| Thanks VC for mentioning the Freedom Day. I proposing that we problematise and give it its proper context. Narrow nationalistically speaking some think that we have achieved freedom, and they attach this to the meaning of the Freedom Day. I've seen many speeches, unfortunately also from within our movement, propagating that conception. According to the SACP, which I agree with, 27 April 1994 constituted a breakthrough to the South African Freedom. Our people are not free from class inequality, unemployment and poverty. But these things, which some of our comrades would like us believe they are our new enemy, do not create themselves. Class inequality, unemployment and poverty are the necessary conditions and products of a system. They are systemic. They are the levers of the accumulation of wealth on a capitalist and in its higest stage, imperialist, basis. The enemy, thruthfully speaking is the system and the class of people who support and reproduce it!! There are many other examples. The debate we held now on what's going on in the media by some shows that our people do not enjoy freedom of that space. The Koos Bekkers of these world still have the monopoly of the Nasperses of this world that served as the mouthpieces and ideological vanguards of racist apartheid system intact. Unfortunately the communication policies adopted by our own ANC-led government - some opposed to ANC's own resolutions including the popular Nelspruit/Cape Town popular January 8th Statement to combat monopoly and various conference resolutions on the same - have strenthened such monopolies. Naspers' Multichoise is not the monopoly it is only because of the advantages that Naspers enjoyed under apartheid but because also of the policy decisions adopted by our own ANC-led government up to this day. The way the digital migration has been and continues to be handled directly serves the best interests of Naspers' Multichoice monopoly. It's not surprising the the agenda to smear SADTU is driven by Naspers' Media24 through its title the City Press and online through News24. That's continuity of the relationship that existed between apartheid media and progressive trade unions. The same applied to the relationship that exiested between apartheid media and the Communist Party. We must use the occasion of this year's Freedom Day to reflect, not only on what the mouthpieces of apartheid and its ideological vanguards such as Naspers continue to do, but also on what we are either doing or not doing to embolden them and given them the guts to undermine our movement and the democratically elected government. We must look into class configurations post-1994, their manifestation in our movement and their impact on its capacity to drive the historical objectives of the NDR. Surely there is something not right. Let us revive the culture of Chris Hani of construtive self-criticism without fear or favour. Cde A Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone.
I have seen a statement by Cosatu KZN notifying us about the death of its PEC member. Our condolences, comrades. Let us close ranks, unite and defend our movement. Nobody will do it for us. Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone.
Thanks Cde Alex. We have not yet seen the statement of the COSATU KZN PEC. After we see it, we will see how the newspapers cover it. SADTU also has its problems with media. It is almost exactly two years since the accusation, not backed by evidence, that teaching posts were being sold, and smearing SADTU over it. That was by Paddy Harper in the City Press. We have not had any apology yet. Thanks for posting sometimes. I appreciate it and I understand that you can’t do it all the time. I wish that the Party will say, in relation to Freedom Day, that it belongs fully to the liberation movement of Hani and Tambo. Others can share, if they want to, and we want them to share; but what they cannot do is to set up as “South Africa” versus the liberation movement, in an attempt to exclude the ANC and the Party. That will be an intolerable abomination. Zwelinzima Vavi has said that there will be 'no doorkeeper' at his anti-ANC meeting on Saturday. That means he is already fully in bed with the De Klerk-ists and the DA. VC From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Alex Mohubetswane Mogale Mashilo Thanks Cde VC, '... concrete conditions' of course that's what I meant. I agree with you on several of the points you made but of course and as you might expect not entirely on everything. We cannot for instance act like the media that we criticise. We must lead by example. Every week we engage with media practioners (as in mainstream media) and representatives about the way they misrepresent our views. We give them feedback, even though we know that some of them are doing the wrong things that they are doing deliberately. I believe you might have seen the statement we released this week about the media coverage agenda pushed by Naspers' Media24 and concentrated in the Afrikaans title the Rapport. They were found guilty of breaking the Press Code by publishing incorrect information that adversely affected the reputation of our GS. The Rapport was ordered to apologise. On the last day of the last SACP Central Committee we issued a statement condemning a similar report by another Media24 title the City Press. The newspaper apologised with acceptable prominence a week later, in its next issue voluntarily - i.e. before the matter could be referred to the Press Ombudsman. They apologised given the evidence that was brought before them contrary to the contents of their story, and for not giving the affected parties opportunity to exercise their right of reply (some of whom were wrongfully attributed to be SACP members) The SACP had condemned a much earlier report by the Rapport - which was also published in the City Press and another Media24 outlet the online platform News24. When a person says 'either... for or against...' that person is not only saying for or only against - s/he is exactly for or against without taking sites as it clearly appears in what Karima said in her reply. These are the things we are dealing with when facts about what we are saying for example are misrepresented by the media, let alone completely new things that are atribbuted to us whereas we have nothing to do with them. Please see the Mail and Guardian. The SACP PB released a statement shortly after the Constitutional Court ruling on Nkdandla. What the statement says is that the ruling and President's apology that followed a day after should be seen at the beginning of a prosess of decisive self-introspection and action including self-correction. Something we didn't say, the Mails and Guardian says this implied that Zuma must go. This morning I handled a similar issue about The Star which we are going to bring to their attention in writing on Monday, the misrepresentation of Cde Limpho Hani. They wrote she said Janusz Walus was entitled to parole. This is sure contrary to the battle she's been fighting. What she said is that parole is not a right but a privilege that Walus doesn't deserve as an unrepentant and unremorseful murderer who killed her husband our General Secretary and still has not regard to the enormity of his crime. As revolutionaries we must not take our cue from the wrong things that some in the media are doing. By the way, I never said the Independent is an exception in the bourgeoisie media. The Gupta media The New Age and ANN7 for example had to be condemned by the NEC of the ANC at its last meeting for the divisive role it is playing in our movement. I hope by one exception you are not referring to them! I can show you our written responses to The New Age media and give you copies of what they said thereafter. Pathetic, they simply chopped our sentences in a surgery and co-opted what we said in their advance and defence of the Gupta's interests. They ignored everything, in this example, evereything with we said about the Guptas. If that is the other or both sides it is really bad. I completely agree with you about the responsibility we all have about posting statements in the CU. If you noticed once I realised that SACP statements were not all posted I did post them and at times shared other pieces which I think are good obtained from elsewhere. Cde A Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone.
Thanks for the contribution Cde Alex. It’s hard not to notice that the South African bourgeois media, with only one exception, are pushing for one side. The exception among our media in this case is not the Independent Group, as anyone could have seen last Sunday. That was the first time I have ever seen red headlines on regime-change stories, or on any other stories, in South Africa. It was ridiculous, in my opinion. When newspapers try to bully their readers, they should be laughed at. “Concrete analysis of the concrete situation” is what Lenin said, and not “concrete reality”. This is a philosophically-important distinction. Analysis becomes real when it is rational. At the empirical level it is not yet rational. Lenin was making a precise philosophical reference, in which the word “concrete” corresponds to “organic”, and not to “tangible”; and where there is a movement, from the situation or data, via analysis, to synthesis, knowledge, and truth. The actual situation of the CU is that the same courses are running as before. I think this will be the third year without any new courses, and there is no plan or intention to create any new ten-part courses at present. New work that we have is in the way of historical material, such as the Chris Hani and Steve Biko archives created over the last month, and the anti-privatisation-of-education archive, People’s Education for People’s Power, building since January, with about 60 documents, and a new lot waiting to be put up. My re-posts of statements and articles to the CU have increased to what I consider is a saturation point, i.e. there cannot be a larger number of them, at least from me, in this medium. These are arms-length original documents. I am formatting and sending about ten a day. I don’t think people can easily cope with more than that. The number of potentially usable statements and articles, however, continues to increase. This means that the selection process gets more drastic. It can’t be helped. More and more material is necessarily left “on the cutting-room floor”. This problem would be less if more comrades took it upon themselves to post such statements and articles. Co-operative editing is possible on the Internet, but experience so far tells us that rather few people are ready and willing to do it. Hence people who could post material direct, continue to send it to me for posting, creating a bottleneck. I wish people would take into account that I still have a full-time job, which is quite a hectic job for that matter. Perhaps it is time to show the diagram of distributed networking once again. A centralised or a decentralised network has capacity limited to that of a single node. But a distributed network has sufficient capacity at any size. In other words, a distributed network is infinitely scalable. Which brings me to your “worries”, Cde Alex. The Communist University is not defined by the opinions of any one person, Cde Alex. In the CU, no-one is right and no-one is wrong. We do not seek “closure”. We do not resolve. We do not have a “line”. We do not indoctrinate. Ours is a Freirean critical pedagogy, of dialogue. It can’t be the case that in “interesting times” we become less vocal, share less, run and hide. Surely, not. We are all present as ourselves, with no exceptions. To the extent that there is moderation, it is only to preserve the forum from destruction. “Marxism-Leninism” must strive no less hard than any other view. Probably we do favour it, although it is strong enough and needs no mollycoddling. The methodology here has always been to offer original texts – primary sources – and to open up space for discussion of such documents. This continues to be the case, no more or less than it was for the last 13 years. Generalised discontent with the Communist University therefore can’t stick, Cde Alex. The remedy is to join in the criticism of a document, and make it better. Thanks for making the opportunity to mention some of these things. VC From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Alex Mohubetswane Mogale Mashilo Is it not better to know from the hourse's mouth who the 'chaps' are, just as we expect others to give us equal opportunity to respond on matters or utterances affecting us in terms of the golden rules of the principle of audi alteram partem. I also notice that Brown says 'either... for or against' - which is what has been happening anyway from different quarters. I would agree with VC had Brown only said against. I think some of us have found it conveniently easy to label others 'regime changers' to a point where the notion of regime change will be discredited because of the difficulty some of us are creating for people to identify clearly who is involved in the agenda. I'm worried VC that of recent a number of your utterances in this forum are abstract and detached from what Lenin called a concrete analysis of concrete reality. I'm struggling at times to locate what is Marxism-Leninism in some of your posts. In fact I find them worrying in the broader scheme of things. I wonder if anybody has raised this with you. I'm raising this openly, in the same way as you have been offering us your useful criticisms of the Party statements, useful because we are able to learn other things that we would not have learnt. This is Communist University. Next time we must look at the statements and articles that are profiled most in this forum and compare this to the Communist Party's. Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone.
Independent Group's Executive Editor instructs Group Labour Editor to activate her informers in COSATU.
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Re: [YCLSA Discussion] Karima Brown exposes the existence of a spy network in COSATU...
Alex Mohubetswane Mogale Mashilo Fri, 15 Apr 2016 11:36:05 -0700
- [YCLSA Discussion] Karima Brown exposes t... VC
- Re: [YCLSA Discussion] Karima Brown ... Alex Mohubetswane Mogale Mashilo
- RE: [YCLSA Discussion] Karima Br... Dominic Tweedie
- Re: [YCLSA Discussion] Karim... Alex Mohubetswane Mogale Mashilo
- RE: [YCLSA Discussion] K... Dominic Tweedie
- Re: [YCLSA Discussi... Alex Mohubetswane Mogale Mashilo
- Re: [YCLSA Disc... Alex Mohubetswane Mogale Mashilo
