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A new political party to be formed

by Thobekile Zhou
23 Jun 2015 at 20:05hrs | Views
Another political party is due to be launched in Zimbabwe that would have a strong background on Marxism.

A seminar was held in Bulawayo last Saturday to prepare ground work towards the formation of the Marxist organisation.

The meeting attended by scores of activists, trade union and top politicians including MDC leader Welshman Ncube was held under the theme "IS ZIMBABWE READY FOR A VANGUARD OF THE WORKING CLASS?".

Below are the resolutions of the working meeting:

Declaration on the Marxist Seminar - held in Bulawayo on 20 June 2015.

We the 25 delegates representing more than 20 organizations gathered in Bulawayo on the 20 June 2015 under the theme:

IS ZIMBABWE READY FOR A VANGUARD OF THE WORKING CLASS?

Have done an analysis of the nature of the Zimbabwean State and agreed with Lenin when he says, "the state is a centralized organization of force separated from the community as a whole which enforces, through special bodies of armed people and other institutions of coercion, the will of one class, or an alliance of classes, upon the rest of society. "

We further noted that as a rule, the state is the organ of defence of the interests of the economically dominated class, that is, the class that owns the decisive means of production.

The seminar has noted the glaring poverty that is faced by the majority of the Zimbabweans with the ruling class continuing its exploitation of the working class and the poor through massive corruption particularly in the mining sector and other sectors.

Corruption is a cancer that has destroyed our society fabric and the current regime does not have a political will to arrest it.

We note with anger the new tendency that is developing within the ruling class of rewarding agents of the State (intelligence) with large farms. This is clear political patronage by the regime as the war on succession takes a new twist a blatant disregard for the needs of the people but rather of enriching cronies.

The seminar has noted and celebrates the class unity demonstrated by the people of Maleme in resisting the takeover of that farm by the regime through an intelligence operative. The rural people (peasants) and the working class came together to resist the takeover of the farm.

That unity reminds us of the communist symbol, that of the hammer and the sickle, which demonstrates the unity of the working class and the peasants. The people of Zimbabwe had hoped in 1999 that the formation of the Movement for Democratic Change would speed up the democratization of the Zimbabwean State and therefore lay their political faith in its political leadership. 16 years down the line, the MDC does not inspire any confidence in the masses in its various forms. It has now become fashionable to form a splitter group of the MDC and claim to be the "original", whatever that means. Of concern to us is the manner in which the labour movement was betrayed by the MDC. Instead of building a strong, vibrant and revolutionary movement, the formation of the MDC weakened it. Today the ZCTU is split and is no longer as vibrant as it was, thanks to the high jacking of the MDC by reactionary forces and the melting down of our economy.

The seminar further noted that today, over 90% of working Zimbabweans are now in the informal economy not as business people but struggling to make ends meet. Those in the informal economy are faced with serious challenges and their hard work is not recognized by the State that continues to want to evict them through the use of the military. The split in the opposition has seriously affected civil society organizations who are now generally split. Some of the civil society organizations have become donor organization without playing their critical citizenship role.

The seminar therefore resolves that:

1.   It is only the vanguard of the working class and the poor that can unite, deepen and advance the struggle for the working class and the poor in Zimbabwe.

2. The struggle of the democratization of the Zimbabwean State cannot be postponed any longer. We therefore commit ourselves to the struggle to democratize the Zimbabwean State and the transition to a Socialism. We affirm that indeed, Socialism is the future and it has to happen in our life time. We can even quote Nelson Mandela who said "I should tie myself to no particular system of society other than of socialism."

3. We stand opposed to the greed exhibited by the ruling class and unscrupulous business people who continue to exploit the masses of the people of Zimbabwe who continue to swim in poverty.

4. We are committed to building a strong, united trade union movement that will continue to organize the unorganized and further organize those in the informal sector into its ranks.

5. We further commit ourselves in building a strong civil society organization that will play a revolutionary role in our society.

6. The victory in Maleme must be celebrated by all progressive Zimbabweans and this victory must be a lesson to other communities in similar situations. The seminar therefore resolves that we should continue to work with the people of Maleme as they seek to build co-operatives in the farm that will improve their economic conditions.


ON THE FORMATION OF A VANGUARD OF THE WORKING CLASS AND THE POOR.

Writing in what is to be done, Lenin wrote:

"I assert (i) that no revolutionary movement can endure without a stable organization of leaders maintaining continuity,

 (ii) that the broader the popular mass drawn spontaneously into the struggle, which forms the basis of the movement and participates in it, the more urgent the need for such an organization, and the more solid this organization must be.

(iii) that such an organization must consist chiefly of people professionally engaged in revolutionary activity,

(iv) that in autocratic states, the more we confine the membership of such an organization to people who are professionally engaged in revolutionary activity and who have been professionally trained in the art of combating the political police, the more difficult will it be to unearth the organization

(v) the greater will be the number of people from the working class and from the other social classes who will be able to join the movement and perform active work in it".

We therefore commit ourselves in the formation of a vanguard of the working class guided by the Marxist -Leninist principles.

A committee has been set up to co-ordinate the work of the formation of the vanguard of the working class.



Source - Byo24News