Course on Anti-Imperialism, War and Peace, Part
6b
How to Master Secret Work
The third linked item is the 1980 clandestine SACP
publication “How to Master Secret Work”.
It makes a point that we need here, which is that there is no virtue in being
illegal.
The communists do not volunteer to be illegal.
The nature of secret work is really that it is a systematic
struggle against banning and persecution. As much as it is secret, yet its
purpose is the re-expansion of communication and the re-legalisation of the
Party. Its purpose is the public political rebirth of the organisation.
Within less than ten years of the publication of this
document, the SACP was unbanned and declared fully legal again, as it has remained
ever since, up to today.
The SACP had been banned and was underground (“clandestine”)
from 1950 to 1990, a total of forty years. All that time the Party struggled to
reverse the situation of banning and illegality. It announced its existence
with the publication of the African Communist from 1959. “How to Master Secret
Work” was published in the underground newspaper, Umsebenzi.
The great majority of secret work is about communicating,
and through communication, deliberately reversing the Party’s excommunication
from society.
There is no imaginable situation where the political
vanguard will deliberately choose to be clandestine and make a virtue of its
excommunication from the masses. There is no virtue in secrecy.
Unfortunately we have none of the lively illustrations from
this historic document, only the text.
Please download and read this text:
How to Master Secret
Work, 1980, SACP (13929 words)
Further
reading:
On the Time for
Armed Struggle, 1974, Pomeroy (6800 words)
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