Course on Anti-Imperialism,
War and Peace, Part 6b
How to Master
Secret Work
The third attached and linked
item in this part is the 1980 clandestine SACP publication “How to Master Secret Work”.
It makes a point that we need here, which is that there is no virtue in being
illegal.
The communists do not
volunteer to be illegal.
The nature of secret work is
really that it is a systematic struggle against banning and persecution. As
much as it is secret, yet its purpose is the re-expansion of communication and
the re-legalisation of the Party. Its purpose is the public political rebirth
of the organisation.
Within less than ten years of
the publication of the attached document, the SACP was unbanned and declared
fully legal again, as it has remained ever since, up to today.
The SACP had been banned and
was underground (“clandestine”) from 1950 to 1990, a total of forty years. All
that time the Party struggled to reverse the situation of banning and
illegality. It announced its existence with the publication of the African
Communist from 1959. “How to Master Secret Work” was published in the underground
newspaper, Umsebenzi.
The great majority of secret
work is about communicating, and through communication, deliberately reversing
the Party’s excommunication from society.
There is no imaginable
situation where the political vanguard will deliberately choose to be
clandestine and make a virtue of its excommunication from the masses. There is
no virtue in secrecy.
Unfortunately we have none of
the lively illustrations from this historic document, only the text.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: How to Master Secret Work, 1980, SACP, Part 1 and Part 2.
