[DEBATE] : (Fwd) Invitation to discussion on SACP's 'Class, National and Gender Struggle in SA', UKZN CCS, Friday, 10am-2pm

[Patrick Bond]

(Please circulate - apologies for late notification)

OPEN INVITATION TO A POLITICAL AND CIVIL SOCIETY DISCUSSION:

CLASS, NATIONAL AND GENDER STRUGGLE IN SOUTH AFRICA

The KZN Provincial chapters of the SA Communist Party, African National
Congress, Congress of SA Trade Unions, and Mkhonto we Sizwe Veterans
Association and the Centre for Civil Society present a discussion and 
launch
of the SACP Discussion Document (published in Bua Komanisi! Volume 5,
Issue No. 1, May 2006, at http://www.sacp.org.za)

DATE: Friday 28 June

TIME: 10am-2pm

PLACE: University of KwaZulu-Natal Memorial Tower Building, Room 167

SPEAKERS:
Intro/overview: Patrick Bond (CCS Director)
SACP: Yunus Carrim, MP (SACP Central Committee and PolitBuro)
COSATU: Sdumo Dlamini (COSATU Provincial Chairperson)
ANC: Nathi Mthethwa, MP (ANC Provincial Executive Member)
MK Vets: Sikhumbuzo Qwuade
CCS: Ashwin Desai

***

Introductory section of the SACP Central Committee Discussion Document

Class, National and Gender Struggle in South Africa:
The Historical Relationship between the ANC and the SACP

“Our claim that we are a vanguard party of the working class is in no
way diminished by our close association with the national liberation
front headed by the ANC… A Communist Party does not earn the honoured
title of vanguard merely by proclaiming it. For example, a working class
Party does not exercise its vanguard role in relation to the trade
unions by capturing them or transforming them into wings of the Party,
but rather by proving that the Party and its individual members are the
most ideologically clear and the most devoted and loyal participants in
the workers’ cause. The same principle applies to a situation such as
ours in which the main immediate instrument for the achievement of the
aims of our national democratic revolution is a mass movement capable of
galvanising all classes in an assault on racist power.The African
National Congress is such an instrument and our loyal participation in
the liberation front which it heads is in the best interests of the
class whose vanguard we claim to be” “It is clear that the dominant
force in this alliance must be the working class and it is their
supremacy in the new state that will emerge after victory, which will
prevent our revolution from grinding to a halt at the point of a formal
political takeover.” (“The Way Forward from Soweto” – Extracts from
political report adopted by the Plenary Session of the Central Committee
of the SACP, April 1977)

The history of the SACP in South Africa can be captured, simultaneously
if not principally, as the history of the relationship between national
and class struggles in our country. It is a history of a struggle for
socialism in a context where the immediate struggle is that of national
liberation.
The conception of the national question and class struggles in the
history of the SACP Our critics to the ‘left’ and right have always
criticised the SACP for having either prioritised the national question
at the expense of the class struggle, or the class struggle over the
national. The ‘left’ has over the decades accused us of subjecting the
class struggle to a nationalist, if not petty bourgeois, struggle. The
right has always insisted that raising the issue of the class
contradiction within our revolution threatens to undermine or weaken the
unity of the liberation movement to fight against national, and racially
based, oppression. We have of course always (correctly) insisted that
the question in South Africa is not about which struggle is primary, the
‘class’ or the ‘national’. It is a question of properly grasping the
relationship between the two. In addition we have also argued that the
fundamental contradiction is the class contradiction – it is the key
causal contradiction that helps to explain the underlying dynamics of
South African society. The national contradiction remains the dominant
contradiction – it is the contradiction that dominates virtually all
facets of South African society.
Consequently our approach to the class and national struggles
necessarily sought to pose the question of the exact nature of the
relationship and ‘transition’ between the national liberation phase and
socialism. The SACP has consistently, but sometimes not very clearly,
proposed a set of answers to these and related questions. Much as there
is a close relationship between: __the articulation between “national”
and “class struggle”, on the one hand; and __the transition from
national liberation to socialism, on the other.
These two sets of things are not identical.
National and class struggles are always taking place whether consciously
or otherwise in any struggle for liberation and independence. But Bua
Komanisi! Volume 5, Issue No. 1, May 2006, 4 Special Edition the
achievement of formal national liberation and independence may occur
without a simultaneous or rapid transition to socialism.
The distinction and relationship within and between these two sets of
relationships have been a subject of decades of debates within
Marxism-Leninism. They are, perhaps, one of the key defining features of
Marxism-Leninism in the era of imperialist colonial domination and
exploitation.
For further conceptual clarification, the relationships outlined above
are not reducible to the relationship between the ANC and SACP, though
it could be argued that the dominant organisational expression of these
relationships for most of 20th century South Africa was through the
alliance and the relationship between these two formations.

(FULL DOCUMENT AVAILABLE AT http://www.sacp.org.za)

For more information contact Xolani Dube at 082 352 4277 or Patrick Bond
at 083 425 1401.