The struggle is one

Nqobizitha Mlilo is well known to the Communist University regulars. He is nowadays sending out a stream of high-quality media releases on behalf of MDC-Zimbabwe via a Google group. The content is of great value. It documents what is going on in our neighbouring country to the North. In the case of the first document linked below, Cde Mlilo chronicles the crimes committed by Zanu-PF, naming both victims and perpetrators. This is an invaluable step towards justice.

The liberal media in South Africa have been slow to get behind the MDC, but this is changing, no doubt partly because of better public relations by the MDC, but mainly because there is by this time nobody, anywhere, who doubts that Morgan Tsvangirai won the Zimbabwe Presidency on 29 March 2008, or that his party was victorious in the harmonised general elections in that country. Thabo Mbeki, Sydney Mufamadi, and Robert Mugabe still have the cheek to deny it, denialists as they are, but they are isolated.

See Wilson Johwa’s article, linked below, from Saturday’s Weekender to sense the new mood of respect in the way that the bourgeois press are handling the MDC story.

When the people of a country are determined, and organised, they will prevail. This is shown once again, in Nepal this time, by the electoral victory of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), or CPN(M), led by Chairman Prachanda (pictured above) with the support of intellectual Dr Baburam Bhattarai (also pictured, below, at Prachanda’s side).

The short report from the Times of India linked below gives the salient facts. More reports can be found here, while the CPN(M)’s web site, English-language section, can be found here. This is a straightforward story of revolution, glorious, victorious revolution! It can help us all to regain courage, especially the poor downtrodden Swazi people, who also face a grotesque and oppressive monarchy.

Also linked below is a very fine revolutionary poster, made in 2006 to mark the 10th Anniversary of the beginning of the People’s War of liberation in Nepal.

There is no human process that is without a potential for humour. Thanks to the Sunday Independent’s Karen Bliksem, the absurd side of President Thabo Mbeki’s denialism can, for a short time at least, be appreciated as comedy. Open the fifth link below, and have a good laugh.

The matter in our previous post about the artificial shortages and outrageous price rises on food and fuel in South Africa can be understood in class and in anti-Imperialist terms even by bourgeois columnists. See Khathu Mamaila’s article in the otherwise often treacherous City Press (sixth item below). We can indeed feed ourselves, and also fuel ourselves, and without paying tribute to the Imperialists. Why have we become victims of the whims of Washington and Wall Street? We know why, and so does the City Press. So why has the City Press not been consistent? Why is this paper still, in other articles, pushing the “external factors” myth? It is because it is a bourgeois newspaper, and therefore internally conflicted.

A lot of work has gone into our “Coming Events” feature, to make it work properly again. It appears to be stable once more, and ready for more events to be added. Please send in your information.

Click on these links:

Zim post-electoral violence, MDC roll of honour, Zanu-PF dishonour (2736 words)

Poll winner leader in waiting, Wilson Johwa, Weekender (1073 words)

Chairman Prachanda to be Nepal PM, Times of India (273 words)

Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), 10 Years of Peoples' War (Poster)

No worries, Dear Leader, Karen Bliksem, Sunday Independent (923 words)

We can feed ourselves, Khathu Mamaila, City Press (657 words)

Coming Events

There are no external factors

The Communist University will meet tomorrow, Monday 21 April 2008, at 17h00 in the SACP Boardroom, COSATU House, 1 Leyds Street, Braamfontein. The topic under discussion is the Red Alert of SACP GS Dr Blade Nzimande (pictured) published in Umsebenzi Online of 2 April 2008 and called “Honour the memory of Chris Hani: Defend the living standards of the workers and the poor”, previously distributed by the CU on 8 April 2008 and before that via the Umsebenzi Online list. This text laid down priorities for action, all of which have since then proved to be both correct and effective.

This was proved by Thursday’s dramatic march of thousands of workers in Johannesburg, vividly captured in The Star (see the first link below). Blade Nzimande said, to laughter and applause: "We wish, as the SACP, that this 53% (electricity tariff) increase was a salary increase. We've always found it hard to get past 10% in increases." Read it. It’s a good report.

It can by no means be taken for granted, as at least one person prominent in the labour movement has suggested, that organised labour will succeed in recapturing what it has lost through inflation. There is more on this argument below.

The Johannesburg march was preceded by a COSATU Provincial Shop Stewards Council, reported in the Business Day (second link below). At this meeting COSATU Acting President Sdumo Dlamini said words to the effect that present lame-duck interregnum government is busy trying to sabotage the post-2009 Jacob Zuma presidency by planting booby-traps. It’s about time somebody said that out loud. Thanks to Cde Sdumo for that.

The CU opposes the assertion, sometimes heard from within the ranks of the broad labour movement, that the problem of food being taken out of the now (spuriously) globalised market for conversion into “bio-fuel”, and the consequent multiple rise in the price of all grains, and maize in particular, can be called “long term”. As Jonathan Swift pointed out in 1728: “there is no dallying with hunger”. In the long term, hungry people are apt to be dead. This is an acute problem, and not a “long term” one.

Nor did not this problem arise long ago. It arose in its present acute form only last year. It was more than adequately publicised then, and without any delay, by none other than Cde Fidel Castro of Cuba. Click here for his Granma piece on the subject, published on 1 May, Workers’ Day, 2007. No way should this ever be labelled a “long term” problem, as if South African communists and trade unionists can afford to put off dealing with it even longer. People will die if we do that.

One person, at least, has made the proper connections. She is Rehana Rossouw, writing in Saturday’s Weekender (see the third link). The headline is good: “First world fuel trumps third world meal”; but please read it all. The problem is not the “globalisation” of high maize prices and high fuel prices. In a country that produces large amounts of both these commodities, the problem is only our bourgeois state’s agreement to such globalisation. The principal traitors who sold us into this situation are still in power. They are the three TMs: Thabo Mbeki, Trevor Manuel, and Tito Mboweni.

This week the proposal for an ANC newspaper was given an airing (see the fourth link below). The parallel proposal, for a trade union newspaper, is also floating around. These fantasies arise from a wrong conception of the problem of communicating with the masses. The question that is put by history is: How can we better communicate with the workers and the poor, and hear from them? The best answer to that question is still, and always will be: By organising! Organised structures are the revolutionaries' main means of mass communication.

The question is not: “Why can’t we have a bourgeois newspaper like the ones the bourgeoisie have got?” This is childishness. Such folly could not only lead to huge losses of money, as the FXI comrades have said, but also to diversion of effort and a set-back of (potentially) years in organisation.

The last in our revision series, to get us up to speed for the “contact sessions” on Capital Volume 1 that we have scheduled, is very appropriately Karl Marx’s “Value Price and Profit”, also sometimes called “Wages, Price and Profit”. See the fifth link below for an abridged version. Click here for the unabridged text.

We have dealt with three fallacies in this post. One is that the organised workers can automatically catch up with inflation. Marx explodes this fallacy in “Value Price and Profit” and shows that this is the very reason why unions are not adequate to the task of emancipating workers, who have therefore to build a superior, political, revolutionary organisation: the Party. Another fallacy is that the food price rise is “long term” (or alternately “due to external factors”). No! The food price rise is a direct and immediate act of class war that requires an immediate and drastic response from the working class, directed at the bourgeois forces in this country.

The third fallacy we have dealt with is that the working class needs a bourgeois-style newspaper, in its centuries-old form. The Communist University itself is the answer to that fallacy. It is a tactical, organising response that is designed in the circumstances of the working class today, using the technology of the day. People forget sometimes that the working class is the most advanced class, technologically as much as politically. It has to be, and the capitalists make it so, while they themselves indulge in and promote old-fashioned things, for their own obvious propaganda reasons. Revolutionary communications do not and cannot resemble those of the bourgeoisie.

Click on these links:

Thousands march against rising prices, Bonile Ngqiyaza, The Star (511 words)

Price crisis a ploy to hurt Zuma, Sibongakonke Shoba, Business Day (514 words)

First world fuel trumps third world meal, Rehana Rossouw, Weekender (489 words)

Commercial paper could ruin the ANC, Edward West, Business Day (561 words)

Value, Price & Profit, Karl Marx, 1865, abridged (6563 words)

Coming Events

Hurly-Burly

The struggle for electricity, as Lenin realised, is a class struggle. In simple terms, less electricity means less development, and a lower standard of living. The 10% reduction in electricity consumption that Eskom is demanding, and trying to enforce, is the same as a 10% de-development or underdevelopment of the country. It is as bad as, or worse than, losing a war. It is, in fact, a class war.

The top picture (like yesterday’s) is by Pavel Filonov, 1883-1941: GOELRO (Lenin's Plan for the Electrification of Russia) 1931. Note the grumpy defeated bourgeoisie in the left-hand panel of the painting. The other picture is of a Soviet worker, with an insulator.

The Eskom onslaught is going to degrade the country by much more than the mere raising of prices plus the loss of productivity and earnings because of load shedding. All kinds of systems are malfunctioning.

By no means all of our bourgeois are ready for this class war. It has been launched unilaterally by a few people. We could speculate about their precise identities. Others among the bourgeoisie regard the Eskom putsch as reckless to the point of insanity. They are unable to see any creative side to Eskom’s destructiveness, which one of their journalists, Tim Cohen, frankly calls an “impending disaster”. (But why “impending”? The disaster is already here. True, it has only just begun. True, it will get worse and more obvious.)

This intra-bourgeois struggle can be seen from today’s collection of articles linked below (and also from the recent fall-out between Billiton and Standard Bank).

The first linked item is our topic for next Monday’s CU, namely Dr Blade Nzimande’s Red Alert on defending living standards of the workers and the poor, which is clearly very appropriate to the moment.

Second item is Tim Cohen, writing for “Dealweb”, an offshoot of “Moneyweb”. In this article he puts down the groundwork of his critique of Eskom that allows him so much freedom in his later article for the Weekender.

Third item is from the front page of the Sunday Independent, where Eleanor Momberg reviews various opinions, including those of the lively Jerry Vilakazi and the cadaverous Azar Jammine, surely the most dismal of dismal scientists.

On the back of all this the Sunday Independent whacks out a devastating editorial, all the more so for its light-headed exposure of the grotesque, farcical nature of Eskom’s posture (fourth linked item).

Tim Cohen’s Weekender piece comes next, stressing the fiendish pleasure of the scribes as they gather for a feeding-frenzy as the hurly-burly dénouement of this tragic farce approaches.

For contrast, another hurly-burly, the one in Zimbabwe, is well exposed by Moshoeshoe Monare in a fine, lean, stylish article, for our sixth item.

President Morgan Tsvangirai of the Zimbabwe Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) will hold a Press conference at the 702 Radio offices in Sandton, Johannesburg today, Monday 14 April 2008, at 14h30. Details: Nqobizitha Mlilo, 083 527 4650.

“Events Diary” is still not fixed. Opportunities for repair-work are few in revolutionary times.

Click on these links:

Defend living standards of workers and poor, Blade Nzimande (2361 words)

What Eskom will gain with a 60% price hike, Tim Cohen, Dealweb (965 words)

Shock and awe, forcing consumers to save power, E Momberg, Sunday Independent (870 words)

Oh shucks, it's Eishkom all set to shock us, Editorial, Sunday Independent (513 words)

Pencils are out as disaster looms, Tim Cohen, Weekender (686 words)

Velvet-glove inaction will have dire results, M Monare, Sunday Independent (672 words)

Events Diary

Communism = Soviet Power + Electrification

Today’s is a mixed Communist University post. The first item of business is a reminder that the CU meets tomorrow, Monday, at 17h00 in the SACP boardroom, 3rd floor, COSATU House, 1 Leyds Street, Braamfontein. We will not be meeting on Tuesdays from now on because of the Eskom “load-shedding” that has disrupted the entire country like a coup d’etat.

The load-shedding may indeed be part of an actual counter-revolutionary coup d’etat. Privatisation of state industries is a step backwards and is invariably a plundering rip-off, but let us not forget that state industries maintained under capitalism, whether in the plain or the corporatised variety, are designed to serve capitalism. Let us also not forget the revolutionary character of the struggle for electrification. In all cases, the way to constrain the bourgeoisie is education, organisation and mass action. Hence it is appropriate that we are to discuss Dr Blade Nzimande’s Red Alert article “Revolution and Counter-revolution in South Africa”, linked below, now being sent out for the third time.

Also linked today is the second last of our short revision series within the “ghost” course on Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume 1. This comprises Chapters 4, 5 and 6. Each of them is short and easy to read, but if, taken together, they should seem too much for you, then please read Chapter 6 first, because this is the point of arrival of all these three chapters. In Chapter 6 it is shown that it is the selling and buying of commodified labour-power, and the expropriation of all of the realised human labour by the capitalist, that is the mechanism of specifically capitalist accumulation. See the second linked item.

Now to a problem of the Communist University as Google Group. During the last three months (coinciding with the load-shedding onslaught) almost one third of the CU’s subscribers to our group have been designated by Google as “bouncing”. As such they remain members but are automatically stopped from receiving e-mails. Some of these subscribers have written in to complain that they have been deliberately cut off. This is not the case! All are welcome!

If your Communist University e-mails should cease for more than a week or two, without prior warning, please go the group site at http://groups.google.com/group/Communist-University . There you will find, in the right-hand panel, a link called “Edit my membership”. You may have to “Sign in” first (top right hand corner). Click on “Edit my membership” and follow instructions to restore your e-mail deliveries. If this process does not work for you, please e-mail dominic.tweedie@gmail.com and describe your problem, briefly.

The Google Groups are designed to be self-managed from the member’s side, including subscribing and unsubscribing. In “Edit my membership” you also have a number of helpful choices to “customise” the service you want. Please learn how to make use of them, comrades.

If you feel that the CU is not giving you enough topical news these days, it is because more effort is going into COSATU Today and COSATU Media Monitor.

You can subscribe to these at http://groups.google.com/group/COSATU-Daily-News . Our main and very lively debating group is the YCLSA Discussion Forum, at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum . Umsebenzi Online is at http://groups.google.com/group/umsebenzi-online .

To join even more groups please go to Plug-in City, either here, or here.

Another reason that the CU is carrying less material is that it, too, is being disrupted on its communication side by “load-sheds” and by other cuts. In the last week we have been hit by three load-sheds in two different places, plus two very long power cuts due to transformer failure. No doubt these failures were also a consequence of load-shedding, because the equipment is not designed to be yacked on and off on a regular basis. There was also a long water cut-off, plus an e-mail server failure due to corruption of software because of a load-shedding power surge. It’s time for the working class to take power, comrades, and in more ways than one.

Good news: communists (“Maoists”) have been elected to a “landslide” victory in Nepal!

Click on these links:

Revolution and Counter-revolution in South Africa, Blade Nzimande (1959 words)

Reprise 4, Capital V 1, C 4, 5 and 6, Capital and Labour Power, Marx, 1867 (12777 words)

Events Diary

New Day For Communist University

The Communist University has taken the decision to meet on Mondays from now on, so as to avoid the scheduled “load-shedding” in Braamfontein where we meet.

Therefore we will be meeting on Monday 14 April 2008 (and not Tuesday 15 as previously advertised).

As before, we will meet in the SACP boardroom, 3rd floor, COSATU House, 1 Leyds Street, Braamfontein, and the time is 17h00.

The schedule on the Communist University Google Group site has been revised so as to accord with the decision to meet on Mondays from now on.

The topic on Monday will be the recent Umsebenzi Online Red Alert by SACP GS Dr Blade Nzimande called Revolution and Counter-revolution in South Africa. Please use the link below. This text was also sent out in the last distribution.

In addition we carry ANC President Jacob Zuma’s speech to the Durban Chamber of Commerce yesterday. Those who have for whatever reason been complaining that they do not notice the substance of Cde JZ’s speeches are going to have to come to terms with the reality that the ANC President is a skilled, direct and meaningful speaker, whose special gift is to be able to say things in words that ordinary people can understand. This is quite a different thing from lack of substance. There is a great deal of substance in this speech, for example. Please see the second link, below.

See you on Monday at the Communist University! The picture is of Moscow State University.

Click on these links:

Revolution and Counter-revolution in South Africa, Blade Nzimande (1959 words)

Address to Durban Chamber of Commerce and Industry (1909 words)

Events Diary

Caucuses, No! Leadership, Yes!

The Communist University, as a study circle, has been hit hard by the power cuts. Twice we have been forced to abandon our class in the cold and the dark. As loath as we may be to have our programme dictated by the odious Eskom, in its new, menacing guise of “Big Brother”, yet we cannot afford to do without the live sessions for so long. They are the life-blood and the nourishment of the CU.

We have reason to believe that there will be no “load-shed” today. Consequently we plan to meet at 17h00 this afternoon in the SACP Boardroom, 3rd floor, COSATU House, 1 Leyds Street, Braamfontein. Part of our discussion will be around proposals for changing the day, to avoid load-shedding, to Monday. Come with your advice, comrades.

Since we have not lately been able to distribute hard copy texts, it would seem to be prudent to take the scheduled topic of Rule Six Point Four today, because it is only three sentences long, so it can easily be read out to the gathering in its entirety. It is linked below for those who need a URL; but here it also is in full:

“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.”

Rule 6.4 of the SACP constitution has for a long time defined the relationship between the Party and the ANC and between the Party and all other mass organisations (trade union, international solidarity, and domestic single-issue). The definition of the relationship has thereby, and correctly so, been unilaterally made by the vanguard Party, and not by the mass organisations. The SACP has never alienated its power to make up its own mind about such relationships, and how they are supposed to work.

With rule 6.4, the SACP is never likely to become dependent, like other parties have sometimes been (e.g. the British communist party) on decisions and regulations made in other organisations without any revolutionary backbone (e.g. in that particular case, the Labour Party). Our rule looks, at first glance, like it is written to protect the mass organisations, but fundamentally it protects the Party. The SACP does not mortgage itself. Consequently the SACP has the best and strongest relations with mass political and trade union formations of any communist party in any bourgeois country. Rule 6.4 is our master-stroke and is a good example to all the communist parties of the world.

The other two linked documents are, as we had long planned, the latest issues of Umsebenzi Online, to be taken in the next two sessions. Umsebenzi Online is ideal for study-circle purposes. It is the ideal length (i.e. it can be printed as a four-page folding leaflet on one sheet of A4). It is both concrete and topical at the same time. It is authentic. In fast-moving, revolutionary times we need this thing, comrades, and we need to use it more, for discussion purposes.

Click on these links:

Rule Six Point Four, SACP Constitution, 2007 (115 words)

Revolution and Counter-revolution in South Africa, Blade Nzimande (1959 words)

Defend living standards of workers and poor, Blade Nzimande (2361 words)

Events Diary

Money

Economists, whose continual job it is to attempt to rationalise the irrational, conflicted, capitalist system, are invariably at a loss to produce a satisfactory definition of their most basic piece of conceptual vocabulary: Money. Karl Marx, on the other hand, who was not an economist but a critic of political economy, described money with ease as a universal measure of value, and continued:

“It is not money that renders commodities commensurable. Just the contrary. It is because all commodities, as values, are realised human labour, and therefore commensurable, that their values can be measured by one and the same special commodity, and the latter be converted into the common measure of their values, i.e., into money.”

Today’s continuation of our revision of Capital, Volume 1 is its third chapter, called: “Money, or the Circulation of Commodities”. It is long. The Communist University’s advice is: read it from the back to the front. Read the section on Universal Money, then the one on Means of Payment, then Hoarding, and so on, until the remainder is small enough to tackle. See the first linked item.

All CU subscribers should by now also be subscribed to Umsebenzi Online, the SACP’s [usually] fortnightly e-mail publication. We link the current one again today because it provides guidance on escalation of mass mobilisation and activism. It sets the agenda, and indicates the form that the mobilisation should take from this (Chris Hani) month onwards. See the second linked item.

ANC President Jacob Zuma, speaking at the funeral of SACP Deputy Chairperson Ncumisa Kondlo, quoted the late former ANC President Oliver Tambo as follows: "The relationship between the ANC and the SACP is not an accident of history, nor is it a natural and inevitable development. For, as we can see, similar relationships have not emerged in other parts of Africa.” Cde Zuma went on to invoke the old liberation-movement slogan: “Don’t mourn, mobilise”. See the third linked item.

In his address at the same funeral on Saturday, SACP GS Dr Blade Nzimande said: “In honour of Cde Ncumisa, let us throw our weight behind the SACP’s Chris Hani Month programme, in which we intend to embark on mass action to defend the standard of living of our people.” The call is clearly made. It is an Alliance call. It will be picked up by COSATU in detail as the Federation prepares for an unprecedented number of nationwide May Day rallies this year. From this month on, to borrow from opera (and football): None shall sleep!

Because the CU is a learned institution, and hence broad in its reading and never sectarian, the fifth item linked below can serve to remind us that long before Karl Marx walked the earth, there was already what we now call polemic, and there were pamphlets, and beautiful writing style, and wit, and considerable understanding of political economy, even in 1728. See the link to some writing of Jonathan Swift (pictured), published in Ireland 280 years ago, and contrast and compare it if you will, to the land question (if not as here with grazing, then with game farms and golf estates) and the urban poverty of today in South Africa.

Click on these links:

Reprise 03, Capital Volume 1, Chapter 3, Money, 1867 (17257 words)

Umsebenzi Online, Defend living standards of workers and poor (2361 words)

Address by ANC President Jacob Zuma at funeral of Ncumisa Kondlo (1667 words)

Revolutionary Loyalty, Blade Nzimande at funeral of Ncumisa Kondlo (1744 words)

An answer to a paper on the Poor Inhabitants, Jonathan Swift, 1728 (2999 words)

Events Diary

Abolition of the Wages System!

At the conclusion of “Value, Price and Profit”, Karl Marx wrote of the working class that:

"Instead of the conservative motto, 'A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!' they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, 'Abolition of the wages system!'"

The question, What is the minimum wage for survival?, is only another way of asking: What is the cost of labour-power?, or, What is the cost of maintaining a worker so that he or she can arrive in a condition to work each day?

It is a bourgeois question. Hence, when this question of minimum wage, or poverty datum line, or living wage is raised, the bourgeoisie is only too delighted to take the lead in the discussion. Reformists in the ranks of the proletariat are apt to amplify the hubbub, to the exclusion of clear revolutionary thought.

We are fortunate that there are revolutionaries within the South African working class who are, like Karl Marx himself, bold enough to think of the abolition of the wages system. One such comrade has recently distributed the four diverse documents on the subject, linked below as our first four items, which the Communist University is happy to redistribute. He wrote:

“The attached documents are shared with comrades for no other reason but to encourage a continuous interrogation of the current conjuncture against the backdrop of the many different interpretations of the direction of our revolution. A never-ending examination of the tendencies at work in our broad national liberation movement and working class formations is required if we are to reflect on and understand how Communists have historically analyzed these fractions that arises from time to time. The attachments whilst not constituting the ABC of the different strands in our movement and the left in general nevertheless signals what revolutionaries historically had to contend with in the execution of class struggle.”

The fifth item is included lest we forget the struggle of the Zimbabwean people. It is a short, powerful press release from the Global Zimbabwe-Diaspora Forum.

Click on these links:

Communist Theory - Beyond the Ultra-Left, Aufheben, 2003 (4759 words)

Workerism as debated during the UDF period, Isizwe, MIA (4417 words)

Cronin, Neo-liberalism, reformism, populism, ultra-leftism (5550 words)

New social movements, COSATU and New UDF, Oupa Lehulere (194 KB PDF, 19,000 words)

Global Zimbabwe Diaspora Forum Press Release, 31 March 2008 (372 words)

Events Diary

Sauce for the Goose, Sauce for the Gander

This post is sent in advance for Tuesday 1 April 2008.

The Communist University meets on Tuesday, 1 April 2008 in the SACP boardroom, 3rd floor, COSATU House, 1 Leyds Street, Braamfontein. The discussion will be around the two draft resolutions produced by the Branch Executive Committee (BEC) of Johannesburg Central Branch, which are given in the first item linked below. Also given in that compilation are the relevant resolution of the 12th SACP Congress, (“On the SACP and State Power”), and the relevant part of the SACP Constitution, which is Rule 6.4.

The first of the two BEC resolutions (“Interlocking SACP-ANC leadership cores”) seems redundant (i.e. unnecessary) in its present form. The resolution does not spell out what it thinks the coming Special Congress should decide. It only says that it, and the Party beforehand, should discuss certain things. But there is no question that there will be a debate about such things, bearing in mind that the Special Congress has been called for the purpose, and that we are in a pre-Congress discussion period.

The second BEC resolution ("The implications of Polokwane &c...") does propose an action of the Special Congress. It proposes that, by prior agreement with the ANC, 10% of the [successful] candidates in the next Parliamentary election should be allocated to SACP nominees, “with the party enjoying the right within a broad Alliance strategy to direct them as well as to recall them”. The first question about this is: Why only 10%?

But the main problem is that the SACP Constitution, Rule 6.4, expressly forbids this kind of arrangement. There cannot be an SACP caucus within the ANC, because the SACP Constitution forbids it. What is more, the unique relationship between the ANC and the SACP has been built upon the foundation of Rule 6.4. Because of that rule, the ANC comrades have been able know that we are not plotting in their midst. Hence the Party is not likely to scrap Rule 6.4 and therefore the second BEC resolution becomes impossible.

But we will discuss them. The Communist University is not a plenary. The Johannesburg Central Branch is the plenary and it meets on 6 April. Meanwhile, Johannesburg Central Branch members could do well to reflect upon whether the Branch has been exercising any kind of direction on Johannesburg Councillors who are Party members. This is because very serious problems are about to explode in Johannesburg and people, both inside and outside the Party, are going to want to know where those SACP-card-carrying Councillors stand.

The Johannesburg Metro Council, although its income is rising, is going to take away the free 6 kilolitres of water, and reduce the free electricity allocation to a paltry 500KWh, and there is much more to this gross attack on Johannesburg’s workers and poor. It is too much to summarise today and it has probably not yet been completely revealed, but the last three items, put on the “Joburg” web site, in the last few days (26-28 April), give quite a good idea of what is intended, if you read between the heavy spin-doctoring of Emily Visser and Virgil James.

It amounts to the fact that huge changes are to be made and enormous extra burdens thrown on to the shoulders of the workers and the poor, and that these changes are “open for comment” only up to 25 April 2008 (or in another version, 30 April 2008). The only channels offered so far for such public inputs in this city of millions are three e-mail addresses, one fax number, and one person’s telephone numbers! We must demand proper public hearings, comrades! We did not vote for this!

The contacts that are given for comments on the cuts are as follows:

velih@joburg.org.za
Lennette Fouche on fax number 011 339 2870 or via email on lennettef@ioburg.org.za
Shenaaz Hoff via email on shenaazh@ioburg.org.za
Virgil James, Communications Specialist, City of Joburg, Tel: 011 407 7226, Cell: 082 467 9415

Click on these links:

SACP Jhb Central drafts, 12th Congress resolution, and Rule 6.4 (1673 words)

Joburg Metro wants to kill people’s water and electricity allowance (940 words)

Residents invited to have their say on city tariffs, Joburg (1115 words)

Calls for comment on City budget, Joburg Metro (592 words)

Events Diary

Commodities and Exchange

This post is sent in advance for Monday 31 March 2008.

This week’s instalment of our revision programme on Karl Marx’s Capital Volume 1 is a composite of part of the first chapter, on Commodities, and the whole of the short second chapter, on Exchange. See the first item, linked below.

This is as “classic” as it gets. This is Marx laying down the foundations for the great work to come. It includes Section 4 of Chapter 1, on “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof.”

Just to show how fresh Marx’s ideas still are, the second item is an extract from William Blum’s “Anti-Empire Report” (an e-mail newsletter that often gets published in full on Counterpunch). Bill Blum has compiled some short, sharp, and witty points that relate directly to Karl Marx’s ideas, yet are entirely located the USA of today, where Blum lives. It can serve as a good companion-piece to Marx’s Chapters 1 and 2 of Capital, Volume 1.

Click on these links:

Reprise 02, Capital V1, C1 and 2, Commodities and Exchange, 1867 (11930 words)

USA, democracy or economy? William Blum, Anti-Empire Report (1578 words)

Events Diary

Eskom and Counter-Revolution

The picture is of voting in Zimbabwe on 29 March 2008.

Today’s may well be the 1000th Communist University distribution! If it is not this one, then it will be one of the two that will shortly follow. James Tweedie has been keeping count since before the CU had a blog. He can confirm if the "psychologically-important" moment has arrived.

There are good reasons at this moment to reaffirm that the Communist University is founded on, and defined by, certain theories of Critical Pedagogy which are the living legacy of the late, great Paulo Freire.

Anyone who thinks that the CU can be remade into its opposite is mistaken. Down the years there have been quite a few who have thought so. Some have sought to expropriate the CU’s goodwill as if it was a commodity “brand”, and then to fraudulently use that goodwill to pump artificial life into stale, failed schemes of political education of the past, without even a moment’s critical examination of why those older attempts did fail and die.

Let the following be noted at this moment: If something should appear in South Africa, calling itself “Communist University”, offering a prescribed curriculum, “beginners’ classes”, and/or certificates of “qualification”; in short if something appears under our name but offering the “banking theory of education”, you and thousands of others who have been touched by this Communist University will know that the other one is an impostor and a fraud if it claims our legacy as its own.

This Communist University stands or falls with Freire. All temptations, blandishments, inducements, arm-twisting, threats and bullying that aim to make us abandon that legacy will be unequivocally turned down, even if it means extinction for the genuine, Freirean CU.

Now to the business of the day. The South African Communist Party has issued an unequivocal declaration of war on the outrageous proposed Eskom electricity price rises in the following terms: “The SACP will take to the streets against these proposed hikes. We will announce in due course a rolling mass action programme to stop this neo-liberal attack on the quality of life of South Africans.” See the first link below.

At the same time, violent ruptures are appearing within the ranks of South Africa’s big bourgeoisie in relation to Eskom’s attempt to reorganise the South African economy, which amount to a counter-revolutionary coup d’etat. In an extraordinary development, reported as the front-page splash in Friday’s “Business Day”, one of the four monopoly finance houses (Standard) has fallen out with one of the two biggest monopoly resource houses, and all because of the dreaded potlines (aluminium smelters) that have been bleeding South Africa’s power supplies for almost the sole benefit of that transnational resource conglomerate (Billiton). See the second linked item.

Popular resistance to the Eskom coup is breaking out all over. On the Mail & Guardian’s “Thought Leader” blog site, an experienced engineer, Bryan Hadfield, has applied his expertise and found Eskom’s “myths, misrepresentations and fallacies” very much wanting. See the third linked item.

The past is a contested terrain. The SACP’s past is also assailed with myths and misrepresentations. The last two items are of this kind. The SACP’s former Treasurer, Phillip Dexter, continues to avail himself of the bourgeois press to attack the party he still wants to call his own. His weasely, self-incriminating words will fool nobody. Even the Mail & Guardian, no friend of the SACP, could not resist giving Dexter’s letter a mocking, ironic headline.

Anthony Butler’s peculiar revisionism is only slightly more subtle, and just as laughable, as Dexter’s. It posits two weird “communist conspiracies”, one in 1991 and one in 2007. Butler’s theories are as far from historical science as alchemy and “phlogiston” theory are from chemical science. The most charitable view is probably that Professor Butler is “flying a kite”, hoping to provoke denials or other forms of controversy, and so to lubricate his way towards a lucrative book contract.

Click on these links:

On the proposed hike by Eskom, SACP Media Release (176 words)

Billiton fires Standard Bank for reckless talk, Charlotte Mathews, B Day (568 words)

Energy-crisis myths, misrepresentations, fallacies, Bryan Hadfield, M and G (1950 words)

Lies, lies, all gossip and lies, Phillip Dexter, Letters, M and G (416 words)

Seventeen years on, left strikes again to save ANC, Butler, B Day (810 words)

Events Diary

ANC and COSATU

According to James Tweedie, ace reporter of the London’s communist daily newspaper the Morning Star, this should be the 999th issue of the Communist University. The number on the post should be 633; this numbering began when the CU started using a Google Group - http://groups.google.com/group/Communist-University - in 2005, and a blog, http://domza.blogspot.com/ , mashed together with a wikispace web site, http://amadlandawonye.wikispaces.com/ .

Before that, e-mails were sent to an ever-growing copy-and-paste list.

The first beginnings of the CU were meetings held in the Hypercube Resource Centre in June 2003; so it is approaching its 5th Anniversary. Maybe it has done some good. Perhaps it has. At least, it has been part of a general growth of political education in South Africa.

As a Freirean thing, the Communist University is not likely to become an institution, or to be benevolently taken under anybody’s wing, or to be in secure possession of bricks and mortar. Wherever it hangs its hat is its home. Apart from what is stored on the Internet, the CU is no more secure than it was in 2003. It could fold any day. The reason it does not fold is that people keep coming to our weekly gatherings. Those old-fashioned study-circle sessions remain the power-house of the whole affair.

One more thing should suffice for today. That is to mention the Marxists Internet Archive, upon which we have relied all along, from the first days when searching the Internet for material to print, then later to put on floppy disks, then later on CDs, and at last in 2005 on to the Internet. We will reflect more about the CU in the next post, but never forgetting that without the MIA there would probably not be anything to write about.

The first, second and third linked items concern the inter-state significance of ANC President Jacob Zuma’s visit to Angola, made on the 20th Anniversary of the battle of Cuito Cuanavale.

Whether Cde JZ stepped on his predecessor’s toes or not, or had revenge, as the journalists would have us believe, is not the real point here. The point is that Cde JZ appears to have opened the road between Angola and South Africa, two large and powerful countries with a long history of past revolutionary solidarity. The flag is that of the ANC’s ally since Kongwa days: the MPLA.

If Zimbabwe can also come right this week, then South Africa has a great deal to thank Cde JZ for, and to thank what used to be called the “Zuma Camp” for. The working-class components of the so-called Zuma Camp, especially COSATU and the SACP, were the ones who put the Zimbabwe question on the South African agenda. Now, increased mutual trade is gong to help us all.

We also feature a major speech of COSATU GS Cde Zwelinzima Vavi to ECSECC in the Eastern Cape; and an article about COSATU by the respected journalist Karima Brown from the Business Day newspaper. Click on the fourth and fifth links.

Click on these links:

ANC President Jacob Zuma on his return from Angola 24 March 2008 (747 words)

Zuma steps on Mbeki’s toes with Angola visit, Hajra Omarjee, Bday (653 words)

Zuma's revenge, R W Johnson, Comment is Free, The Guardian (512 words)

Challenges for a poor province like E Cape, Z Vavi to ECSECC (2928 words)

Why COSATU should focus on core business, Karima Brown, Bday (682 words)

Events Diary