Youth School 2005

Sub-Saharan Africa and Permanent Revolution

Jean — 23/8/2005

Introduction

* Africa in the dominant discourse

* Universality of Marxism?

* Africa: a testing ground for permanent revolution?

1-The theory of permanent revolution

- Marx/Engels: from the revolution in permanence to the transition from the Russian mir to communism (correspondence with Vera Zassulich)

- Leon Trotsky, theorist of permanent revolution

The law of combined and uneven development

Permanent revolution: from 1905 to 1917

The transitional programme

Third World revolutions (China, Cuba)

2- Revolution in Africa

- Africa and Marxism:

The ideology of “Western ideology”

Africa and Capital

- Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral and the People's National Democratic Revolution

On the Stalinist tradition

On the uselessness of the bourgeois phase

On the suicide of the petty bourgeoisie as a class

- On democratization in Africa, or, from classical neo-colonialism to neoliberal neo-colonialism

3- The South African case

- South African society:

- Colonization

- Apartheid

- 'National' consciousness and class-consciousness

- 'Racial' anti-apartheid movements and parties

- The trade unions

- The Freedom Charter

- The 1980s and '90s

- The conjuncture

- The ANC and SACP faced with the Freedom Charter and socialism

- The National Forum and permanent revolution

- Provisional balance sheet of a decade of National Democratic Revolution

By way of conclusion

The bougeois-capitalist African Renaissance: the African Union and NEPAD

Revolutionary socialist Pan-Africanism?