Hegemony in the NDR

National Democratic Revolution, Part 10

Hegemony in the NDR

On 14 September 2009 the South African Communist Party released a main discussion document (attached) in preparation for the SACP Special National Congress that took place in December 2009 at the Turfloop campus in Polokwane, Limpopo Province.

This document is titled “Building working class hegemony on the terrain of a national democratic struggle”. It is therefore directly in line with the previous eleven parts of this series on the National Democratic Revolution, and it presents an opportunity to conclude the 10-part series in an open-ended fashion that is suited to the present conjuncture.

The most relevant parts of this document to our discussion so far are Part 2.4 (“The politics of working class hegemony...versus the politics of a multi-class balancing act”) and the whole of Part 3 (“Towards a politics of mass-driven, state-led radical transformation on the terrain of a National Democratic Revolution”).

In an echo of Lenin’s “The State and Revolution”, the SACP document notes that the “sectarian left” (equivalent to Lenin’s “anarchists”) and the “centrist reformists” (Lenin’s “opportunists”) are twins in their subjective denigration of the NDR. Lenin said that the anarchists and the opportunists are twins.

This document was work-in-progress.

At the Congress, a Political Report was given which is downloadable in PDF format from the SACP web site, here. It is called “Together, let’s defeat capitalist greed and corruption! Together, build socialism now!”

As usual in the Freirean practice of pedagogy, we are not looking for closure, but rather to reveal and expose the problems of the moment: In short, to problematise. The second instalment of this part will be the Strategy and Tactics document passed at another Polokwane event, held two years earlier, the 52^nd National Conference of the ANC; and that will be the end of the series on South Africa’s National Democratic Revolution this time around.

• The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Building hegemony on national democratic terrain, 2009, SACP, Part 1 and Part 2.

• To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.