Basics,
Part 10c
SA Working Class and the NDR
In this final
part of our “Basics” course, we have looked at democracy, armed struggle, and
popular unity-in-action, in terms of various countries of the world. The
National Democratic Revolution is not a South African invention. It is a
worldwide phenomenon, but it has also generated a specifically South African
literature of the NDR.
Joe Slovo published the SA Working Class
and the National Democratic Revolution (see the link below) at a time
when he was the General Secretary of the SACP. The Party was still clandestine.
The end of its 40-year period of illegality was to come two years later. Like
many political documents, this pamphlet takes shape around a polemical response
to contemporary opponents who may no longer be well-remembered (in this case it
was the particular “workerists” and compromisers of the time that Slovo
mentions on the first page of the document).
But as with the polemics of Marx, Engels and Lenin, in the
course of the argument against otherwise long-forgotten foes, Slovo was obliged
to set up a fully concrete, rounded assessment of the meaning of the NDR, which
still remains today as the best single and definitive text on this matter in
South Africa.
Slovo quickly establishes the class-alliance basis of the
NDR and quotes Lenin saying that: “the advanced class ... should fight
with… energy and enthusiasm for the cause of the whole people, at the head of
the whole people”. This advanced class is the working class. Slovo
goes on to write of the continuity of the NDR and of the institutional
organisation that is the bricks-and-mortar of nation-building.
Slovo’s is a long document but it has many possibilities as
the basis for a discussion and that is always our purpose: dialogue.
This instalment ends the “Basics” course. The next course on
this channel will start being sent out at the end of this week. It will be an
improved and 50% larger version of the African Revolutionary Writers Series
that was first flighted last year on the Communist University. The previous version
can be read here.
Please download and
read this text via the following link:
The South African Working Class and the NDR, 1988, Slovo (14985 words)
Further reading:
On the Time for Armed
Struggle, 1974, Pomeroy (6800 words)
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