National Democratic
Revolution, Part 9
SA Working Class and the NDR
The previous week’s part of this 10-part series on the National
Democratic Revolution was based around the ANC’s Morogoro Strategy and Tactics
document of 1969. We took our examination of the development of South Africa’s
NDR up to the beginning of 1976, when the document “The Enemy Hidden Under the
Same Colour” was published following the treachery and the consequent
expulsion from the ANC of the “Gang of Eight”.
Later the same year the “Soweto uprising” of youth began and spread all
over the country.
Trade Unionism re-expanded from the early 1970s with strike waves in
Durban and in the Witwatersrand where the watershed Carletonville Massacre took
place on 11 September 1973. This year marks the fortieth anniversary of that
event.
FOSATU, a syndicalist-led federation, was formed in 1979. It gave way to
the National Democratic Revolutionary Alliance-aligned COSATU in 1985.
The United Democratic Front was launched in 1983.
All of these activities, amounting to the creation of living, democratic
structures on a national scale, typify the National Democratic Revolution. They
showed precisely how organisation into democratic structures formed the
relentless collective Subject of History that then became impossible to resist.
Joe Slovo published “The SA Working Class
and the National Democratic Revolution” (see the attached document,
also linked below) in 1988 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
enforced illegality was to come two years later. Like many political documents,
this one 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. He succeeded brilliantly.
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 organising work that produces
the bricks-and-mortar of nation-building.
Slovo’s incomparable document
has many possibilities as the basis for a discussion; and that is always our
purpose: dialogue.
·
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.
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