Dear Comrades, When Lenin wrote Left-Wing Childishness and the Petty-Bourgeois Mentality and Left-Wing Communism an Infantile Disorder, he criticized comrades on such matters as:-
1) Refusing to understand the reason for the Brest-Litovsk treaty which conceded huge chunks of territory to Germany in order to gain peace. 2) Not understanding the need to keep the bourgeoisie in management and technical positions when, at that time, most of the revolutionaries did not have those skills. 3) Fsiling to understand the need to participate in reactionary trade unions. 4) Failing to understand that participation in bourgeois parliaments is a tactical question dependant on the current situation. All these are major issues, for which Lenin referred to comrades as chidish or infantile. That the major topic for discussion on this forum should be whether or not a minister, though within budget, spent too much on a car is sub-childish. That comrades who feel that they can say anything they like about ministers -- many of them experienced and dedicated -- but start crying when they themselves are criticized, only strengthens the characterization. The current, excellent discussion document produced by the SACP on promoting working-class hegemony in the NDR will Ihope provoke discussion in which theory is related to practice. The implementation of policy decisions is not only the responsibility of ministers, who are then criticized when they fail -- it is the responsibility of the whole Alliance, especially the vanguard part the SACP, for being the vanguard means far more than the snobbish attitude that, "We have read Marx, Engels and Lenin". It means working with ordinary people, many of whom may have the most weird and extravagany ideas, in order to promote the programme of the party and the Alliance as spelt out in the Polokwane resolutions and to achieve the pre-requisite for socialism, the hegemony of the working-class. I am very disappointed that no one has taken me up on the subject of South African chauvinist attitudes towards the region and Africa as a whole. It seems that though there is a general understanding of class contradictions within South Africa, the role of imperialism, especially in its neo-colonial phase is little understood -- concretely the AFRICOM (Africa Command) policy of the USA, which is seeking military control of the whole continent and which Obama has vowed to accelerate. The Second Congo War, the biggest in terms of loss of lives since the Second World War, and initiated by the husband of the present US Secretary of State, is hardly known by South Africans, but the influx of 4m. Zimbabweans, itself a partial by-product of that war is very evident. In future I will be writing far more on these issues, in particular the background of the economic melt-down in Zimbabwe, which is far more complex than the is portrayed by our neo-colonialist media. Fraternally, Ian --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. You don't have to put anything in the message part. All you have to do is to send an e-mail to this address (repeat): [email protected] . -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
