The content on this page is not written by Polity.org.za, but is supplied by third parties. This content does not constitute news reporting by Polity.org.za.

A Call of History.

What began, in the course of the long three (3) decades of a political settlement between the leadership of the national liberation movement and the Apartheid capitalist state, as a form of an unsanctioned, undeclared, organic and quiet, sturdy referendum and balance sheet of the state of the nation, is today becoming louder, more desperate and more exasperating, pointing directly with greater vigor and a refined confidence, that the political democracy it conferred to the people is not only rigged, but is alien to the common aspirations of the people, the Black Working Class in particular.

The loud voices of the people are real, and are indeed far more concrete than the fantastic chicanery of liberal constitutionality, national codetermination and the delusions of the social contract of the 1994 political moment. We declare in common with the working class, today tossed in a well of helpless despair, that the political settlement lay postrate, the democratic cobweb is flung open, is ending in tragedy, and the gauntlet is openly thrown.

Who shall pick it up? Our answer is equally concrete – the proletariat shall pick it up, lead the whole of society in struggle, and promulgate the Second Republic of Workers and Peoples, in South Africa and the region. It is such possibilities the Conference is called upon to render consummate and in struggle. It is in this political moment that we view with hope, and hail with revolutionary circumspection, the SACP-EFF call for the Conference of the Left.

We welcome and support the SACP-EFF call and for what it is worth – i.e. the possibility to bear answers to one single and central problem - under what government, in what state, and under the leadership of what social class, would a true socialist program and tasks of the revolutionary

proletariat be accomplished? and whether Conference, could indeed offer the possibility that the struggle against the bourgeoisie and the political class ensconced under its wing, may, for the first time, develop in its unchequered, undiluted form, and uncompromised by any political policy forcing its channeling towards tailing petit bourgeois nationalism.

That, the proletariat, for once, may be able to create its own instrument for persecuting the struggle for political power, its own independent pole of political reference and fortress against bourgeois society, domestic and imperialist, its cultural and epistemic dominion, and its armed violence.

Our Political Perspective.

We hold a political perspective that the working class stands betrayed in a state bent on serving neoliberal principalities, and the bureaucracies watching over them in their own organizations. It is marshalled by false leaders, and is disciplined into obedience by capitalist institutions. Yet beneath this decay, something stirs and history calls. The masses, even as they stand on uneven footing, and without any politically coherent articulations, nor revolutionary conclusions;

(1) Can see through the thinness of the edifice of bourgeois political democracy, as an inherently flawed social structure, and as standing in direct collision with their most basic desires and demands.

2) To the minimum extent that the Marxist left itself is experiencing a slight shift in its gazing, is the greater inverse proportion the masses are turning further and further away from their original primitive condition. This phenomenon keeps the left in trail behind the masses, the ‘vanguard’ behind the working class.

This transcendental break and movement in mass consciousness can be explained in the understanding that, the masses, in their primitive stage, saw themselves through the lenses of their elected mainstream party political representatives and upon whom they entrusted the future of the country and the resolution of their material realities; abject poverty, joblessness, declining living standards.

3) But, with deepening contradictions of capitalism, in particular, the shifting centres of accumulation coming through with a de-industrializing impulse and the enclosure of the many avenues for their subsistence and reproduction, has been a sharp decline in the credibility of the standing political edifice of parliamentary representation holding the promise of entire bourgeois society and it’s institutional framework. These delusions continue to stand today, however, on roughening, shaking, unstable ground.

4) Although the proletarian masses have hardly reached any hard revolutionary conclusions', i.e., meaning the proletariat has not reached conclusions that the entire political edifice ought to be hauled to ground, in relative terms, and in a continuum of its evolving class consciousness, it has traversed notches ahead, and enough to have reached an unfamiliar and a puzzling terrain, and impasse (part of which is the bewildering experience of having to disdain its traditional political home - the Congress movement).

5) However, since it has not been educated in the line of class politics reflecting its own class position and strength, has not imbibed class politics – i.e. is brought up on the diet and a political spirit of liberalized national democracy - it is as yet unable to see the class essence of its betrayal and thus, counterpose the political logic of its own class social standing, create its own organized political pole, in its own name, program and flag. It stands, as though, on an interregnum of shifting ground between revolution and reaction. The left must lift it from the morass of indecision.

But what has so far been the left answer to this condition? "let's build a movement first" then, in stagist sequence, a Party. These apparently separate stages must occur simultaneously. The revolutionary left must work towards unashamedly building a party of the revolutionary working class.

The duty of the revolutionary left, upon the attainment of an instrument of political power, an organization of the working class, must proceed to cause the working masses to immerse itself through a more intense baptism in class politics, and on Marxist basis.

This work is neither going to be easy nor complicated, since the boundaries between (proletarian) progression and (bourgeois) restoration, shall have been drawn in earnest, and in a deeply explosive fashion; shall have cut through the middle of bourgeoisie society, opening widely the antagonisms of the two contending and organized classes, the working masses shall refuse to stop short of purging the fetters of bourgeois experience, that only yesterday collapsed them to ground. It is in such struggles that may present conditions for dual power; conditions where the socialist question is posed and posed in permanence.

Our Call to Conference

That, Conference places at the centre of all its activities, a direct gaze towards the ears and eyes of the working class- must turn its word and did, it’s propaganda machinery to the class itself; must appeal to the working class far more and with all its strength and consistency, than appealing to authorities and the administration of a bourgeois government.

It Is the turn of such authority that must, this time around, decide it’s own future, its own comeuppance. It must cause the working class to come in close and tight contact with the truth about the political situation. Conference must draw a line between a political strategy internal to capitalism and one that breaks its enduring chain and must demonstrate that combating bourgeois restoration and continuity, as has happened with the GNU, requires, simultaneously a movement from below; the creation of assemblies, sovereign workplace councils, sovereign community organizations and a revolutionary party as a coordinating platform for all mass activity as a whole, not in sequential stages but in dialectical development.

In respect of the latter connection, the OC, has been consistent at calling for the convocation of a Mass Working Class Assembly to deliberate and to consider the formation of a Mass Working Class Party. The OC, is certainly not blindly calling for a Mass Working Class Party, nor is it a case of its entrapment in old formula. Working class organizations always occupy one particular place reflecting the scales in a continuum between elementary and advance consciousness – from a community service campaign, a workers economic strike, including a general strike and through a trade union form of organization, a

workers party standing above trade unionism, only second to the very highest – i.e., a Marxist revolutionary party. This hierarchical ranking, is not arbitrary on the part of the working class. It is a function of the layered scaffolding of capitalist social relations and organization. It is in that line of function that a workers party, unlike its highest form, embraces all workers, and is reflective of the unevenness of their political consciousness.

It is the duty of the Marxist Revolutionary party of professional combatants, organized separately and independently of every other organizational form ; to argue for and work towards a Working class party that imbibe a socialist program and orientation - to guide, and to be guided, but to help the class lift its political horizons higher, i.e. to forge an anti capitalist, rather than a social democratic, and to weld in its program, an anti imperialist, internationalist worldview - to attain such cultural heights as to reject all forms of social chauvinism.

While the Marxist Revolutionary Party remains autonomous, it had no interests separate from the working class as a whole and in its various forms of organization and rhythms of struggles, seeking to unify, collectivize and to escalate the offensive against Capital and the capitalist state. Conference is to make that solemn uncompromising call – Proletarians of All Countries Unite – to resonate across the country and the region.

And, in the context of today’s conflagrations concerning immigration - to point out to the class as a whole, and across territories and lands - their common arch enemy – the bourgeoisie and the African political elites at the coat tails of imperialist Capital.

Costs and Risks of Delay.

A prolonged absence of a coherent and a revolutionary political alternative risks regression to reactionary practice and the surrender of mass energy and will to counterrevolution: tribalism, criminality, patriarchal ideologies, right-wing white supremacy, neo-fascism and support for Zionist secession and balkanization of the country and the Continent.

Conclusion.

The crises of the political moment are twofold: the crises of revolutionary leadership, and a crisis of class political power. As the OC-MWCA we look forward to a successful Conference of the Left.

Issued by the organising committee for the mass working class assembly (OC for MWCA)