Contradictions of the New South Africa
Those of us whose memories go back to the insurrectionary years of the mid-1980s—when millions of oppressed people were drawn into struggle in townships, factories, mines, schools, colleges and universities—will recall how regularly the language of contradiction was used to analyse what was happening from day to day, and to move people forward into action. In mass rallies, at funerals, and in smaller meetings, speakers would urge their audiences to think dialectically about their situation, to recognize its contradictions, and exploit these to the full. Ten years later [in 1995], many of the same comrades who urged us then to think dialectically, urge us to be realistic instead.
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What is this realism, which has won so many new converts? What does it mean to be realistic? It means to limit your aspirations and demands to what you are able to achieve - that is, to what you are able to achieve... READ MORE
​UWC: From ‘Intellectual Home of the Left’ to ‘Preparing to Govern’
‘Intellectual Home of the Left'
Universities change constantly, but they do so slowly and haphazardly.[1] It seldom happens that a university is able to set itself major historical goals, especially when these will take it in a radically new direction. In the South African context, the opportunity to set such goals which opened up for the University of the Western Cape, after it became an autonomous university in 1984, must be counted as more or less unique.... READ MORE
How Revolutionary Consciousness Develops
An Essay on Trotsky's Legacy
In commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of Trotsky—that is, in coming together from our varying backgrounds of belief, commitment, and experience to mark the occasion collectively—we are doing three things, at least. First, we are acknowledging a life of immense moral grandeur, a unique testimony to the invincibility of the revolutionary spirit. Second, we are making our modest contribution to redressing the massive historical injustice done to Trotsky, by the decades of official slanders heaped upon him, and thereby we are also perhaps making it more difficult for such slanders to take the place of argument within the worker’s movement in future. (We should also remember that his assassin, after his release from prison in Mexico, was awarded a generous pension in the Soviet Union and decorated with the Order of the Red Banner.)... READ MORE
Leninism and Democracy
The question of Leninism and democracy has been placed on the agenda today [in 1990] by events in Eastern Europe.[i] The idea that Leninism is fundamentally authoritarian and fundamentally hostile to democracy is no longer found among bourgeois commentators alone. For tens of millions of ordinary workers, socialism has come to mean the knock on the door at four o’clock in the morning and the torture-chamber; the life of luxury and privilege led by the bureaucrats of the Communist Parties; the prime cuts of veal flown in each day from Switzerland to feed the fifteen poodles of the daughter of the Romanian dictator, Nicolae CeauÈ™escu, while workers queue for bread.
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And if this is the image of socialism, then Lenin stands to be judged as the author of the most relentless, consistent and revolutionary pursuit of socialism... READ MORE
Marxism, Hegel and Revolution
Is Hegel really necessary? This is a question of which Hegel himself was acutely aware. Other philosophers before him, from Greek antiquity to the French Revolution, had tried to describe the human condition and the ways in which we understand it. Hegel was the first to argue that the attempt itself was mistaken, as it presupposed a point outside the human condition from which that condition might be described.
Against this, he insisted on the need constantly to locate all thought, including his own, within the context of the historical development of the condition it seeks to understand. The unprecedented task which he set himself was to describe reality and our experience of it in such a way that the inner necessity of its historical development could demonstrate the necessity of his own description.... READ MORE