National Democratic Revolution, Part 0
National Democratic
Revolution, Introduction
The CU National Democratic Revolution (NDR) course will be
serialised on the CU-Africa list in the second quarter of 2012.
The NDR is the product of a class alliance (unity-in-action)
against an oppressor class. The clearest original statement of this theoretical
principle was made by V I Lenin at the Second Congress of the Communist
International (2CCI) in 1920, in his Report of the Commission on the National
and Colonial Question. We will return to the 2CCI statement in due course.
In practice, the NDR works to extend democracy to all
horizontal corners of, and to all vertical layers within, the national
territory and its population. In the cause of national democracy, it also
overcomes non-class contradictions such as those of race and gender.
The NDR is always historical, in the sense of being a
practical piece of work carried out in changing objective conditions, by
individuals acting through the structures that they have consciously created.
This series will trace the world history of the NDR from the distant past up to
the present, attempting to cover the salient features, if not all the detail.
The living history of the NDR in South Africa is that of the
African National Congress, embodying as it does the class alliance that is the
functional heart of the NDR.
COSATU, and organised labour in general, are vital
components in the necessary process of rendering an objectively-existing
class-in-itself into a self-conscious class-for-itself. The working class leads
and lends class-consciousness and a sense of purpose to the peasantry and to
the petty-bourgeoisie. The working class is indispensable to the NDR.
But labour unions are not sufficient by themselves for the
NDR; it also requires a party of generalising professional revolutionaries.
That party is the SACP.
The theoretical pattern of the NDR was set in 1920 by the
Comintern, and immediately afterwards by the conference of “The Peoples of the
East”. Before we come to this we will look at the ancient history of the
nation.
Coming up to date we will find, in parts of the ANC, that
the NDR is treated as if it is complete, or in stasis, or that it is an end in
itself.
The NDR story is one of the materialisation and triumph of
an idea all around the world, but also of a new threat: that the NDR could be
treated as a meaningless commonplace, taken for granted, or even worse,
expropriated as a political weapon by the very forces that the NDR exists to
oppose.
Unlike those who want to call closure on revolution and
declare a static “National Democratic State”, the communists know that history
will insist on moving on, beyond NDR, towards the revolutionary end of class
conflict itself, and towards the corresponding withering-away of the State.
The challenge posed by this study of the NDR is therefore to
learn how to carry out the National Democratic Revolution to its utmost
possible extent, and then to be able to conceive of an even greater degree of
freedom: a freedom that is beyond democracy and which is more than the mere
crushing of a minority by a majority, which is the essence of democracy.
As Lenin pointed out in “The State and Revolution”,
written on the eve of Great October, the withering away of the state has to
become a burning issue. Before we get to that point in our studies, we must, in
the next post of this new course on the National Democratic Revolution, begin
again from the beginning.
The first week’s postings of this new course will commence
next Thursday, 29 March 2012.
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