>>Its interesting how the national
>>question has come up as THE difficult one.
>
>Why? Because it's still unsolved, because the bourgeoisie and the
>petty-bourgeoisie have no solutions at all nowadays, and because the
>oppression and exploitation of weak nations (semi-colonies and to an
>increasing extent re-colonies, that is colonies again in everything but
>name) and minorities is getting worse. All this paradoxically enough in a
>world in which the apartheid regime in South Africa was smashed by a
>revolutionary war and where the lip-service paid to women and some
>minorities in laws etc is much greater than ever before. Combined and
>uneven development. (Read Marx on the Jewish Question for the basic
>contradictions underlying all this.)
>
>Hi Hugh!
>
>Could you clarify what you mean by the above. Most of us have read a number
>of the classics. However the point is how one interprets this stuff with a
>programmatic and tactical answer. Which I don't think your recent line on
>Lesotho adequately addresses. And if we are going to have a discussion on
>South Africa then we should address the whole Southern cone connected to the
>key position that the South African proletariat will play in all this.
>Bob
The clarification of the general position (recolonization, the increasing
contradictions of combined and uneven development, etc) will come in the
LIT's world document after our forthcoming congress. Hopefully the
relationship between democratic mobilizations on a huge scale (ie in South
Africa against the apartheid regime) and socialist revolution (in other
words, the Permanent Revolution) will also be made clearer than it has been
in the past.
As for South Africa, get stuck in! Do you see any relationship at all
between the unsolved democratic problems of these countries and the ability
of the southern African proletariat to lead the masses there to socialism
(ie to expropriate capital and set up workers states)?`
The reference to On the Jewish Question is straightforward. Marx deals with
the contradictions between the individuals in bourgeois society seen on the
one hand as Citizens with all the rights, equality before the law, personal
inviolability etc, and on the other as what he calls Bourgeois, in other
words actors in the process of capitalist production, where the only thing
that matters is a person's relationship to the means of production, either
as their owner or as the owner of nothing but an individual body's labour
power. On the one hand Equality, civic solidarity, etc, on the other
Exploitation and degradation. Marx also deals with this in the transition
in Capital from circulation to production (Capital I, Part 2, chapter 6,
last three paragraphs).
Cheers,
Hugh
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