Basics, Part 0
Introduction
to “Basics”
The SADTU Political Education
Forum will be serialising the ten-week “Basics” course during
the first quarter of 2014. This course was designed to satisfy comrades who are
impatient to acquire the political fundamentals as quickly as possible.
At the same time, it is
designed to open doors to further studies, including, but not limited to, the
other 15 courses of the Communist University (find them here, or here,
in the links below the top).
Each post will have,
attached, at least one PDF file of an original text, formatted for printing as
a booklet. Each post will consist of an opening to a discussion of that text. Please
join in the dialogue around these posts by e-mail. Serialising the courses in
parts is what allows the possibility of such e-mail dialogue.
By contributing to dialogue,
you will multiply the value of this course for yourself, and for others.
Education
The course begins with reflections
on the theory of teaching and learning. This is so that we can know what we are
doing, how we will do it, and why. In general, the theory that underlies the
pedagogical approach of the Communist University is that of Paulo Freire,
author of “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed”. Not only is it crucial to ourselves
as we proceed, but it is also given as a political method, and as the actual
substance of political practice. Education is politics, and politics is
education. Education takes place in dialogue.
The rest of the course
The second part leads with
Machiavelli, backed up with texts on Capital and The State by Marx and Engels
respectively. The third part is the Communist Manifesto of 1848, followed by
summarising works by Lenin and Engels on the fourth part. By this stage we should
have made out a good general outline of the material history of the world, and of
its constant class struggles.
In the fifth part we come
back to South Africa to look at the SACP’s short constitution, and to other
crucial South African documents: the 1955 Freedom Charter and the 1969 Morogoro
“Strategy and Tactics” document of the ANC.
In the sixth and seventh
parts we deal with the relation of the vanguard party to the mass organisations
of the working class, in particular trade unions and their work of collective
bargaining with capitalist employers. Then we go straight to Karl Marx’s
classic lecture on this topic, “Value, Price and Profit”, backed up by the
great Chapter One of Marx’s Capital, Volume 1, on Commodities.
In part nine we return to a closer
examination of the state, starting with Lenin’s lecture on the state, and then using
the great classics, Engels’ “Origin of the Family, Private Property and The
State”, and Lenin’s “The State and Revolution”.
The tenth part is dedicated
to the on-going struggle against Imperialism, using several short texts as well
as Joe Slovo’s great “The South African Working Class and the National
Democratic Revolution”.
The whole course can be
downloaded in the form of PDF files (printable as booklets) from:
0 comments:
Post a Comment