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. Now we
look again at South Africa. 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 above is to introduce the original reading-text: The South African Working Class
and the NDR, 1988, Slovo, Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.
- To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.
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