Calls for intensification of political education made by many including the ANC
Secretary General Cde. Gwede Mantashe in his contribution to the ANC today of
16 October sheds some light into the nature and direction that the movement is
supposed to be going.
Comrade Gwede’s contribution is a wake-up call and it will assist us towards
the resolution of the problem that Cde. Gugile Nkwinti pointed out about 9
years ago when he made an observation that comrades who are properly trained in
the movements’ policies and programme are a diminishing proportion of the
people that currently populate it. This leads to a situation where it is easy
to buy them.
The Communist Manifesto’s assertion that the history of all hitherto existing
society is that of class struggle is true reflection of society, but equally so
the theory of the National Democratic Revolution which talks about the class
alliance between the working class with some sections of the middle and upper
class, who share the same objectives with those of the working class, is also
relevant.
In the South African context, this is reflected in the Revolutionary Alliance
of three different but interrelated and interdependent organisations. This
Alliance is led by the ANC, which is a mass liberation movement, with working
class organisations such as SACP and COSATU as allies.
The SACP is a working class organisation that strives for Socialism and COSATU
is a revolutionary trade union movement which transcends petty economic
analysis of work place struggles as it gives them political content and locates
them within the working class struggle for socialism.
The ANC on the other hand is a multi-class organisation which is biased towards
the working class. Because it is a multi-class this means its ideological
position is shaped and revived by different sections of society and in most
cases these are classes which are supposed to be in antagonistic terms in
society.
The current NEC of the ANC is indicative of this and the current differences
also bring this to mind. The fact that the ANC is multi-class, does not mean
that the ANC is ideological neutral and neither does it mean it performs some
form of a ‘class balancing act’.
Honest comrades have been forever saying that the ANC has an ideology which is
premised on the principles of the Freedom Charter and clearly articulated in
the programme of the National Democratic Revolution.
Comrade Gwede is right the current ANC Strategy and Tactics document recognises
the leading role of the “African majority working class” in the National
Democratic Revolution. This basically means that the middle class and the
emergent black elites joined the ANC because they agreed with this agenda of
the working class.
Throughout the period in which this revolutionary alliance has been in public
office, there has been a systematic campaign to project the ANC as a neoliberal
capitalist organisation in alliance with working class organisations such as
COSATU and SACP. This has been mostly done by those from the emergent
capitalist class, but also by some within Marxists circles (“The Sectarian
Left”).
This has been the cause for many differences in the movement and this can be
illustrated by the emergence of the ‘1996 class project’ which has, in some
way, rolled back, but replaced now by what the SACP Special Congress
Discussion Document calls the “new tendency”.
The call for intensification of political education will indeed help us
navigate through these and many other challenges because it will help us
understand that it is the emergent or aspiring capitalist who ideological
joined the working class in the ANC and the movement at large and not the
reverse.
Political education will teach us that communist are people who are with and
for the workers and the poor hence they will always contests any privatisation,
flawed tender process and javelin throwing even if these benefits people within
the ranks of the movement.
This is the reason why communist will always be in conflict with sections of
the emergent capitalist class. Political education will therefore show us as
to where these whole anti-communist sentiments come from and why they will
always be in the movement and how they can be dealt with.
Political education will lead to political and organisational independence as
it will teach us as to how to deal with influence of money in our movement. It
is political education that will help us formulate a pragmatic approach to the
challenges we are facing and not just interpret them as a attack against Gwede
Mantashe, Blade Nzimande or Phumulo Masualle and others.
Political Education will help us navigate thought these problems by teaching us
that “Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims.”
Revolutionary Regards Luzuko Buku
YCL Chairperson, Rhodes University
ANC Rodgers Faltein
0786172286
www.lbuku.blogspot.com
"The state is the product and manifestation of the irreconcilability of class
antagonisms..."State and Revolution, Lenin (1917)
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