From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Subject: Women of SA not yet free. Date: Mon, 3 May 2010 10:33:42 +0200 1.The women of SA are not free and will only be fully emancipated and equal to men after a genuine proletarien and sosialist revolution has occured in SA.With the revolution will come the abolition of private property,the gradual abolition of the state and the abolition of the familly.For sometime now we have been discussing the women question at the communist university(Doorfontein campus).The reading of extraits from works by Kollontai and Lenin,the examination of documents from the 3CCI and FSAW(Women Charter),every thursday from 17h00 to 19h00 has led me to this conclusion. 2.Despite the breaktrohghs and the gains under the ANC led NDR,the NDR in SA can not and will not solve the women question as well the social question.Under the NDR and capitalism in SA the oppression and exploitation of women within the frames of the family and the work place will survive be it in subtil and less blatant forms so will the oppresion and exploitation of the working class even if the alliance(ANC,SACP,COSATU) acheives its aim of building a welfare state. Date: Sun, 2 May 2010 08:38:15 -0700 From: [email protected] Subject: Re: [CUAfrica] The Congress Call To: [email protected] thank you for the emails. --- On Sat, 5/1/10, Dominic.Tweedie <[email protected]> wrote: From: Dominic.Tweedie <[email protected]> Subject: [CUAfrica] The Congress Call To: [email protected] Date: Saturday, May 1, 2010, 1:06 PM CU, NDR Part 8 The Congress Call This post is about the preparations from 1953 onwards for the 1955 Congress of the People (CoP), the Congress of the People as a definite event, and the Freedom Charter that came out of that event, all considered as historic acts and as part of the process of building the South African National Democratic Revolution (NDR). What could very advantageously be used for this discussion is an electronic copy of the book by Jeremy Cronin and Raymond Suttner, published in 1986, called “30 Years of the Freedom Charter”, or even just a good extract from the book. But unfortunately the book is not available on the Internet. Instead, it has been polished up and re-published as “50 Years of the Freedom Charter”, in hard copy only. If you can get either one of these editions, do use it. “The Congress of the People and Freedom Charter Campaign”, by Ismail Vadi, Sterling Publishers, New Delhi, 1995, is another book that comes up in searches of the Internet. According to the small samples of Vadi’s book that can be read on line, (i.e. the Introduction, the Preface, and the Foreword by Walter Sisulu) the planning of the CoP began in 1953, and the campaign was only wound down in 1956, the year of the beginning of the Treason Trial, which was itself a consequence of the CoP. The Treason Trial continued until 1961, by which time all the defendants had been acquitted. Another document on the Internet is a short History of the Freedom Charter on the “non-partisan” South African History Online web site, funded by the Ford Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, and other liberal philanthropists. “Non-partisan” in the case of SAHO therefore tends to mean that the Communist Party is mentioned as little as possible. Nevertheless, these pages bear out the extended nature of the political intervention that was the total CoP Campaign, a campaign that was in turn a clear extension of the National Democratic Revolution policy of the recently-banned CPSA and of the Comintern before it, since 1920. The CoP/Freedom Charter campaign was a determined and deliberately visible construction of a national democratic project. It drew in huge masses of people. It was a conscious and fully worked-out design, even to the Nehru-style caps in ANC colours that the Volunteers wore. [See the photo above showing the CoP platform at Kliptown in 1955, with a Volunteer in attendance] There is an error in the SAHO text: There were five organisations involved, not four. SACTU, the non-racial South African Congress of Trade Unions, was a late entry to the CoP but it made the cut and it managed to feature in the “wheel of unity” that nowadays still forms part of both COSATU’s and the ANC’s logos. [The second image shows the document that was used to publicise the Freedom Charter after the Congress, including the newly-pasted “SACTU” acronym, and the “ANC” acronym shifted from the rim to the hub of the wheel. The document includes quotes from the Freedom Charter itself.] This series is about the NDR [n.b. for CUAfrica that the series "No Woman, No revolution is running concurrently]. This post and the reading are given so as to invite you to consider the whole episode of the CoP campaign from 1953 to 1956 and beyond through the Treason Trial as one of the strongest specific and historical contributions to South Africa's NDR. The document linked below [and attached] includes the “Call to the Congress of the People”, as well as the Freedom Charter itself. The "Call" was a mobilising flyer and it shows very clearly the large scope and scale of the call to “all Unionwide Organisations”. The Freedom Charter was much more than a list of demands. It was an integral part of a kind of conscious nation-building which had real revolutionary content and which demonstrated real democracy in action. Those old comrades laid down an irresistible pattern. It appealed to the heart as well as to the eye and to the mind, and it still surrounds us today, manifested in the continuing Congress Alliance of which the SACP, legal once more, is now an open part. There was never a time when the communists were not part of the National Democratic Revolution. It is family. As it was when Lenin spoke to the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1920, so it was in 1955. Two things were required. One was a genuine class alliance and unity-in-action against the main oppressor class, the colonialist monopoly capitalists. The other was the deliberate extension of democracy for the creation of a democratic nation. The CoP campaign was exactly in this mould. Download: Click here to download the text of Call to the Congress of the People; Freedom Charter (2555 words) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the "CUAfrica2" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit http://groups.google.com/group/cuafrica2?hl=en Visit the CU blog at http://domza.blogspot.com/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the "CUAfrica" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit http://groups.google.com/group/cuafrica Visit the CU blog at http://domza.blogspot.com/ Your E-mail and More On-the-Go. Get Windows Live Hotmail Free. Sign up now. _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail: Free, trusted and rich email service. https://signup.live.com/signup.aspx?id=60969 -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. 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