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
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u did it again
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