During the year of the 98th anniversary of the birth of the South African Communist Party, we salute the working class and the entire people of our country, the continent and the world. We pride ourselves to be part of this glorious history of heroic struggle led by our party.
We salute all the leadership and the general membership of the party, which over the years dedicated their own lives, for the noble cause of our struggle for the liberation of humanity. Karl Marx says:
“history calls those men the greatest, who have ennobled themselves by working for the common good; experience acclaims as happiest the man who has made the greatest number of people happy; religion itself teaches us that the ideal being, whom all strive to copy sacrificed himself for the sake of mankind, and who would dare to set at nought such judgments.
“If we have chosen the position in life in which we can most of all work for mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all; then we shall experience no petty, limited, selfish joy, but our happiness will belong to millions, our deeds will live on quietly but perpetually at work, and over our ashes will be shed the hot tears of noble people”.
We salute their relentless sacrifices and determination to make the millions of the people of our country happier, we salute their remarkable contribution to the struggle of our people against imperialism and colonialism. Indeed, they belong to a galaxy of a special mould of human species, who beyond our imaginations, contributed magnificently to the development of human society.
It is during this historic occasion of the year of the 98th anniversary of the glorious life of our party, that we remember gallant heroes and heroines, men and women, who occupied the forefront trenches of our struggle for the liberation of mankind.
They are the true torchbearers of enlightenment of the barbarians of the civilised society, the downtrodden, the poor and the working class. In their own deeds and devotion, fulfilled by the inspiration to create a better future for humanity, they have left an indelible mark, along our long march for the freedom and dignity, of the suffering people of the world.
The endless efforts by the barbarians to open the gate of the civilised society, is taking longer than they thought, and many are falling along the long odious path, and at the same time as they fall, they contribute towards the rise of the consciousness of human society. Their consciousness drives them to stand at the gate of the civilised society, of the bourgeoisie, demanding for the appropriation of land without compensation, the nationalisation of the Reserve Bank and free and equal education, knowing well that by its nature and character, a revolution is bloody and knows no angels of morality.
They are inspired by the words of courage of the Decembrist poet, Prince Alexander Odovysky, who upon being sentenced to hard labour in Siberia by the Tsar said “Our sorrowful task will not be for nothing. The spark will kindle the flame”. His famous words of hope” the spark will kindle the flame”, were as a result, inscribed by Vladimir Lenin, as a motto in the first paper of the party, the Iskra (The Spark).
Throughout history, the Communist movement has been in the forefront of the struggle overthrow ancient regimes, and to abolish feudal relations of production, and therefore ushering society into a new trajectory for the achievement of a better life for all. It has played its indispensable leadership role, through the long historical journey of our struggle against imperialism, colonialism, wars and the worst forms of oppression and exploitation.
The Communist movement has distinguished itself from all other political movements in that it has as a guiding tool, a revolutionary scientific theory of Marxism Leninism. A philosophical view which is the most supreme, the most advanced theory, guiding human society from its lower to the higher stage of its development.
Each stage is essentially the product of the time and the conditions to which it owes its origin in relations to the development of productive forces. But at the turn of each and every historical stage, the preceding stage must decay, as it gives way to the development of a new stage, from the lower to the higher mode of productive relations.
History manifests itself as the fall and the rise of different socio-economic formations at the different epochs of the development of human society. The reason why the material realities of the present historical epoch remain profoundly different from the ones of the past centuries and will remain different to the ones of the centuries to come.
Our understanding is that all successive stages of the development of society are transitional in form and content. The last and the final stage which signifies the pedestal of human society, from its lower to the higher stage of development, is socialism and communism.
This historical task of leading society into its final stage of development, can only be accomplish by a Communist Party, the party which is the most advanced detachment and the political party of the struggle of the working class. The vanguard party led by the most advanced elements in society.
The Communist Manifesto says “even if there is advancement of modern society, the modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, and therefore new forms of struggle”.
The reality remains to be that the history of all hitherto existing society, the history of all past history, is the history of class antagonism. Therefore, all historical stages of the development of human society are the expression of the class struggle between the spectrum of our social classes.
The beginning is that in the planet inhabited by humanity, the nature that preceded history no longer exist anywhere today. These are the signs of evolution which have over the years shaped our struggle, realities of a historical process which have today ushered society into the realms of the fourth industrial revolution, into an innovative high technological epoch of a new man, arising out of nature.
In his polemic, The Dialectics of Nature, Frederick Engels says “we by no means rule over nature, like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature, but we, with flesh, blood and brain belong to nature and exist in its mist. It is nature which makes the continuation and development of human history possible”.
He stresses that is just as much as the source of use values of the material wealth as labour, which itself is the manifestation of a force of nature, human labour power.
“The worker never gets the slightest glimpse of nature in his large town with his long working hours. Besides the nature present in the working people’s quarters of the urban centres affords a desolate spectacle, they have been constructed without the slightest reference to ventilation and abandoned to the most miserable and filthy conditions and shocking stench with filth and swarms of vermin”.
In his preface to the critique of the political economy, Karl Marx wrote about the economic structure of society as the real base upon which legal and political superstructure rises and to which particular social consciousness corresponds.
On the other hand, in his famous thesis, the eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, he profoundly expresses the following.
“upon the different form of property, upon the social conditions of existence, rises an entire superstructure of distinct and particularly formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought and views of life.
The whole class creates and forms them out of its material foundations and out of the corresponding social relations. The single individual who receives them through tradition and upbringing, may imagine that they form the real motives and the starting point of his own activity”.
Later in a letter to J.Bloch, Frederick Engels further substantiated the theoretical exposition by Marx in the following way:
“The economic situation is the base, but the various elements of the superstructure, political forms of the class struggle and its consequences, forms of law and then even the reflections of these actual struggles in the brains of the combatants: political, legal and philosophical theories, religious ideas, also widen their influences upon the coarse of historical struggle and in many cases are the main contradictions to determining the forms of these struggles”.
He says “the state, which rises from the conflict between classes, is as a rule, the state of the most powerful and economically dominant class, which by this means also becomes the politically dominant class and thus acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class.
“For every stage of the relations of production there is a particular, corresponding form of state, which regulates the relations between the different classes to the advantage of the economically dominant class.
“The ancient state was, above all, the state of the slaveowners for holding down the slave, just as the feudal state was the organ of the nobility for holding down the peasant serfs and bondsmen, and the modern representative state is the instrument for exploiting wage-labour by capital.”
Dialectical materialism is the world outlook of the Marxist-Leninist vanguard party. It is called dialectical materialism because its approach to the phenomena of nature, its method of studying and apprehending them, is dialectical, while its interpretation and conception of the phenomenon of nature is materialistic.
Historical materialism is the extension of the principles of dialectical materialism to the study of social life, an application of the principles of dialectical materialism to the phenomena of the life of society, to the study of society and its history. The science of socio-economic development of society.
The important question of the relation of thinking to being, the relation of spirit to nature is the paramount question of whole of philosophy. The answers which philosophers gave to this question split them into two fundamental views of those who asserts the primacy of spirit of nature comprised to the camp of idealism and those who regard nature as primary comprised to the camp of materialism.
Karl Marx says “the material, sensuously perceptible world to which we ourselves belong, is the only reality, our consciousness and thinking, however supra sensuous they may seem, are the product of a material, bodily organ, the brain. Matter is not a product of mind but mind itself is merely the highest product of matter”.
Therefore, the age of human society is a complex phenomenon sharpened by the two distinct philosophical views, which have become the defining features of its theory of development. The philosophical views of idealism and marxism Leninism.
The conception of the world materialistic view, of the contradictions between the two philosophical theories, prompted Karl Marx to write the famous letter to Philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, praising his scientific exposition, which he declared to be of a historic and epoch making significant. In the letter he praised him of having broken the rubicon of idealism as espoused by Philosopher Hegel and therefore proclaimed materialism as the only path to the development of society.
Hegel was widely criticised for his famous thesis that” All what is real is rational, and all that is rational is real. Many criticised him for being an obedient servant of adversity and therefore bestowing humanity to all the horrors of despotism and forms of oppression and exploitation.
For him the attribute of reality belongs to that which at the same time is necessary. He firmly believed that in the coarse of the development of society, reality has proven to be a necessity.
In his critique of Hegelian idealism, Feuerbach says “being from which philosophy sets out, cannot be separated from consciousness, nor consciousness from being. Being is the reality of consciousness and consciousness the reality of being.
The true relation of thought to being is simply the being is subject, thought predicate. Thought proceed from being, but being does not proceed from thought. Being exist from itself and through itself, being bears its principles without itself”.
Marx says:
“My dialectic method is fundamentally not only different from the Hegelian but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the process of thinking, which, under the name of the idea, he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurge (creator) of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of `the idea’. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind and translated into forms of thought.”
He further says:
“We know Feuerbach, although he was fundamentally a materialist, he objected to the name materialism. Engels more than once declared that “in spite of the materialistic foundation, Feuerbach remained bound by the traditional idealist fetters,” and that “the real idealism of Feuerbach becomes evident as soon as we come to his philosophy of religion and ethics”.
This far-reaching philosophical debate led to a conclusion by Karl Marx that man is no abstract essence perceived somewhere outside the world. He concluded that man is the world of man, the state and society, and that man is a sound being who can only live in and through society.
He regarded man not merely as a product of nature but as a product of social and human labour. He was prudent that it is not only consciousness that distinguishes men from animals, but the fact that they produce their own means of existence.
In the production, men not only act on nature but also on one another. They produce only by cooperating in a certain way and mutually exchanging their activities.
In order to produce they enter into definite connections and relations with one another and only within these social connections and relations does their action on nature and production take place.
What distinguishes man from the animals is the fact that he produces the men of subsistence and labour which are necessary for him”.
His argument was that man himself indirectly produce his own life and therefore as a result, world history is simply a production of man through human labour.
“There is no so-called unchanging nature, but there is only nature that can be changed by man, who in so doing, changes his own nature too. Man does not only know nature, he also drastically reshapes it, causing changes in the material view of the world.
In other words, through human activity, the Atlantic Ocean which has historically separated the two people of the African continent and the Americas, has today become the very same means of communication between themselves. Man continues to transform nature as a realm of necessity, which in turn, determines the relationship between the base and the superstructure.
The point here is that natural forces become productive forces only when they are harnessed by human labour. They only become productive when they serve production and reproduction of human life.
Even the renowned Marxist orthodox Vladimir Lenin, later conceded that if we want to examine the relations between consciousness and being in historical materialism, revolutionaries have to pay close attention of ideas espoused by other philosophers like Hegel. His firm view was indeed that in order to have a thorough comprehension of Marxism, we have to organise a systematic study of Hegel, conducted from the point of view of materialism.
He was also much convinced that in order to comprehend the theory of Marxism, one has to grapple with the polemics of the contemporary materialism by the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. He regarded him as an astute philosopher who distinguished himself to be a fierce critic of idealism.
Lenin says:
“When describing their dialectical method, Marx and Engels refer to Hegel as the philosopher who formulated the main features of dialectics. This, however, does not mean that the dialectics of Marx and Engels is identical with the dialectics of Hegel. As a matter of fact, Marx and Engels took from the Hegelian dialectics only its ‘rational kernel’ casting aside its idealistic shell and developed it further so as to lend it a modern scientific form.”
Again, he says:
“When describing their materialism, Marx and Engels refer to Feuerbach as the philosopher who restored materialism to its rights. This, however, does not mean that the materialism of Marx and Engels is identical with Feuerbach’s materialism. As a matter of fact, Marx and Engels took from Feuerbach’s materialism its “inner kernel,” developed it into a scientific-philosophical theory of materialism and cast aside its idealistic and religious-ethical encumbrances.
The discourse between philosophers Hegel and Feuerbach, of the contradictions between being and consciousness, and their relationship to nature, paved way for Karl Marx to formulate his revolutionary scientific theory, which over the past centuries, become the guiding torch of the struggle for the emancipation of the working class.
As we celebrate the 98th anniversary celebrations of the South African Communist Party, I am personally convinced that the ideas of Karl Marx have withstood the test of time, emerged victorious and have become relevant more than ever before. The theory of Marxism Leninism remains the logical science to guide society into its future.
The phantom of Marxism is still haunting the bourgeoisie centuries after his mortal remains were laid to rest at the Highgate Cemetery in the capital of the British empire.
The perpetual catastrophic world economic crisis is a living testimony of what this gigantic visionary of our time foresaw centuries ago.
Today, his living document, the Communist Manifesto, continues to anticipate the phenomenon of capitalism at a world scale. Its truthfulness continues to present a picture of a degenerating world political and socio-economic crisis more than when it was published in 1848.
The crisis of capitalism has reached an unprecedented proportion hitherto undreamed of. The world has indeed become an arena of an exploitation of man by another.
The Communist Manifesto explains how free enterprise and competition would invariably lead to the concentration of capital and monopolisation of the productive forces. The hegemony of monopoly capital has reached its unprecedented form in the whole chain of the development of capitalism.
Today the economy of the entire world is dominated by a handful of giant transnational monopolies. These behemoths controls capital that far surpasses the national budgets of two thirds of the world nation states.
It is for this reason that the bourgeoisie will never forgive Karl Marx and all Communists for their ability to foresee the causes of the serial degeneration of capitalism throughout its formative stages. Many of the millions of the innocent people of the world have perished brutally in the hands of the profit mongers.
The Communist Manifesto anticipates in the following way the end of the bourgeois rule:
“The bourgeoisie forged weapons that bring death to itself, it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons, the modem working class, the proletarians of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and fully disappear in the face of the modern industry, the proletariat is itself a special and essential product”.
It further says that “the condition for capital is wage labour and with the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in number, it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels the strength more. The wage labour is the worker in bourgeois society and the mass of the wage labour is the working class, the proletariat”.
It is in the context of this rich evolution of our revolutionary philosophical theory, that we understand that the transformation of society means liberation, and not only of the working class, but the whole of the human race. Therefore, the struggle of the working class against capitalist exploitation is necessarily a political struggle.
The working class cannot develop its economic organization and wage its economic battles without political rights. It can therefore no be able to accomplish the important task of the transfer of the means of production from the hands of the minority into the hands of the majority without political power.
What is of paramount importance to our understanding is the important question that the class struggle is not only encompassed in different social relations, but equally at the ideological level. The class struggle is the heartbeat of any revolution.
The struggle of the South African working class against the centuries old legacy of imperialism and colonialism is ideological and therefore first and foremost a class struggle. It part of the overall common struggle of the people of the world to improve their living conditions.
This is context to understand the historic necessity of our revolutionary Alliance led by our national liberation movement, the African National Congress. The context that our struggle is about resolving the contradictions of the national, gender and class questions in our society.
From its beginning, the worldwide revolution by the Communist movement, was geared not only to the emancipation of the oppressed class, but also to the liberation of the oppressed nations. The deep understanding has been that the struggle for the liberation of the oppressed nations is not less important than the struggle for the emancipation of the working class.
The point of view has always been that whilst the working class is enjoined to wage the struggle on the widest possible national basis, the task of the working class in the oppressor nation was to deepen the contradictions towards the ruling class and at the same time, contributing towards the emancipation of the oppressed nations.
The strategic objective has always been that the power of the bourgeoisie had to be overthrown to break the chains imposed by it on the working class. In other words, the emancipation of the working class can only be achieved by the abolition of the class rule in society.
Our struggle is about human emancipation, it is about the improvement of the living conditions of the whole of the people of the world. In the late 1847, Marx started his writings on the liberation of the people of Ireland or the conquest of the people of Ireland for national independence, what he referred as the people who suffered five centuries of oppression.
Again in 1848, he brought to the attention of the Communist Movement the question of the partitioning of Poland by Russia, Austria and Prussia. He brought to the attention of the Communist movement that the tragedy of stealing Poland, “ a liberation movement which dedicated the participation of the bourgeoisie itself was born”.
The event which he regarded as of unprecedented proportions, when the nobility collaborated with the proletariat to free themselves from the humiliation of national oppression and exploitation. For their own selfish interests, even the bourgeoisie was ready to denounce the feudal privileges and support the revolution.
Being the most reliable force, which can lead any revolution to its logical conclusion, the working class of Poland supported the nobility with quite an unprecedented selflessness. A heroic action which Karl Marx himself defined as “world history does not know another example of such nobility of soul”.
Karl Marx also supported the common efforts of the people of Ireland and India to liberate themselves from the subjugation of colonial oppression. He called Ireland the earliest English colony and India the Ireland of the East.
In calling for the struggle for the liberation of the people of Ireland, he also demanded for a universal struggle for the liberation of the oppressed nations. The call was not only geared for the liberation of the oppressed class but also for the liberation of the oppressed nations. Hence the slogan at the end of the Communist Manifesto: “Working men of all countries unite”
He again reaffirms his understanding of the relationship between the national and class struggle with his profound words during his inaugural address of the International Working Men Association in 1864 when he said:
“The unity of all working men of all countries will prevent the heroic people of Poland as well as Ireland and other oppressed nations from being assassinated and therefore putting an end to Western Europe “piratical wars in the colonies”.
From its inception, the Communist Movement understood that the struggle for the liberation of the oppressed nations is no less important than the struggle for the emancipation of the working class. This is affirmed by his letter to Frederick Feuerbach in 1844 when he said”
You would have to attend one of the meetings of the French workers to appreciate the pure fresheners, the nobility which bursts forth these soul working men. But anyhow, it is amongst these “Barbarians” of our civilised society that history is preparing the practical element for the emancipation of mankind”.
Therefore, the important question of the involvement of the working class in the political struggle for the liberation of the nation states has been throughout the years at the centre stage of the history of class struggle. The working class is part of the broader detachment of our struggle for the freedom and dignity of humanity.
From long, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, acknowledged that even if the proletariat are to break the chains of the capitalist rule, the Alliance to break the shackles of oppression is broader.
“While the oppressed nations were enjoined to wage its struggle on the widest possible national basis, the task of the proletariat in the oppressor nation, is to nurture its antagonism towards the ruling class, thereby furthering its own emancipation and therefore contributing to the emancipation of the oppressed nations”.
In a letter written to Frederick Engels in May 1856, Marx wrote that Ireland may be regarded as the earliest English colony, but we are thus led to a non- European colonial yard and in particular India, which he termed the “Ireland of the East”. In the letter he wrote” The Indians will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered amongst them by the British bourgeoisie, till in Great Britain itself the new ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindoos themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether”.
After the launch of the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx, became vocal against the exploitation of one nation by the other or the exploitation of some nations by the others. He said” those who cannot understand how one nation can grow rich at the expense of another, were less equipped to understand how in the same country, one class can enrich itself at the expense of the other”.
This is what he called the superiority of revolutionary ideas stand to be. What he called humanity leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.
The truth stands to be that the driving forces of all political, social and economic life are the contradictions in our material and social life. The contradictions between the social forces of production and the relations of production.
The history of the South African Communist Party is the history of the struggle of humanity. It is a history born out of the desire by the barbarians of the civilised society to fight for the attainment of universal freedom and dignity.
Cde Mao Tse Tung says a revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.
***
Amb Phatse Justice Piitso is a member of the South African Communist Party and the Chief of staff in the office of the ANC Secretary General writing this article on his personal capacity.