More than anything we must give the greatest significance possible to the task of development of Party cadres. By this I do not mean simply filling the ranks of the congress with new forces or having sterile political education classes that will simply allow them to memorize text that can be regurgitated on command. I mean that members of our movement must be prepared to lead and be lead.In practical terms this certainly means that they should be able to lead the particular areas of work for which they may be responsible. Their leaders must give them complete understanding of this work. But they must also be able to lead the masses in general — in their communities and on the campuses, at their work places. They must be won to a love for the Revolution and an undying love for the movement that is the instrument through which the Revolution will be pursued and won.This deep and profound respect and love for the Party is an absolute necessity for our cadres in this period. The movement cadres must be capable of recognizing the programs, commitments, strategy and struggles of the congress as their own. They must see the contradictions as well as victories of the vongress as their own.This means that subjectivism and opportunism, tendencies that place the interests of individuals at the forefront, have no place in African National Congress cadres.The same is true of adventurism and other forms of individualism that substitute personal significance over the significance of the African National Congress and our collective mission.Individuals displaying subjective tendencies may be able to work in mass organizations under the leadership of the movement and may be even in the ranks of the ANC itself, but they cannot be considered cadres, regardless of the shortage of forces we may be contending with at any given time.No matter how great or genuine the problems or significance of individuals, they cannot be allowed to undermine the responsibility to place the interests of the Revolution and the African national congress first, above all else. This means that within the ANC all our members must aspire to becoming cadres.Cadres must be taught to understand that the ANC is everything, without which our people will be left with another 100 years of misery, should we survive the desperate aggressions of this imperialism in crisis at all. If there is to be independence, unification and socialism in our lifetime it will be because our Party, deeply united in our mission, is successful. This cannot happen with an organization of whining self-serving, individualistic members incapable of seeing beyond their own real or perceived pain or genius.Our cadres recognize the value of democratic centralism as the main organizational principle of the African National Congress. They recognize why this is so and how this reflects the fact that we are an organization of unity of will and action, something that is absolutely necessary for making the revolution that will end the misery of our people.Our cadres understand that to come into the ranks of our glorious movement is to submit to its will, to make the will of our congresd our own will as opposed to the tendency of attempting to make our own will the will of the movement, as has been occasionally demonstrated by some movement members, past and present.Cadres must be schooled in the history of our movement that fought decades of struggles and held true to revolutionary principles while others all around us abandoned the field of battle in the face of our imperialist enemy. They must not only know the history in terms of dates and places of struggles, but cadres must also be made familiar with the tactics and strategies employed by the African National Congresd during various periods and in different struggles. This will arm them with a bank of experience that they can call on when faced with similar circumstances.Our cadres must also know the history of our movement because it is represented by the exemplary stances of various comrades who have undergone sacrifices including alienation from friends and family as well as jailings, beatings, bombings and other attempts on their lives. The history should include the examples of those comrades who have traveled throughout Africa and Russia, Cuba, Tanzania, Angola, Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Botswana and the world to organize the African resistance under the most difficult circumstances. It must be a history that helps to steel cadres for the hardships and victories to come.Our cadres must be taught African Internationalism. They must study the critical theoretical documents of our movement, especially those developed to explain the world as we were involved in struggle to change it.We must study “The Dialectics of Black Revolution” and “Political and Economic Critique of Imperialism and Imperialist Opportunism.Obviously these are not the only materials that should be used for study. Others include works on political economy and dialectical and historical materialism.They also include materials that teach cadres how to be in an organization of this type, based on principles of revolutionary discipline.However, we must remember that the best school for the development of cadres is actual, practical struggle. Otherwise we create forces that are incapable of utilizing anything that they learn. We continue to be guided by the understanding that practice is primary and that it provides the only meaningful test of theory.We must have true cadres to protect the integrity and future of the organisation from differrent forces that seek to divid this movement.
Posted on: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 04:11:55 +0000
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