Call to the CoP;
Freedom Charter
In our “Basics” course, this
document is given as an alternative or supplementary discussion document to the
main one on the SACP constitution, so that we could have a discussion around mass
and vanguard organisation, alliances between classes, and the role of the Party.
The SACP’s Rule 6.4 makes a
good basis for alliances. The attitude and principle that Rule 6.4 represents
has been successful over the decades. Alliance of mass democratic organisations
was exemplified the 1955 Congress of the People and the Freedom Charter that
was adopted there.
The Freedom Charter was much
more than a list of demands. It was an integral part of a conscious
nation-building project which had real revolutionary content and which
demonstrated real democracy in action, following the banning of the communist
party (CPSA) in 1950.
The campaign of which the
Freedom Charter was a part, and which generated the Charter, began long before
the Kliptown event. It was also intended to go on for a long time afterwards.
It got under way with the collection, by countrywide volunteers, of suggestions
and inputs to the document, so that the people could “write their own demands
into the Charter of Freedom”, as the “Call” document said.
In practice, the campaign was
disturbed, following the Kliptown event, by the arrest of many of the Congress and
allied leadership, in 1956, and the subsequent Treason Trial. But this did not
stop the Freedom Charter from attaining the classic status that it still
carries today.
Those old comrades laid down
a well-designed pattern. It appealed to the heart as well as to the eye and to
the mind, and it still surrounds us today, manifested in the continuing
Congress Alliance of which the SACP, legal again, is now an open part.
As it was when Lenin spoke in
the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1920, so it was again in
1955: Two things were required. The first was a genuine class alliance and
unity-in-action against the main oppressor class, the colonialist monopoly
capitalists. The other was the deliberate extension of democracy for the
creation of a democratic nation.
The CoP campaign was exactly
in this mould.
Please download and read
this text via the following link:
Further reading:
Strategy and
Tactics, Morogoro, 1969, ANC
(5882 words)
SACP Constitution, 2007
(6603 words)
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