----- Original Message ----- From: "michael a. lebowitz" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > I've heard the term stagism used mainly in the context of the position of > the South Africa Communist Party position (at one point) that first comes > the national-democratic revolution and then comes the socialist one.
Hi comrade, you're right. This 'stagism' (in sneery style, Doug) represents the classical Third Internationalist reading from the 1930s-60s. The innovation during the 1980s was SACP ideologue Joe Slovo's insistence that 'there is no "Chinese Wall" between the two stages', and so in the early 1990s the more creative SACP strategists came up with the attractive slogan: 'Socialism is the Future, Build it Today.' Attractive, yes, but not yet really conceptualised in terms of concrete campaigning - as the SACP still promotes the 'NDR' as the philosophical grounding for supporting its Alliance with the overwhelmingly-neoliberal ruling party. And SACP campaigns, while often valiant and sometimes successful, aren't yet really explained in terms of building socialism. The most recent, to illustrate, was getting low-income township people slightly better access to the formal banking system; and indeed Slovo (as the first democratic housing minister) himself did the most dishonourable U-turn on earlier commitments when in 1994 (a few months before he died of cancer), relying upon banks and commercial developers to drive the low-income housing policy. (The best example SACP strategists might provide is support for cooperatives - but this is so marginal as to be basically invisible in society and the economy, unfortunately.) > I'm not certain how prevalent this position still is-- eg., whether it's still > held in the context of the uniting of white capital and emerging black > capital in the new, enriched ANC. Maybe Patrick can advise? A few key SACP intellectuals (e.g. Blade Nzimande and Jeremy Cronin) have been fairly bold about condemning not just awful white capitalists who have taken their apartheid loot and then run away, but also contesting 'Black Economic Empowerment' - as one would expect, since the BEE lords are gaining sufficient clout within the ANC's leading circuits (especially the National Executive Committee) as to discernably shift the balance of forces away from workers and Communists. The latter really have *no* top membership in positions of decision-making power (there are today nearly a dozen Cabinet members, including Thabo Mbeki himself, who are or who have been high-profile Communists within the past two decades, but in reality they are among the *most* neoliberal and brutal to workers and leftists, and so don't really count.) There's a phrase (and indeed also a book) that captures some of these dynamics of faux-Leninist terminology that periodically emanates (http://www.anc.org.za) from Moscow-trained ANC intellectuals: 'Talk Left, Walk Right' (my spin is on sale at http://www.unpress.co.za and a new edn is coming soon from Merlin in London).
