Contributing to the discussion raised by comrade Floyd. I have to say one agrees with certain elements even though he has not explicitly raised them. One I generally agree that, the Party as the vanguard of the working class ought to be first of all vanguard of the working class and that the party cannot be a real party if it will limit itself to register what the masses of the working class feel and think.
If it will drag at the tail of the spontaneous movement, if it is unable to overcome the inertness and political indifference of the spontaneous movement, if it is unable to rise above the momentary interest of the working class. We also further agree that, the Party ought to lead the working class and not follow in the tail of the spontaneous moment. But then, the question which we ought to ask ourselves is, in 1996 what kind of Communist did the Party have ? did we have communist who stressed the material component of our philosophy at the expense of dialectics which therefore projected them as Right Wing opportunist, who in this case overestimated the strength of the 1996 class project over the strength of the masses ? which then lead them to welcome Gear and other unprogressive economic policies. Or was the Communist Party cautious of the real political conditions our country was faced with, the political conditions of divide and rule tactics, which set comrade against comrade and other forces which wanted to render the party totally disorganized and isolated at that time. Welcoming a policy comrades does it mean that, the Party was automatically agree with the content of Gear or could it have meant that the Party leadership welcomed the space which was opened for qualitative engagement on a certain policy issues at the time ? For the record, the Party for years has always welcomed debates. As Party members we have always debated issues and never have we debated subjective issues of other independent organization within the Tripartite Alliance, but we have always debated objective issues which had an impact on changing the material conditions of the working class like the Nationalization of mines. As the majority members of the Party we have welcomed the debate raised by the ANCYL of Nationalization of mines, but we have also highlighted the fact that Nationalization by itself is not progressive and that we should never carry on unfounded myth that seeks to project that Nationalization of government control is a project hostile to capital, because what it really means at sometime and in most cases is state capitalism. Practically all schemes of nationalization have been carried out by avowedly capital government and liberals. Some of the schemes are outcomes of cleavages of interest between particular groups of the capital class being injured or jeopardized commercially and when for some cost involved is great. So as the Party we can not fall to any political rhetoric that sound revolutionary. As the Party we welcome the NGP. AMANDLA -- 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] .
