ANC Strategy and Tactics, Polokwane

CU, NDR, Part 12a

  

ANC Strategy and Tactics, Polokwane

This is the last item of the CU series on the National Democratic Revolution which has been running via the SADTU Political education blog, and the SADTU Political Education e-mail forum. It has also been running on the Ars Notoria web site. It will be followed in these particular channels, from next week, by a six-part series on Lenin’s “The State and Revolution”

Also starting very soon, but via other, different channels, will be a ten-part CU course on Philosophy and Religion and a twenty-four part CU course on Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume 1. If you wish to make sure of receiving these other two distributions, in addition to “The State and Revolution”, please send your e-mail address to dominic.tweedie@gmail.com, with an indication of which additional courses you wish to receive.

Static or revolutionary?

This, the second in this final part, where the main document is the SACP 2009 discussion document, is the current version of the ANC Strategy and Tactics, amended several times since the original was adopted in Morogoro in 1969, as passed by the 52^ndANC National Conference at Polokwane,

The ANC 52^nd National Conference was otherwise considered a victory for the popular forces within the ANC. But from paragraph 90, this document launched a revision of the previously much clearer understanding of class and colour in South Africa.

Now, in the latest S and T, all are ranked in a single notional table, as “motive forces”. “Blacks in general and Africans in particular” become commensurate with “The Working Class”.

In the draft, monopoly capital, too, was going to be included as a “motive force”, thereby removing even the oppressor from the equation, but this was changed in commission at Polokwane.

This version of the S&T document remains above all marred by its static and non-revolutionary conception of “National Democratic Society” as a “Holy Grail” and final steady-state condition of what Thabo Mbeki used to call a “normal” society.

The idea of closure on the NDR without its becoming something more, is close to Francis Fukuyama’s provocative 1992 “post-Cold-War” essay “The End of History and the Last Man”. History has not ended; and the “Last Man” is only a nightmare of the proto-fascist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900).

We have not arrived at a closure of the NDR. The struggle continues.Hi

[Image: ANC President Jacob Zuma]

Downloads:

Strategy and Tactics, Polokwane, 2007, ANC (17523 words)

Further reading:

Building hegemony on national democratic terrain, 2009, SACP (13222 words)