Armed Struggle in South Africa: Consequences of a Strategy Debate
It would be possible to draw a line from the founding leaflet of Umkhonto We Sizwe (MK), issued on December 16, 1961 (and from the 1962 South African Communist Party [SACP] programme, The Road to South African Freedom) to the Harare Declaration of 1989 – and to the eventual outcome and claim that the strategy of the African National Congress (ANC) was always for a negotiated settlement to achieve democracy in South Africa (Umkhonto we Sizwe 1961, 1989a, 1989b). That indeed is the idea which Allister Sparks attributes to NelsonMandela: “I startedUmkhontoWe Sizwe ... but I never had any illusions that we could win a military victory; its purpose was to focus attention on the resistancemovement” (1994:26). However, that standpoint is contradicted by the decisions of the ANC conference at Morogoro (April 25–May 1, 1969) and by countless other ANC documents which insist that the goal was the armed seizure of power by the masses.
Liberation movements, universal citizenship and the resolution of ethno-national conflict: anc non-racialism and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict
How does a national liberation movement address the security fears of the Other to promote a democratic transition? We consider South Africa and Israel–Palestine apt cases for comparison as the intractability of each conflict derives in large part from a colonial settlement process that led to the creation of ethno-nationalist states. Similarly the manner in which the liberation movements have defined themselves and the Other accounts in part for the successful transition in South Africa and the lack thereof in Israel–Palestine. In the Palestinian case collective intra-movement struggles framing the post-liberation state in exclusive terms have reinforced a predilection by Israelis to fight, leading to an ongoing stalemate and violence; in the South African case framing the post-liberation state in inclusive terms initiated a cycle of movement–Other concessions and democratisation. Our study suggests that universalistic democratic principles codified in public charter will function as a ‘master frame’ applicable to divided society struggles.
ON CORRECTING MISTAKEN IDEAS IN THE PARTY
This chapter provides an overview of correcting mistaken ideas in the party. There are various non-proletarian ideas in the Communist Party organization in the Fourth Red Army that greatly hinder the application of the Party's correct line. Unless these ideas are thoroughly corrected, the Fourth Army cannot possibly shoulder the tasks assigned to it in China's great revolutionary struggle. The source of such incorrect ideas in this Party organization lies, of course, in the fact that its basic units are composed largely of peasants and other elements of petty-bourgeois origin; yet the failure of the Party's leading bodies to wage a concerted and determined struggle against these incorrect ideas and to educate the members in the Party's correct line is also an important cause of their existence and growth.