2005-11-21,+Exchange+of+messages+with+Mazibuko+Jara

Exchange of e-mails on 15 November

Comrade Tweedie

How are you? Long time!

Please check the attached document. It is my critique of the Party approach on the JZ matter. I would like to hear your comments on it as it is quite critical of the Party approach.

I have submitted it to the Party HQ, the Western Cape PEC and the YCL National Committee. I ask that you circulate it to your communist university email list.

Thanks

Mazibuko

Dear Comrade Mazibuko,

Thank you very much. I will be very happy to distribute your paper in the interest of dialogue and the sharpening of contradictions.

I will re-format it into Arial 11-point as opposed to Arial Narrow 12-point, if you don't mind.

I will also put it on the Debate Forum, unless you object. I'll do all this tomorrow morning.

I have skimmed through it and see things I would agree with, things that I am indifferent to, and gaps, that is to say things that are absent that I would argue should be there.

I think the picture you paint of the jostling bourgeois factions is true.

My own way of dealing with this whole question is to root it in the Alliance in particular and the necessity of class alliance tactics in general. I rely quite heavily on Joe Slovo's 1988 "SA Working Class and the NDR". The working class must not voluntarily isolate itself.

This question has positive and defensive aspects. I mean that there are bourgeois factions who want to destroy the alliance and re-make the ANC in the image of a bourgeois reformist social-democratic party, and declare the NDR to be over. This would be accompanied by the break-up of the working-class mass formations (i.e. union-busting) and the hounding of the SACP into the margins (or worse, outright counter-revolutionary persecution). Except for the last, all these elements were openly presented to the ANC NGC in July. They were all rejected but their promoters have not faltered and continue to scheme.

I suspect that they are the particular bourgeois faction that already has its candidate in place in the shape of Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka. This faction I presume includes Saki Macozoma, Mzi Khumalo, Penuel Maduna, Bulelani Ngcuka and Khaya Ngqula.

So long as we are involved in liberal bourgeois democracy (as opposed to a working-class democratic dictatorship) we have to have a candidate to carry the flag of our interest against this faction. That interest is the maintenance of the National Democratic Revolutionary Alliance.

We have to have interlocutors in the bourgeois camp. This is an absolute pre-requisite for alliance politics in our circumstances.

In my opinion, any such interlocutor, whether it be Jacob Zuma, Kgalema Motlanthe, or any other one, is the crucial single link and at the same time the most vulnerable link in the chain binding the alliance together. If it were not Jacob Zuma, any other candidate would be subject to the same dirty tricks as have been used against him, or other tactics to the same effect.

If we were to abandon Zuma, then we would have to have another interlocutor and Presidential candidate. I have not seen yet where you deal with the alternative to Zuma in this regard (I will have a closer look at your paper later).

More important than the tactical bourgeois-democratic requirement for us to have a Presidential candidate of this kind is the strategic requirement to retain the alliance; and along with the alliance goes the equally strategic necessity of building the autonomous organisations of the working class. It seems to me we are managing to do this latter task at a fairly strong rate, and we should continue to push it.

In this strategic sense it is not a question of whether we support Zuma in particular or not. But the actual circumstances demand that we support a candidate who is not in our party. The fallacy of criticising Zuma for not being a Communist is the logical consequence of demanding a fully Communist candidate - which will not serve the cause of alliance.

Only if you can argue that the alliance as presently constructed is bust, and also that we have alternative organs of peoples' power, can we contemplate a revolutionary government that is fully and explicitly socialist, and **even then it would still have to be an alliance**.

That's what I think!

It's nice to hear from you. I hope that you and Noelene are enjoying life in the Cape.

Best revolutionary wishes,

Dominic.

got your comments. will go through them overnight. pls do not send it to the debate list as it may slip from there to the media even before the YCL NC discusses the doc next week. cape town is a beautiful colonial city.