THE APRIL issue of Sechaba, the magazine of the African National Congress (ANC), carried an article •Dual power and the creation of people's committees' Mashinini. This explained ANC's call for the creation street committees organisations in South Africa. The following are excerpts from the article.
WE SHALL confine ourselves here to the issue of the emerging embryonic forms of self-government and popular power and the creation of the people's committees.
In executing strategy people's war, the liberation movement, headed ANC, has specific and concrete tactical offensive positions of our people to make apartheid unworkable ungovernable.
In most of the areas torn by upgovernment-instituted munity councils have been destroyed, and those who man them have either been killed or forced to resign. Black to quit most of the townships.
Alex the of similar conspicuous praise these developments?
of a both against that evolved all the country political sense.
Racism
compolice and informers have been forced through mass revolutionary violence, Thus, in several areas of the coun- day. try, we have what the press has come to term 'no-go areas'. These are the areas in which the police have maintained a absence, except when patrolling in large military convoys.
Apartheid is increasingly becoming unworkable, and the country is rapidly degenerating into a state of complete ungovernability. How, then, do we apIn South Africa today, the enemy can no longer rule in the same old wav There is a considerable measure of independent action on the part of the tral who are enforcing their will, of the ruling classes, and parallel with it. As a result, there has emerged (but not yet on a national scale) a peculiar form of dual power, but in a Let us clarify what we actually mean by this peculiar form of dual power, so as to ward off any unwarranted op timism, which can only lead to a confusion of priorities.
We are far from implying that two governments exist in South Africa toOuite the contrary! There is still one central government in power, that of the racists. There is this difference: it is the racist government which has lost, and is still losing, control over its local organs of Black administration and law enforcement. State power It is central government whose local power are being gradually undermined by the masses, and indeed, are disintegrating. It is therefore a cengovernment which, given unabated continuity and escalation of these campaigns, will in the end remain centre without reference ordinates, and therefore isolated and irrenall.
But let us not lose sight of the fact that this is but an aspect (legislative and executive at Black local levels) of the South African apartheid system. state, whose purpose it is to protect and sustain by force of arms the rule of the minoriti OVCL democratic majority, is still intact. the real power of the majority can only be achieved after the revolution has smashed dismantled power. 'All revolutions are about state power. Ours is no exception.' (ANC 8 January Message, 1986)
Crisis This, therefore, is the nature of this peculiar form signifies that the already dawned in the South African But peculiar form of dual power would indeed be incomplete if we omitted to look into the development for the entire our revolution.
ment signifies the emergence, still embryonic, still incipient, self-government and These are organs which have rejected the illegitimate rule of apartheid, which challenging authorities for the control of these areas, emerging, therefore, as the alterthe native power. They are, and should be Afar called 'organs of insurrection,' cO- which, when that moment arrives, will be called upon to rise, arms in hands, and seize power.
campaigns increasingly workable, in which rapidly degenerating into a state of com plete ungovernability, and in 'the democratic movement has emerged the alternative
THE LAND question is one of the central pillars of democratic tasks of the revolution in South Africa. But what class character of state can resolve the land question in Africa? Or can it be resolved by a "classless state'.
JOHN ROSS looks at a recent pamphlet on this question Ernest Harsch Great Land Theft.
THE deepening of the struggle in Sout Africa has meant that its basic course has become still clearer. It is worth outlining that dynamic briefly.
Over the last two years the African National (ANC). deepened its dominance of the situation in South Africa.
United Democratic Front (UDF) it has created the most powerful united front against apartheid seen in South African history.
The ANC made grave mistakes in relation to the trade unions in the 1970s errors linkea lo a wrong characterisation OI the fascist. But it has shifted. its course from these mistakes. It cemented its relation with the trade unions through ine creation or the contederation of Socialist Action 23 May 1986 the South by Apartheid's has Through the regime Unions constitutes the Peasants in the 'Pondo Rebellion' in the Transkei in 1960. in South Africa pened.
tatorship istence in any ed to created letariat 1917 perty.
As letarian peasantry u democratic democratic Lenin and Trotsky are subject to a higher criteria — what actually hapNo 'revolutionary democratic dic OTI the proletariat peasantry' has ever come into excountry in history.
Harsch cannot point to one such ex ample. The national democratic tasks in Russia itself were not carried out b the February revolution — which fail solve a single decisive democratic task in Russia through the October revolution.
However the October revolution 'revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the pro and peasantry, power which possesses an unbroken continuity from 7 November 1917 to the present day. A state power which did not defend capitalism but on the contrary was used to uproot it. The state power of a workers state, of the dictatorship of the proletariat The state created on 7 November first smashed to pieces pre-capitalist survivals in Russia • TO carry out the tasks of the national democratic revolution and then proceeded to uproot capitalist pro.
Lenin wrote: 'It was the Bolsheviks, and only the Bolsheviks, who, thanks to the victory of the prorevolution, helped the bourgeois