No Woman, No Revolution, Part 10a
Umsebenzi Online on Women
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Umsebenzi Online is the SACP’s
authentic voice. It often carries an article by the elected SACP General
Secretary, currently Dr Blade Nzimande.
To complete the picture of
the women’s movement that the CU has tried to provide in our ten-part “No Woman, No Revolution” set, the last
main document (attached, and linked below) consists of four articles published
in Umsebenzi Online since the beginning of 2006.
2006 was the year when the CU
did its first “No Woman, No Revolution” series, from February to May of that
year, meeting at the Women’s Jail, Constitution Hill. August 2006 was when we
saw the launch of the “Progressive Woman’s Movement”, something different and
opposite in character from what the Communist University had
imagined was needed.
Here are some speculative
theses on the question of women in South Africa:
·
Women, as such, have no interests that are
antagonistic to those of men, but women have a common and particular felt
experience among themselves, as women, of the oppression that capitalism has
brought to their lives.
·
Therefore there is a basis for working women to
organise as a mass, by which is meant a small or large number of people who
feel a common disadvantage in society, and who in consequence organise
themselves together for their mutual collective good and combined self-defence.
·
Women’s mass organisations have the same requirement
as trade unions and political-vanguard organisations, to be both democratic and
centralist. Therefore women’s organisations should have individual membership
and branches, hold periodic national congresses, have corporate personality,
and have a constitution to ensure democracy.
·
The SACP, as a vanguard political organisation of the
working class, is designed to relate to such mass organisations, just as it
relates to trade union organisations, and others.
·
As a matter of historical fact, the ANC, through the
ANCWL, has on at least four successive occasions since its founding in 1948,
acted to ensure that the above kind of democratic, mass, individual-membership
general-purpose women’s movement could not flourish.
The ANCWL, under pressure from the ANC, blighted FEDSAW, then the UDF women’s
structures, then the Women’s National Coalition, and it now blights the
Progressive Women’s Movement.
·
The ANC adopted “non-sexism” in the 1980s, and the
current South African Constitution is non-sexist, but in practice these
provisions mean little as compared to the material non-existence of a mass
women’s movement that has membership and democracy, and which is politically
aligned to the working class and to the cause of socialism.
·
Very little of the above is discussed in the general
public realm. What discussion there may be is often based on unexamined bourgeois-feminist,
eclectic and post-modernist precepts. The situation is, on the face of it, much
the same as it was nine years ago in mid-2005, when the Communist University
began to put together its first “No Woman, No Revolution” series.
·
Yet great gains have been made. One was the election,
in December 2007 at Polokwane, of an ANC National Executive Committee of 84
members of which 50% were women. Another was the announcement in 2009 by the
SACP GS that the YCLSA has a membership that is more than 50% female.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Umsebenzi Online on Women,
2006-2009.
