7 August 2014
"Building a strong Student-Worker Alliance within a Marxist Leninist Framework"
Long Live the revolutionary Alliance!
Cde. Nogcinisa - Nehawu Provincial Secretary
Cde. Ayanda Tomose - SASCO
PYA leadership
The entire membership of the SACP in the Western Cape sends its most revolutionary greetings to you this evening!
We are honoured by the invitation to share this platform here shortly after celebrating our 93 years of gallant revolutionary struggle. In the 93 years of advancing national democratic struggle the SACP has distinguished itself as a vanguard of the poor and oppressed, fighting against colonial and imperialist monstrosity at home and abroad.
We are internationalists and therefore we cannot fold our arms when injustice is perpetuated against defenseless people. The Central Committee statement on the occasion of our 93rd Anniversary categorically condemned the genocide perpetrated by Israel with the support of the western powers against the people of Palestine. This vicious genocidal campaign of the apartheid Israeli government in Gaza is abominable. It is for this reason that we, on behalf of the oppressed people of Palestine, encourage all of you to attend the national march to Parliament on Saturday to urge our government to server all ties with apartheid Israeli regime.
The disquiet of the Democratic Alliance is not surprising as they are beneficiaries of blood money from Israel capitalists. The DA is complicit in the genocidal campaign of the Israeli government. We condemn this in the strongest possible terms.
With equal measure we continue to condemn the economic blockade of the US against the peoples of Cuba. The only crime of the Cuban people is their unrelenting pursuit of socialism. For this reason we join hands with our Alliance Partner the ANC in deepening the bonds of friendship with the Cuban Revolution remembering the defeat suffered by the racist South African forces in the battle of Cuito Canavale.
Turning to the domestic situation, comrades, the revolution is on trial! As we speak the NUMSA leadership clique is convening a so-called "symposium of international left parties". This leadership clique is nothing but uncontrollable power-hungry and desperate comprador bourgeoisie bent on subverting the revolution. This clique siphoned the investment arms of the union, workers hard- earned money, to spawn a break of the Alliance. We say they will fail as all their predecessors such as the PAC, Gang of 8, UDM and COPE. Comrades, we must defend our revolution against these opportunistic and parasitic tendencies. This requires single-minded focus on building class-consciousness amongst our workers and youths of our country not to be misled by malcontents and lumpen opportunists of the EFF.
The Congolese revolutionary Patrice Lumumba in 1960 encouraged the youth of his country in the following words:
"You must energetically combat tribalism, which is a poison, a social scourge that is the country`s misfortune today. You must combat all the separatist manoeuvres, which some of the preachers of the policy of division are trying to pass off to young and inexperienced people.................." These words are relevant as if they were expressed yesterday in our country. The Nazi style chauvinists of the EFF and the separatist manoeuvres of Irvin Jim represent exactly what we must combat in our generation.
What the Irvin Jim clique fail to comprehend is our principled commitment to the Alliance with the national liberation movement. They agitated that we abandon the Alliance but they failed. To us the decision of the Second Communist International taken in 1929 to adopt the "Native or Black Republic Thesis" remains valid todate. Part of the Comintern`s Black Republic thesis for SA reads as follows:
"The Party should pay particular attention to the embryonic national organisations among the natives, such as the African National Congress. The Party, while retaining its full independence, should participate in these organisations, should seek to broaden and extend their activity. Our aim should be to transform the ANC into a fighting nationalist revolutionary organisation against the white bourgeoisie and the British imperialists, based upon the trade unions, peasant organisations, etc., developing systematically the leadership of the workers and the Communist Party in this organisation."
Our role in "developing systematically the leadership of the workers and the Communist Party" in order to ensure hegemony particularly as we advance towards the second more radical phase of our revolution is paramount.
Comrades, the theme for this discussion is Student-Worker Alliance within a Marxist Leninist Framework.
Let us begin to focus on this subject. Marxism Leninism is a worldview, a science, not common sense. The guiding principle here is the materialist conception of history guided by the dialectical method, which maintains that everything is always in a constant state of motion and change. The dialectical and materialist approach exposed the inherent tendencies or contradictions of capital and how it overcomes barriers but further place them on its way on a more formidable scale. This is the essence for understanding the crises of capitalism!
It is necessary for students to grasp this as a point of departure in order to internalize the philosophy and ideology and apply in the daily struggles of working class youth. This is not a fashion label. This requires understanding the world in its interconnectedness and the necessity for revolutionary reconstruction of society.
The Communist Manifesto tells us that the "History of all hitherto society is a history of class struggle". Whilst the youth do not constitute a class, but the reality is that you do not choose your class location in society. Therefore the working class youth must take up working class struggles. We must note that some of us live in the idealist fantasies imagining themselves as super-rich and part of the exploiting class and this idealism is reproduced daily by our education system teaching you if you believe strong enough then your dreams become reality.
Comrades you are located temporarily in institutions of higher learning and the ideas produced and reproduced here are dominated by neo-liberal anti-poor ideology. For a student movement to earn recognition as a revolutionary movement it must wage militant campaigns to effect fundamental change in this area of knowledge production because knowledge is not value free and is not neutral. In these institutions particularly UCT we are not confronting the problem of neo-liberalism alone but also its ugly twin of westernization worse still Americanisation. These evils conspire to destroy progressive values of human solidarity and sharing replacing them with deification of money and rampant greed.
This is the reality we must confront. In the theory of Feuerbach Marx said "Man make their own history but not in circumstances of their choosing". These are objective realities produced by our history but we have a revolutionary to change them to introduce progressive values for the future egalitarian society we seek to build.
The challenges confronting students actually affect society and therefore not only require student militant activism but require workers and progressive forces generally to collectively forge the struggle. Similarly the challenges besetting workers impact on students directly. When students face exclusion the hope of their families to break the cycle of poverty are compromised on the other side when workers face retrenchment as a result of outsourcing, when they exploited under subcontracting this has a direct bearing on students’ ability to afford the high costs of tertiary education.
Therefore, unity in struggle to protect our collective interests is critical. In this context let us invoke the slogan of SASCO, which declares, "We are members of the community before we are students". Students who become ivory towers above society and not embedded in community struggles are narrow reactionary forces and similarly workers that focus only shopfloor issues are narrow workerists and both phenomena are reactionary. The point of emphasis is that there is an interrelationship between student struggles and workers cause.
One of the founding fathers of the Chinese revolution Chairman Moa once posed a question, which is relevant for the discussion this evening and he asked;
"How should we judge whether a youth is a revolutionary? How can we tell? There can only be one criterion, namely, whether or not he is willing to integrate himself with the broad masses of workers and peasants and does so in practice. If he is willing to do so and actually does so, he is a revolutionary; otherwise he is a nonrevolutionary or a counter-revolutionary.
He continued further by adding that;
"If today he integrates himself with the masses of workers and peasants, then today he is a revolutionary; if tomorrow he ceases to do so or turns round to oppress the common people, then he becomes a nonrevolutionary or a counter revolutionary".
This is very instructive particularly for this evening. We know that youth challenges are many and vast and therefore need youth and students to mount the struggle under the leadership of the vanguard of the working class.
Under conditions of democratic rule we have witnessed emergence of right wing organisations in our campuses, as student leaders you need to ask yourselves how much of this is your own making. There are tendencies here that destroy the revolutionary traditions of selfless service to the revolution that are emerging which erode the confidence of students. Student leaders abusing institutional vehicles, not completing their studies there not leading by force of example academically, engaging in tenderpreneurship and therefore corruption. The more recent tendency is preoccupation with appointments of Vice Chancellors because of tenderpreneural interests. This danger is collapsing the student movement and opening space for neo-liberals to emerge.
In closing we borrow a quote from a piece by Peter Kropotkin published in 1880 under the title: An Appeal to the Young. As students we urge you to read and internalize the entire piece and not just the quotation in isolation. It reads as follows:
"To rise from the ranks of the working people, and not to devote oneself to bringing about the triumph of socialism, is to misconceive the real interests at stake, to give up the cause and the true historic mission".
Even though youth are not a class but you emerge from working backgrounds and thus to pursue any other struggle other than socialism is to betray the historic mission and commit class suicide!
Amandla!!!
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