A Ground for Building Working Class Hegemony

Comrades this is an attempt to start the debate around the SACP Special National conference Discussion document titled “Building Working Class Hegemony on the Terrain of a National Democratic Struggle (2009).” This is an insightful document.

Another thing is that there are discussions about the YCL provincial conference, some other comrades have already started discussing the personalities that should lead, but what we must know is that at the end of the day and similar to the outcomes of the ANC recent ANC conferences, the working class must lead.

The silence of Communist in the Eastern Cape in the SACP pre-conference debate raise diverse interpretations and here we don’t attempt to deal with them but what is important is an account on the silence, if there is any.

The watershed Eastern Cape ANC provincial conference could have never came at a better time than when the South African Communist Party is preparing for its Special National Congress in Limpopo this December.

It is an undisputable fact that the provincial conference refocused our energies, and we are still having conference hangover, but here we want to connect where our energies are and how this place connects with the whole discussion on “Building Working Class Hegemony on the Terrain of a National Democratic Struggle.”

The SACP provincial secretary’s pre-conference article, “Enrichment of few must be stopped at ANC conference ...” goes a long way in explaining the link between the EC conference and the SACP pre-conference debates.

The ANC is a class contested national liberation movement and it can be said that in the EC conference the working class was faced with a tough contests by sections of the new black capitalist class.

In that conference the foreign capitalistic tendency that seeks to redefine the National Democratic Revolution and reposition the ANC as a capitalist organization, which is in alliance with the working class was defeated. It was boldly stated that the situation was the reverse.

This tendency was dismissed and defeated because it tries to paint a picture that the ANC is a capitalist organization and the working class has joined it because they agree with the agenda of capitalist.

Dismissing and defeating this tendency can indeed be linked to “Building working class hegemony on the Terrain of a National Democratic Struggle.” We must always know that we will always encounter these types of tendencies on our ‘South African Road to Socialism.’