By George Tsibani:
I advance the following proposition with Leninist clarity: just as human development proceeds through distinct, irreversible stages, so too does a national revolution. To conflate or postpone stages in either domain is to court deformation and arrest.
In developmental psychology, Jean Piaget’s theory demonstrates that biological and cognitive growth unfold through qualitatively distinct stages: sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete operational, and formal operational. In the cultural life of the human race, I recognise these transitions as rites of passage to womanhood or manhood. A child cannot be made an adult by decree; the physiological and psychological transition must be traversed. To traverse here means to pass across, to undergo, and to complete the necessary internal development; it cannot be bypassed or simulated. To deny the stage is to produce immaturity in adult form, a body without the consciousness to direct it.
Similarly, in the science of revolution, Marx and Lenin, the great revolutionaries, synthesised the materialist conception of history with the theory of the vanguard party, in our case, being the CPSA and later the SACP in South Africa. Later philosophers such as Louis Althusser and Antonio Gramsci deepened this tradition, giving us Marxism-Leninism. In short, Marxism-Leninism argues that the National Democratic Revolution possesses strategic, tactical, and prerequisite tasks informed by the Two-Stage Theory. The first stage is national democratic: the destruction of colonial and apartheid property relations, the transfer of the commanding heights of the economy to the ownership of the people as a whole, and the achievement of genuine national sovereignty. The second stage is socialist: the conscious construction of a classless society based on social ownership and planning. These stages are not arbitrary. They are grounded in the concrete balance of class forces, just as Piaget’s stages are grounded in biology and cognition, and each stage must be traversed in full before the next can be secured.
The historical logic is therefore clear: I cannot postpone the two stages of the NDR based on the SACP’s emotional and subjective resolutions in our unique material and historical conditions. To attempt to leap from colonial bondage to socialism without dismantling monopoly capital is ultra-left adventurism. That adventurism includes the tendency to dump the incomplete NDR and the Two-Stage Theory by leaving the ANC Alliance partners, as NUMSA and AMCU have done, and presenting as a workers’ party while distorting the NDR into narrow trade-unionism. To remain indefinitely in the first stage without advancing to socialisation is right opportunism and class betrayal. This is a mess the SACP wants to add to our already compromised negotiated settlement and the SACP-sponsored sunset clause during CODESA, with far-reaching negative impact on our incomplete NDR. We needed collective responsibility for voters to reject the ANC in May 2024. If that is your argument, I agree.
Notwithstanding the above, post-colonial Africa, with the exception of Libya under Muammar Gaddafi, has an incomplete NDR. Regrettably, in Libya, the USA-led NATO implemented a regime-change strategy similar to that imposed on all post-colonial states. It even sponsored military rebellions in the Global South countries like Venezuela, the Middle East, Lebanon, and Iran. Consequently, I submit that we in Africa and South Africa have not reached a post-Marxist-Leninist thesis. Unless advised otherwise by the concrete experiences of China, Russia, and, to a large extent, the Asian Tigers, the task of completing the first stage remains outstanding.
The SACP must apply science and use global NDR like in China and Russia. For instance, China’s New Democracy was the strategic line developed by Mao Zedong and the Communist Party of China between the 1930s and 1940s to guide the first stage of the Chinese Revolution. It was not socialism. It was a transitional national democratic stage necessitated by China’s semi-colonial, semi-feudal conditions. Under imperialism, China had been carved up by foreign powers and dominated by comprador capitalists, landlords, and warlords. Mao argued that the revolution, therefore, could not immediately establish socialism because the productive forces were backward and the main contradiction was between imperialism and the Chinese nation, and between feudalism and the broad masses of the people.
The meaning of New Democracy was thus a united front of four revolutionary classes: the proletariat, the peasantry, the urban petty-bourgeoisie, and the national bourgeoisie. Its economic program was to confiscate the land of the landlords and distribute it to the peasants, to nationalise the enterprises of imperialism and the comprador bourgeoisie, and to protect the enterprises of the national bourgeoisie that did not oppose the revolution. Politically, it meant a joint dictatorship of all revolutionary classes under the leadership of the proletariat, led by its vanguard party. The task was to traverse this national democratic stage fully. Only after completing these national and democratic tasks, after smashing feudalism and imperialism, could China advance to socialism. To skip New Democracy would be ultra-left adventurism; to stay in it forever would be right opportunism. By 1949, the CPC had traversed the stage, established the People’s Republic, and only then began the transition to socialism in 1953.
Similar to China, the Russian New Economic Policy (NEP) was introduced by Lenin in 1921 after the Civil War and War Communism. War Communism had been an emergency measure: grain requisitioning, total nationalisation, and prohibition of private trade. By 1921, the peasantry was in revolt, industry had collapsed, and the alliance between the proletariat and peasantry was breaking. Lenin made a sober appraisal of the balance of forces. He concluded that Russia could not leap directly into socialism. The productive forces were too backward, the peasantry was the vast majority, and the proletariat was too small and exhausted to sustain pure socialist relations.
The meaning of the NEP was therefore a tactical retreat in order to advance. It was a temporary mixed economy within the framework of proletarian state power. The commanding heights, large industry, banking, foreign trade, and transport, remained in the hands of the workers’ state. But small-scale production, retail trade, and peasant agriculture were reopened to market relations. Peasants paid a tax in kind and could sell their surplus on the market. This restored the worker-peasant alliance, revived production, and bought time for the proletarian state to build large-scale industry. Lenin was clear: the NEP was not a return to capitalism. It was state capitalism under the dictatorship of the proletariat, a necessary stage to traverse before socialist construction could be undertaken in earnest. By 1928, once industry and planning capacity had been built, the NEP was ended and the USSR began the Five-Year Plans and collectivisation.
The Synthesis for Our NDR
Both New Democracy and the NEP teach the same Leninist lesson. The Two-Stage Theory is not a dogma but a law of development. Each stage must be traversed. To traverse means to undergo the contradictions, to resolve them in practice, and to complete the historic tasks of that stage. China had to smash feudalism and imperialism before it could build socialism. Russia had to restore the economy and build the material base before it could socialise agriculture and industry.
Contextually, in South Africa and post-colonial sub-Saharan Africa, the first stage, the NDR, remains incomplete. We have not smashed the feudal and comprador relations entrenched by Cape slavery, colonialism, and “colonialism of a special type”. Monopoly capital still owns the commanding heights. Until that stage is traversed through revolutionary rupture, talk of skipping to socialism is adventurism, and talk of freezing the NDR at tenders and commissions is class betrayal. The stages will not wait.
The Asian Tigers developed under strong developmental states that smashed feudal and comprador relations. To smash feudal and comprador relations in our context means to uproot the economic and social foundations laid by Cape slavery, imperialism, and colonialism, and to dismantle “colonialism of a special type”, which expressed itself as apartheid in South Africa and continues as occupation in the Holy Land of Palestine. Neither apartheid nor Zionist settler-colonialism can be negotiated out of existence; they must be traversed through revolutionary rupture and replaced by democratic people’s power. The Asian Tigers did not skip stages; they traversed them with discipline and planning, subordinating private accumulation to national development.
To summarise the words of wisdom: nature does not allow a child to become an adult without adolescence. History does not allow a colony to become socialist without national liberation. The NDR is our adolescence as a nation, and like adolescent adolescence, it must be traversed, not evaded. To abandon it is to remain a child in the house of imperialism, dependent and stunted. To complete it is the prerequisite for adulthood: socialism.
Therefore, I must defend the Two-Stage Theory against both ultra-leftism, which wants to skip to socialism by slogan, and right opportunism, which wants to freeze the revolution in the first stage for the benefit of tenders and political-preneurs. The Morogoro method remains my guide: sober appraisal of the balance of forces, not “firstism”; what is to be done, not who is to lead.
Phambili with Marxist-Leninist clarity. The stages will not wait, and history does not forgive those who arrest their own development. Then it is true that history repeats itself.
Fumene George Tsibani is Professor of Practice at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa, and a Water Management Expert – @NewsSA_Online
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