these links:

The Struggle for Democracy & Culture, Issa Shivji, 2003 (5035 words)

All Cultures Are Not Equal, Kenan Malik, 2002 (1838 words)

Capital, Volume 1

The Communist University has completed the second iteration of our 24-part series on Karl Marx’s “Capital, Volume 1”. The text has been re-organised.

In part, this has been done, by request, so as to assist the CCS comrades who will be running a course on Marx’s “Capital” beginning this month in Durban, based on the videos of David Harvey’s lectures.

The CU series, now under the name “Capital by a Freirean Method”, is fully elaborated and published on one of the CU Google web sites (CU with attachments).

Having passed this stage of development, it now becomes possible to publish “Capital by a Freirean Method” on other web sites, or to publish it as a set of printed booklets, or to compile a single PDF of the entire thing, or to publish it all as a single hard-copy book. All of these options are under consideration.

The single page linked below shows the layout of the entire set as one array, or console, and this is in turn available as a one-page (landscape) MS-Word document, with live links, which can also be printed, of course.

Capital, Volume 1 is the “Holy Grail” of political education. It is a much bigger undertaking than any other single one. Yet without it, political education is incomplete. The rewards of studying Capital Volume 1 are clear and indisputable. Without it a cadre is politically naked. It has to be done.

The Freirean method does help.

This re-write of the CU’s earlier version (it was called the “Ghost course”) includes a new Introduction that explains how the inherent difficulties of this project have been dealt with, for better or for worse.

There will be further iterations. Changes will continue to be made. It is already clear that Chapter 25 must be properly represented, for example. All of the “openings” will remain under review.

Suggestions and comments for this project on Capital will therefore be more than welcome, comrades. Please send to dominic.tweedie@gmail.com or use the Comments facility on the blog at http://domza.blogspot.com/.

Click on this link:

Capital by a Freirean Method (single-page linked console)

State and Revolution

[CU for Tuesday, 11 August 2009]

Announcement

Communist University has created two news lists that are open to anyone to join. CU News is for cultural and political items having to do with South Africa. CU World is for internationalist news. Join these lists at the linked group web sites, or use the easy “promo-boxes” at the top of the right-hand panel of the CU blog.

These two new distribution lists will be used to send announcements and stories that would not otherwise get notified to the media or to the movement. If you have such material, do please send it by e-mail to dominic.tweedie@gmail.com.

State and Revolution – Chapters 2 and 3

We continue up to the end of this week with our series on “Basic Communism”, with extra attention to The State. Today’s is from Lenin’s State and Revolution (see the link below). Lenin was writing this book up until the moment of the Great October Revolution in Russia in 1917 and did not complete it for that reason, as he relates in his “Postscript” (included).

Chapters 2 and 3 refer to that part of Karl Marx’s legacy that runs in parallel with Marx’s lifetime work on Capital, complements that work, and makes a bridge between the close analysis of existing society, and the strategy and tactics necessary to break away from the current system.

These are primarily the three great works on France: Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850; The 18^th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852); and The Civil War in France (1871); and Lenin also mentions Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy (a polemic against the French anarchist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon) and The Communist Manifesto (published for the revolution that broke out in Paris in February 1848) which Lenin calls, at the beginning of Chapter 2 of State and Revolution “The first works of mature Marxism”.

This second great body of Marx’s work (next to Capital) is preoccupied with “political economy” in the sense of the ever-changing arrangement of class forces within society, using France as his “text-book case”. The unity-and-struggle-of-opposites that constitutes the disposition of class forces in a class-divided society at any time is kept under the dominance of the ruling class by one crucial instrument: The State.

In the furious revolutionary months after the February 1917 Revolution, after April, and after July, it was to Marx’s works on France that Lenin returned for guidance. The CU will follow Lenin’s example in the not-too-distant future.

Click here to find the full text of Lenin’s State and Revolution at Marxists Internet Archive

Click on this link:

State and Revolution, Chapters 2 and 3, Lenin, 1917 (11279 words)

Barbarism and Civilization

[CU for Friday, 7 August 2009]

We have been running a series based on the Communist University’s long-standing Basic Communism Internet set. Yesterday we featured Lenin’s lecture on The State; and the State is a particularly relevant and necessary point of study for the conjuncture in which South Africa finds itself.

For that reason, we are going to extend the series with two more items on the State. The first is today’s excerpt, Chapter 9 from Frederick Engels’ “Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” (see the link below for today’s extract).

Please read on through and skip things you don’t understand. It is not necessary for you to understand everything about gens, gentes, gentiles and phratrys. The chosen chapter is a great read, with or without this knowledge. A few more general remarks may help:

Engels wrote this book soon after Karl Marx’s death, after reading notes that Marx had left about a book by Henry Morgan [pictured], called “Ancient Society”. Independently of Marx and Engels, Morgan had shown by studies of living cultures as well the written record, that all ancient human society had gone through similar stages of development, and that this could be seen in contemporary societies that were still living in the old way (as some still are living in Africa, even up to today).

Engels’ Chapter 9 is a sweeping summary, not only of Morgan’s theories, combined with “Marx's Capital”, but of the entire historic period from “barbarism” (i.e. before writing) up until the age of capitalism.

Not only does this show with great clarity exactly what the State is and how it came into being, but it also shows how the fall of the women happened at the same time as the idea of property became a reality. This book of Engels’ is as ruthlessly feminist, or more so, than any 20^th- or 21st-Century work of feminism.

State, property, and the condition of women in society are all illuminated by Engels' thrilling narrative, because all are connected and all are part of the same whole.

In the next excerpt we will see how the theory of the State connects to the reality of class, and to the study of class relations in society, known as Political Economy.

The concept of the State is like a keystone that binds many parts of political theory together. Without a strong grasp of the theory of the State, it is very easy to go wrong.

Click on this link:

Origin of Family, Private Property and State, Chapter 9, Engels, 1884 (8306 words)

The State

[CU for Thursday, 6 August 2009]

In “Bourgeois and Proletarians”, the first section of the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx wrote: “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” In other words: The State is the executive committee of the ruling class.

The State makes its material appearance in many guises. Not only is it Legislature, Executive and Judiciary, but it is also the “Special Bodies of Armed Men” (police and military), the “sovereign document” of the Constitution, the State Owned Enterprises, and “Delivery” departments like Education, Health, Public Works; and others.

As communists we hold fast to the concept of the State as the instrument of class power that enforces and perpetuates bourgeois class dictatorship in our country. We do not believe that the State is neutral, or above class struggle. The State is the principal instrument of class struggle on behalf of the ruling bourgeois class.

We intend that there should as soon as possible be no class division and therefore that the State as we know it would become redundant and give way to social self-management, or in other words communism.

Yet the term “State” is used in other, less strict senses, and we as political people who must communicate with others, do also use the word in other senses than the above. For example, we sometimes use the phrase “Developmental State”, which even if we ourselves would qualify its meaning, is nevertheless widely understood as meaning a State that is equally beneficial to all classes (i.e. is a “win-win” or classless or neutral state).

We are fortunate to have the lecture that Lenin [pictured] gave to students in Moscow in 1919 on this topic, wherein Lenin asks “what is the state, how did it arise and fundamentally what attitude to the state should be displayed by the party of the working class, which is fighting for the complete overthrow of capitalism - the Communist Party?”

We will follow Lenin’s advice and extend this Basic Communism series slightly by proceeding from this lecture to part of Engels’ “Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State”; and then to extracts from Lenin’s own “State and Revolution”.

Read and comment on the CU blog at http://domza.blogspot.com/.

Click on this link:

The State, Lenin, 1919 (7203 words)

The SACP Constitution

[CU for Wednesday, 5 August 2009]

We are still working through our “Basic Communism” course here on the Communist University. The SACP’s Constitution naturally has to be part of the “basics”.

One way of understanding the structure our Constitution is to deal with it backwards. In an MS-Word version, the SACP Constitution is about 12 pages long. The last (short) item, Section 25, is about rules for amending the Constitution. The next last, Section 24, is less than two pages long, and is about the disciplinary processes in the SACP.

Then (still working backwards) there is a series of sections which take up about half of the entire document. They describe each level of structure, from Units, and the basic structure of the Party, the Branch, all the way up to the highest body of the Party, which is the National Congress. All of these sections are simple, descriptive, and easy.

That takes us all the way back to Section 7, a short one of only two clauses, dealing with relations between the SACP and the Young Communist League.

Section 6, called Basic Organisational Principles, is one of the most important. The first clause describes democratic centralism, without calling it by that name, as follows:

“All decisions taken by higher structures are binding on all lower structures and individual members. Members shall have the right to pursue their views internally in the lead up to conferences or congresses with powers under this constitution to determine or reverse SACP policies. No groupings with their own discipline shall be permitted.”

Also in Section 6 is the jewel of the SACP constitution, Rule 6.4, which says:

“Members active in fraternal organisations or in any sector of the mass movement have a duty to set an example of loyalty, hard work and zeal in the performance of their duties and shall be bound by the discipline and decisions of such organisations and movement. They shall not create or participate in SACP caucuses within such organisations and movements designed to influence either elections or policies. The advocacy of SACP policy on any question relating to the internal affairs of any such organisations or movements shall be by open public statements or at joint meetings between representatives of the SACP and such organisations or movements.”

Section 5 is on Membership, including who can be a member, and the duties of SACP members (5.9). Section 4 is on Guiding Principles and includes the basis of the Communist University, to “organise, educate and lead the working class” (4.2).

Section 3 gives the Aims of the SACP, while Sections 2 and 1 deal with the name and the symbols.

Click on this link:

The Constitution of the South African Communist Party, 2007 (6603 words)

Value, Price & Profit

[CU for Tuesday, 4 August 2009]

By 1865 Karl Marx (pictured) had solved the theoretical problems of his work, “Capital”, on Surplus Value, and in that year he gave the well-known address to a gathering of workers that afterwards became a popular publication under the name “Value, Price and Profit”, also sometimes called “Wages, Price and Profit”. The first volume of “Capital” was published two years later.

This short book has served the labour movement well, down the years. Among other things, it debunks the argument, still attempted by employers and their apologists in South Africa today, that wage rises will cause unemployment.

It shows how commodities, including commodity Labour-Power, are normally sold at their full value, yet how, at the same time, the worker is getting swindled every day. It explains this apparent paradox.

It encourages workers to struggle for better wages and conditions, but it also (prefiguring Lenin’s argument against “Economism” forty years later in “What is to be Done?”) shows clearly why trade unionism, without political organisation, will never succeed in throwing off the yoke of capital.

The abridged version of “Value, Price and Profit”, linked below, can serve as the short, or “basic”, version of “Capital” that so many people long for. It will help us to get a better grip on some of the key concepts in “Capital, Volume 1” such as Labour, Value, Labour-Power, and above all, Surplus-Value.

For this purpose we have put aside many of the sections of “Value, Price and Profit”. The work is available (here, and here) on the Internet for anyone who would like to read it in full. The best source for Marxist classics in general on the Internet is the Marxists Internet Archive (MIA).

One way to read all of these Communist University posts is to go to the CU blog at http://domza.blogspot.com/. You can also leave comments there.

Click on this link:

Value, Price and Profit, Karl Marx, 1865 (Abridged: 6563 words)