Basic+Communism+Series,+Openings,+for+ZAPU


 * // [|Basic Communism Series, for ZAPU] //** flat

-- ** “__Openings__” **
 * Note: ** These texts are given as the equivalent of an “opening of the discussion” that one participant who had read the text would give so as to “kick off” the dialogue. There are many ways of doing an “opening”. One is to use a lot of quotations, Another is to try to find one or two strong points of controversy. Another is to attempt a summary, or “review” of the item. Another is to state, frankly, what one does not understand in the text, and ask the comrades to assist.

Here, these “openings” can serve, all together, as a short running commentary on Capital, Volume 1, that may assist people in their reading of the work. // Dominic Tweedie, 25 September 2009 //

 = 1101, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, C2, plus Glossary and Pol Ed = According to **[|its constitution]**, the SACP works to organise, educate and lead the working class. According to Liu Shaoqi (download linked below), communists should cultivate and temper themselves.

For both of these reasons, and for the immediate purpose of this set of studies called Basic Communism, it is necessary to have a theory of “pedagogy”, or in other words a theory of learning and teaching.

The great 20th-century theoretician of liberation pedagogy was Paolo Freire. He it was who gave us the word “conscientise”. It is Paulo Freire, more than any other, who showed how the bourgeois education system, with its “banking” theory of pedagogy, does not educate but reproduces the class relations that suit the bourgeoisie. Education, which should by nature liberate, is made by the bourgeoisie into a means of repression.

How can we make sure that education is part of the building of socialism and communism? To ask such a question is to “problematise” education. To ask such a question is to begin a “dialogue”

In the dialogical method of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, otherwise called Critical Pedagogy, there is no elementary, junior, senior, matriculation, undergraduate, post-graduate, doctorate or professor level.

As much as there may be a room and a gathering of individuals each known by name, and a “codification” which is the text or other object for the occasion, yet the dialogue admits no limits. The Freirean gathering is not sheltered. It is one of the essentials of Freirean Pedagogy that we refuse the fiction of the sheltered classroom, and instead recognise that the oppressor is around us and even within us, while we strive to liberate ourselves through our mutual pedagogical dialogue. In Freirean practice, there is no such thing as a basic level, or an advanced level. All that we can do is to begin a process of to “problematising” communism, beginning with education itself. The Communist University prefers to use original authors, and not commentaries on their original texts.

The first of the chosen building blocks is second chapter from Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, here supplemented with a glossary of “critical pedagogy terms and the CUs own philosophy of political education (the linked to the download is below). This is an opportunity to reflect upon what you are trying to do by learning and teaching. What is political education for?

For the late Freire (pictured above), and for the Freireans of today, education is a political act and a social act.

You may also like to refer to Chapter 1 of “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed”. Also archived is a summary of the unpolitical but very useful “Use Your Head” of Tony Buzan. Downolads are linked below. Part of Buzan’s advice is: Don’t get stuck. Skip over the difficult bits.
 * [|Click here to download the text of] [|Pedagogy of the Oppressed, C2, plus Glossary and Pol Ed] **
 * // __Further (optional) reading__ //****// : //**
 * [|1101a, How to be a good Communist, C1, Liu Shaoqi] **
 * [|1101b, Use Your Head, Conspectus, Buzan] **
 * [|1101c, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Chapter 1, Freire] **

 = 1102, The Prince, compilation, Machiavelli =



Communism is historical. Communism does not separate one part of human history from another. Communism does not break with the past, but grows out of it. In any study of communism there has to be a sense of history. In this “Basic”, series, we can usefully start to stretch our historical perspective with Machiavelli.

Machiavelli’s “Prince” was written about 500 years ago, in Florence, Italy, and published in 1512. According to Karl Marx the sixteenth century was when capitalism first arose on the earth, especially in the Netherlands and in England; but it was Italy that had the most developed political culture at that time.

Hence [|“The Prince”] appeared much earlier than the first writings on Political Economy such as those by [|Thomas Hobbes], [|William Petty] and [|Nicholas Barbon], which appeared between 1650 and 1700. Karl Marx was familiar with all of these, as well as Machiavelli’s work. The latter has been foundational for politicians through five centuries.

Both Machiavelli and Marx were familiar with the politics of ancient Greece and Rome, something that comes through in their works.

Later in life, both Marx and Engels studied human pre-history, which is the longer story of human life before writing was invented. This resulted in Engels’ famous “**The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State**” whose Chapter 9 is a grand narrative of the entire story. Commmunist thought embraces the entire sweep of human history from its earliest beginnings up to the present moment.

[|Machiavelli] was needing employment when he wrote this user-friendly text for [|Lorenzo di Piero De’ Medici] (pictured), a 20-year-old Florentine prince, hoping that the young prince would give Machiavelli a job as a consultant, or something of the sort. No job resulted for Machiavelli but what he left us as a result of this attempt was a set of “short texts” of very frank and still-useful political education, not very different from a Communist University “Generic Course”.

The chapter in this selection of four that corresponds most closely to the politics of today is Chapter IX, “Concerning a Civil Principality”. All of them are very interesting and all contain advice that is still good after 500 years. The discussion should be about this advice. If people have not read the material, one could be selected and read out loud. The chapters are very short, but powerful.

Machiavelli had a good basic understanding of class politics, which is perhaps why his works were put on the Pope’s //Index Librorum Prohibitorum// (Index of Forbidden Books) not long after his death.
 * [|Click here to download the text of] [|The Prince, Machiavelli] **
 * // __Further (optional) reading__ //****// : //**
 * [|1102a, Capital, V1, C32, Historical Tendency of Capital, Marx] **
 * [|1109a, Origin of Family, Private Property, & State, C9, Engels] **

 = 1103, Communist Manifesto, Bourgeois & Proletarians, Marx = This is the first of the three main parts of the **Communist Manifesto**, written in London by Karl Marx, at the age of 29, with the help of his then 27-year-old friend Frederick Engels, and published in January, 1848.

Also included is the final page of the Manifesto, called “Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties.”

Marx and Engels were under pressure from the Communist League to get it the job done quickly. The brief was as difficult as it could be: to produce a short, emphatic, unambiguous, motivational description of historic processes, and to announce a credible determination to change the world under the leadership of the most exploited class of people, the working class, also known as the proletariat.

Marx and Engels were convinced that the new masters, the capitalists, also known as burghers, or burgesses, or bourgeoisie, that had grown up in the towns under feudal rule, were sooner or later going to be overthrown by the proletariat that the bourgeoisie had brought into existence.

Marx fell behind the agreed deadline, but came through with a magnificent text just before the February, 1848 events in Paris that brought the proletariat on to the stage of history to an extent that had not previously been seen in the world.

The timing was great, and the text turned out to be classic to the extent that every line of it is memorable, especially in this first part. It is so rich and so compressed as to be saturated with meaning, and practically impossible to summarise. Therefore let me simply quote some of the most extraordinary sentences, so as to encourage you to read the document, not once but many times: // The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles //. // Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other - bourgeoisie and proletariat. // // The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie //. // All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. // // All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind. // The final words of the Manifesto are as follows: // In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. // // In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time. // // Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries. // // The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. // WORKERS OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE! **// __Further (optional) reading__ //****// : //**
 * [|Click here to download the text of Communist Manifesto, Bourgeois & Proletarians, Marx] **
 * [|1103a, Communist Manifesto, Proletarians & Communists, Marx] **

 = 1104, 3 Sources and 3 Component parts of Marxism, Lenin =  We have said, while discussing Machiavelli, that communism does not break with the past, but grows out of it.

This piece of writing of Lenin’s, while it is short, yet it manages to embrace the whole of philosophy, politics and economics. Lenin’s purpose is to show how comprehensive Marxism is, and that Marxism is on the “highroad of development of world civilisation.”

He puts the matter like this:  // “…there is nothing resembling "sectarianism" in Marxism, in the sense of its being a hidebound, petrified doctrine, a doctrine which arose away from the highroad of development of world civilisation. On the contrary, the genius of Marx consists precisely in the fact that he furnished answers to questions which had already engrossed the foremost minds of humanity. His teachings arose as a direct and immediate continuation of the teachings of the greatest representatives of philosophy, political economy and socialism.” //  One may appreciate this point, without necessarily accepting every simplicity in this extremely compressed account. It is a scheme of understanding, almost like a diagram. It raises many questions, for example: · Is there any such thing as “Marxism”, in the sense described here by Lenin as “ complete and harmonious” and “an integral world conception”? Karl Marx did not think so. From his own point of view, Marx had hardly completed a small part of what lay before him; and he refused the label “Marxist”. · Was Marx’s philosophy materialist? Did Marx see human beings first and foremost as arrangements of molecules – i.e. as an “extension” of materialism? Or is the actual point of Marx’s philosophy and politics to give the free human subject priority over the material, objective world in which it must toil for its development? Scholars still debate these questions. · In what sense did Marx have an economic doctrine, or economic theory? It is true that the question of surplus value is at the core of Marx’s Capital, Volume 1, but is that work an economic text-book? Or is it what Marx called it: A Critique of Political Economy?

When it comes to politics, there is no doubt about “ the //struggle of classes// as the basis and the motive force of the whole development”. 

It is pleasing that in this short, packed piece Lenin still has time to mention South Africa (in his last paragraph), and that news of proletarian organisation in our country had already reached Lenin in 1913.

For a fuller treatment that follows the same scheme of arrangement, please see Frederick Engels’ Socialism, Utopian & Scientific (download linked below).
 * [|Click here to download the text of] [|3 Sources and 3 Component parts of Marxism, Lenin] **
 * // __Further (optional) reading__ //****// : //**
 * [|1104a, Socialism, Utopian & Scientific, Engels] **

 = 1105, SACP Constitution, 2007 =

One way of understanding the structure of the SACP Constitution is to deal with it backwards.

In an MS-Word version, the SACP Constitution is about 12 pages long.

The last (short) item, **Section 25**, is about rules for amending the Constitution. The next to the last, **Section 24**, is less than two pages long. It is about the disciplinary processes in the SACP. Then (still working backwards) there is a series of sections which take up about half of the entire document. These describe each level of structure, from Units, and the basic structure of the Party (the Branch), all the way up to the highest body of the Party, which is the National Congress. All of these sections are simple, descriptive, and easy to understand. That takes us all the way back to **Section 7**, with less than one third of the document remaining. Section 7 has only two clauses, dealing with relations between the SACP and the Young Communist League. //“All decisions taken by higher structures are binding on all lower structures and individual members. Members shall have the right to pursue their views internally in the lead up to conferences or congresses with powers under this constitution to determine or reverse SACP policies. No groupings with their own discipline shall be permitted.” // Also in Section 6 is the jewel of the SACP constitution, **Rule 6.4**, which says: //“Members active in fraternal organisations or in any sector of the mass movement have a duty to set an example of loyalty, hard work and zeal in the performance of their duties and shall be bound by the discipline and decisions of such organisations and movement. They shall not create or participate in SACP caucuses within such organisations and movements designed to influence either elections or policies. The advocacy of SACP policy on any question relating to the internal affairs of any such organisations or movements shall be by open public statements or at joint meetings between representatives of the SACP and such organisations or movements.” //
 * Section 6 **, called Basic Organisational Principles, is one of the most important. Its first clause describes democratic centralism, without calling it by that name, as follows:
 * <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Section 5 **<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">is on Membership, including who can be a member, and the duties of SACP members (5.9). **Section 4** is on Guiding Principles and includes the basis of the Communist University: to //“organise, educate and lead the working class”// (4.2).
 * <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Section 3 **<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> gives the Aims of the SACP, while Sections 2 and 1 deal with the name and the symbols.


 * <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">[|Click here to download the text of] [|SACP Constitution, 2007] **<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">
 * // __Further (optional) reading__ //****// : //**
 * [|1105a, Call to the Congress of the People; Freedom Charter] **
 * [|1105b, Strategy & Tactics, Morogoro, ANC] **

 = 1106, Worker Solidarity and Unions, MIA, Meetings, Hannington = <span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"> <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> In politics, the word “vanguard” means the professional force, human framework or “cadre”, which can lead the mass movement of the people on a revolutionary path. <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">The relationship of the revolutionary vanguard to the mass organisations of the people is similar to the relationship of a doctor to the people, or of accountants and lawyers to businesses, or of an architect or an engineer to builders and their clients. The vanguard is made up of professional revolutionaries. <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">The revolutionary vanguard is a servant, and not a master. The vanguard party of the working class serves the working class, and does not boss it. <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">The working-class vanguard party, which is the communist party, is not separate from the mass movement. It is intimately involved with the mass movement at all times and at all levels. To be a vanguard at all, it must study the workings of the mass movement. <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">The vanguard party educates, organises and mobilises. As a vanguard, it must have expert knowledge how mass movements in general, and especially about how the primary mass organisations of the working class which are the trade unions, work. <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">To deal with this crucial matter (how trade unions work) the Communist University has chosen a text from the Marxists Internet Archive ’s Encyclopaedia of Marxism, written by Brian Basgen and Andy Blunden, two comrades who clearly have vast experience of what they are writing about. <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">This text is empirical and experiential and there is nothing wrong with that, because experiential is exactly what trade unions and other mass organisations are. Trade unions arise out of the existing consciousness of workers as they are found under capitalism. In many ways workers emulate capitalist forms of organisation. Their initial purpose is to get a better money deal in exchange for their labour-power in the capitalist labour-market. <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Trade unions are in the first place reformist, not revolutionary. Nor can trade unions become revolutionary without the assistance of professional revolutionaries, organised separately as a communist party. Lenin dealt with this relationship in “ What is to be Done? ” (download linked below). <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Trade unionists who think that they can dispense with the assistance of a communist party are on a road to ruin. <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> Crucial to the democracy of mass organisations are the Rules of Debate and Procedure of Meetings. These are a bit like language, or [|political education], or the Internet, in the sense of being communistic. They are not given as authority. They are not imposed by a “state”. There is no institutional enforcer of these rules. <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">For example, the South African Communist Party has no given Rules of Debate or Standing Orders. Unfortunately this does not prevent people from claiming “Points of Order”! The nature of the notional “rules” is such that they are only effective to the extent that they are understood in common by the members of any particular gathering. <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Wal Hannington [1896-1966, pictured] was well known as a communist leader of the unemployed workers’ movement in Britain in the 1930s. Our summary of his 1950 booklet “Mr Chairman” is included with this item on Trade Unions because communists involved in trade unions need this knowledge. <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Hannington wrote: "The Chairman is there to guide the meeting, not to boss it." This is the most valuable message in his book. The Rules of Debate and the Procedures of Meetings are only justified to the extent that they liberate the people present. They become useless when they are felt as a burden or an obstruction. <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">The point is not for the Chairperson to “keep order”, or for individuals to be bullied down with “points of order”. The Chairperson serves the meeting, and the meeting needs to know how to guide the Chairperson. Everything works best when everyone knows the generic Rules of Debate. <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">
 * <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Rules of Debate **
 * <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">[|Click here to download the text of] [| Worker Solidarity and Unions, MIA, Meetings, Hannington] **
 * // __Further (optional) reading__ //****// : //**
 * [|1106a, What is to be Done, Workers & Revolutionaries, Lenin] **

 = 1107, Negotiations, MIA = <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> We proceed from an understanding of the vanguard relationship between the communists and the mass of the working class who are initially organised in trade unions for self-defense, and not for revolutionary purposes. <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">We included the [|Rules of Debate] that are applied in those and other organisations. We now come to the practical means by which trade unions do their business: Negotiation. <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Negotiation is what two parties must always do in order to arrive at an agreement to exchange one thing for another, or in other words to arrive at a common contract. In the case of trade union negotiations with employers, the two sides are trying to arrive at a bargain for the exchange of Labour-Power for money. <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Inflation (a rise in the money prices of all commodities) makes it inevitable that the price of Labour-Power must also be re-negotiated at frequent, often annual, intervals. Contrary to what is often written about negotiations there is no presumption of dispute about this process. On the contrary, the invariable aim on all sides is to arrive at a bargain. <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">On the way to the bargain, there may be “failure to agree”, and sometimes there may be a “withdrawal of labour”, but there is no attempt to upset the relationship of boss and worker. The boss/worker relationship is confirmed, and not threatened, by the process of negotiation. <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">So long as there is “failure to agree”, people will talk of a “wage dispute” and sometimes they will use military language to describe what happens. Yet even in military terms, as Clausewitz wrote in his book “** On War ** ” : “ ** The Result in War is Never Absolute ** ”. In other words the combatants will inevitably have to live together in peace again after the war. Negotiation is a skill that can be learned. The linked document is a very good short introduction to wage negotiation. It comes from the MIA ** [|Encyclopedia of Marxism] **.

<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">
 * [|Click here to download the text of] [|Negotiations, MIA] **

 = 1108, Value, Price and Profit, Parts 6 to 10, Marx = <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">By 1865 **Karl Marx** (pictured) had solved the theoretical problems of his work, “Capital”, on Surplus Value, and in that year he gave the well-known address to a gathering of workers that afterwards became a popular publication under the name “Value, Price and Profit”, also sometimes called “Wages, Price and Profit”. The first volume of “Capital” was published two years later. <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">This short book has served the labour movement well, down the years. Among other things, it debunks the argument, still attempted by employers and their apologists in South Africa today, that wage rises will cause unemployment. <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">It shows how commodities, including commodity Labour-Power, are normally sold at their full value, yet how, at the same time, the worker is getting swindled every day. It explains this apparent paradox. <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">It encourages workers to struggle for better wages and conditions, but it also (prefiguring Lenin’s argument against “Economism” forty years later in “What is to be Done?”) shows clearly why trade unionism, without political organisation, will never succeed in throwing off the yoke of capital. <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">The abridged version of “Value, Price and Profit”, linked below, can serve as the short, or “basic”, version of “Capital” that so many people long for. It will help us to get a better grip on some of the key concepts in “Capital, Volume 1” such as Labour, Value, Labour-Power, and above all, Surplus-Value. <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">For this purpose we have put aside many of the sections of “Value, Price and Profit”. The work is available on the Internet for anyone who would like to read it in full. The best source for Marxist classics in general on the Internet is the ** [|Marxists Internet Archive] ** (MIA).
 * [|Click here to download the text of] [|Value, Price and Profit, Parts 6 to 10, Marx] **
 * // __Further (optional) reading__ //****// : //**
 * [|1108a, Capital V1, C1, Commodities, Marx] **

 = 1109, Lecture on The State, Lenin = <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">In “** Bourgeois and Proletarians **”, the first section of the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx wrote: //“The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”// In other words: The State is the executive committee of the ruling class. <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">The State manifests itself in many ways. Not only is it Legislature, Executive and Judiciary, but it is also the “Special Bodies of Armed Men” (police and military), the “sovereign document” of the Constitution, the State Owned Enterprises, and “Delivery” departments like Education, Health, Public Works; and others. <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">As communists we hold fast to the concept of the State as the instrument of class power that enforces and perpetuates bourgeois class dictatorship in our country. We do not believe that the State is neutral, or above class struggle. The State is the principal instrument of class struggle on behalf of the ruling bourgeois class. <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">We intend that there should as soon as possible be no class division and therefore that the State as we know it would become redundant and give way to social self-management, or in other words, to communism. <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Yet the term “State” is used in other, less strict senses, and we as political people who must communicate with others, do also use the word in other senses than the above. For example, we sometimes use the phrase “Developmental State”, which even if we ourselves would qualify its meaning, is nevertheless widely understood as meaning a State that is equally beneficial to all classes (i.e. is a “win-win” or classless or neutral state). <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">We are fortunate to have the lecture that Lenin [pictured] gave to students in Moscow in 1919 on this topic, wherein Lenin asks //“what is the state, how did it arise and fundamentally what attitude to the state should be displayed by the party of the working class, which is fighting for the complete overthrow of capitalism - the Communist Party?”// Lenin referred his audience to <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Engels’ //“** Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State **”.// This link goes to Chapter 9, the summarising chapter of the book. This book sweeps through the whole human story and explains the fall of the women, as well as class struggle and the state. <span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-ZA; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">

For a fuller treatment from Lenin, there is the extraordinary work that he produced between the two Russian revolutions of February and October, 1917: “The State and Revolution” (download linked below)
 * [|Click here to download the text of the] [|Lecture on The State, Lenin] **
 * // __Further (optional) reading__ //****// : //**
 * [|1109a, Origin of Family, Private Property, & State, C9, Engels] **
 * [|1109b, State and Revolution, C1, Class Society & The State, Lenin] **

 = 1110, Democracy & Culture, Shivji, Malik, African Socialism, Nkrumah = In the last of the CU Basic Communism set we touch upon the single biggest historic task of the Communists in the period since the founding of the ** [|Communist International] ** (a.k.a. Third International) in 1919: National Liberation.

In 1920 the Comintern organised a ** [|Congress of the Peoples of the East] **. It was the first international anti-colonial congress. The Comintern recognised Communist Parties in many countries (including South Africa’s CPSA in 1921). In 1928 the Comintern and the CPSA adopted the “Black Republic” policy for South Africa, making the CPSA the first South African party to call for black majority rule in South Africa. The CPSA was also the first non-racial party South African in terms of its membership.

This is some of our part in the story. But the worldwide story of the past century, under the impetus of the Communists more than any other single political component, has been a story of political independence of the former colonies worldwide. The masses of the world have risen time and again in National Democratic Revolutions, with the invariable support of the Communists. Our internationalist duties still continue. Any “Basic Communism” series must mention this.

Since the victories in so many (150-plus) countries, constituting the vast majority of the population of the globe, that set them free of direct colonial rule, the Imperialist powers have sought to re-impose themselves by other means.

One who has made the anti-Imperialist case very well in this regard is the Tanzanian professor Issa Shivji [pictured], to remind us that it is we freedom-fighters who are the humanists now, and it is the Imperialists who are the barbarians, a message also reinforced by Kenan Malik’s short, included piece about culture. From the time of Eduard Bernstein and his 1899 book “** [|Evolutionary Socialism] **”, and Rosa Luxemburg’s 1900 response to Bernstein, “** [|Reform or Revolution?] **”, the same question has been put, in one way or another.
 * African Socialism **

In the history of the struggle for liberation from colonialism in Africa, the question “Reform or Revolution” was again put. To sound better and to deceive the people more easily, false “Socialism” was dressed up as “African Socialism”, and was widely used as a smokescreen for neo-colonialism from the dawn of African Independence in the 1950s and 1960s.

Dr Kwame Nkrumah spoke out firmly against this false so-called African Socialism more than forty years ago. See the linked article below. Although Kwame Nkrumah and his adversary Leopold Senghor are both long gone, yet Nkrumah’s words appear to carry as much relevant meaning as they did when they were spoken in Cairo in 1967.


 * [|Click here to download the text of Democracy & Culture, Shivji, Malik; African Socialism, Nkrumah] **


 * // __Further (optional) reading__ //****// : //**
 * [|1110a, On the Time for Armed Struggle, Pomeroy] **
 * [|1110b, Popular Unity Rule (Chile) plus Dimitrov Intervention] **
 * [|1110c, SA Working Class & National Democratic Revolution, Slovo] **


 * Return to Basic Communism Console **