National Democratic Revolution
The National Democratic Revolution (NDR) is the product of a class alliance (unity-in-action) against an oppressor class. In practice the NDR works to extend democracy to all horizontal corners of, and all vertical layers within, the national territory and its population. In the cause of national democracy, it also overcomes non-class contradictions such as those of race and gender.
The NDR is always historical. It is a practical piece of work carried out in changing objective conditions, by individuals acting through the structures that they have consciously created. This is the first of a series that will trace the world history of the NDR from the distant past up to the present, attempting to cover the salient features, if not all the detail.
The living history of the NDR in South Africa is the African National Congress (ANC), embodying as it does the class alliance that is the functional heart of the NDR. The ANC is South Africa's liberation movement.
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), and organised labour in general, are vital components in the necessary process of rendering an objectively-existing class-in-itself into a self-conscious class-for-itself. The working class leads and lends class-consciousness and a sense of purpose to the peasantry and to the petty-bourgeoisie. The working class is indispensable to the NDR.
But labour unions are not sufficient by themselves for the NDR; it also requires a party of generalising professional revolutionaries. That party is the South African Communist Party (SACP) - whose emblem includes the crossed hammer and sickle, symbolising a historical revolutionary alliance of workers and peasants.
When we look at the entire worldwide story of the NDR, we find that a well-developed theoretical pattern was set very early, in 1920, by the Comintern and by the “Peoples of the East”. The subsequent decolonisation of the majority of the lands and populations of the earth was the great transition of the 20th century.
Coming up to date, we find in parts of the ANC, that the NDR is treated as if it is complete, or in stasis, or that it is an end in itself, or that it is a set of tick-boxes, saturated with incrementalism.
The NDR’s is a story of the materialisation and triumph of an idea all around the world, but also of a new threat: that the same NDR could be degraded to the level of meaningless commonplace, taken for granted, or even worse, expropriated as a political weapon by the very forces that the NDR exists to oppose.
Unlike those in the ANC who want to call closure on revolution and declare a static “National Democratic State”, the communists know that history will insist on moving on beyond NDR, towards the revolutionary end of class conflict itself, and towards the corresponding withering-away of the State.
The challenge posed by this study of the NDR is therefore to learn how to carry out the National Democratic Revolution to its utmost possible extent, and then to be able to conceive of an even greater degree of freedom: a freedom that is beyond democracy and which is more than the mere crushing of a minority by a majority, which is the essence of democracy.
As Lenin pointed out in “The State and Revolution”, written on the eve of Great October, the withering away of the state has to become a burning issue. Before we get to that point in our studies, we must begin from the beginning, which we will seek to do in the next post of this series on the National Democratic Revolution.
Comments
"The challenge posed by this study of the NDR is therefore to learn how to carry out the National Democratic Revolution to its utmost possible extent, and then to be able to conceive of an even greater degree of freedom: a freedom that is beyond democracy and which is more than the mere crushing of a minority by a majority, which is the essence of democracy."
The key words are "to be able to concieve of an even greater degree of freedom"
In a way bourgoise Science Fiction has conceived of a thousand utopias and distopias.
"The Culture" is Ian Bank's semi-socialist conception of a utopian communist-like state. It's based on the fact that there are almost unlimited resources and machine intelligences. Not the case on Earth.
Now one of the problems of Communist Science fiction is/was that the best of it only visualised a future Communist society contingently. I.e. the society was backgrounded while the characters moved through time and space.
In a sense there are NGOs all over the world who are conducting social experiments into different forms of cooperative-collective existance. There have been utopian Communist-like groups since the Essenes and long before.
The criticism of Communism is that it is both utopian and at the same time distopian. The same people who say the withering away of the satet is utopian, say that the Communists, and lenin, were "golpistas" and that there were in favour of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They criticise both Beria and the lamb he is supposed to one day lie down beside.
There are contradictions here.
But I feel that there would be fewer contradictions if Communists actually did the vision thing and depicted the kind of society and showed how it would work.
Science fiction is the copper coin of the day. There is nothing strange about science fiction as a way of viewing society. In the past it might not have been the case but now I think new forms of quality, inspirational, complex and universal communist science fiction is a must in order to help people envision a complex future.
Either that or people go see Avatar and get their future in three D through a plot thinner than the plastic lenses in they have to put on to see it.
This is not science fiction.
Please lets revisit this contribution of yours a little later on.