How a Communist Oligarchy governs a Third World Country
Henning van Aswegen
Key Words: South Africa, Communist Party of South Africa [CPSA], South African Communist Party [SACP], ANC-SACP, Revolutionary Elite
South Africa post-1994 is ruled by an elite bourgeoisie – a communist oligarchy masquerading as another form of a modern liberal democracy.
The elite six-member Politburo of the Communist Party of South Africa [CPSA], the party Nelson Mandela belonged to, and the South African Communist Party [SACP] understood the principle that the majority of South Africans had no absolute right to rule. Except for one singular vote every four years or so, it is physically impossible for a majority to rule a country.
The Constructs of Eletist Communist Rule
The Politburo of both the CPSA and the SACP utilised force and violence from 1961 because it understood that the willingness to use violence was a sign of strength by the elite, and unwillingness a sign of weakness. This simple truism was explained by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known by his pseudonym Lenin, to his minister of defence, Leon Trotsky, at the beginning of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917.[1]
Consecutive ANC/SACP Politburo’s since 1921 consisted exclusively of white communists who arrogantly believed that revolution in South Africa would not happen on its own. The Politburo understood that the Central Committee of the SACP had to act violently and with force to bring about a revolution and transformation in South Africa. Their aim was not to get rid of apartheid, but to gain power in the country by way of armed insurrection and revolution. Hence, the creation of Umkhonto We Sizwe on 16 December 1961.
Initium et domidium facti
‘He who lies first establishes half the facts.’ Successive ANC-SACP Politburos and Secretaries General like Abram Fischer and Joe Slovo slavishly followed the dictum of Karl Marx, plainly expressed not in Das Kapital or the Communist Manifesto of 1848, but in his famous essay The Treatise on Feuerbach: The point is no longer to study the problem, but to radically transform it through revolution.
The German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach [1804-1872] is regarded as the bridge builder between Hegelianism, theoretical Marxism (Marx), and practical communism (Lenin and Trotsky). The realisation of international communism and the subsequent successful civil war and revolution in South Africa was the work of only a small group of revolutionaries, not the result of a collective rational thought process of a frustrated and oppressed proletariat.
State-centered Communism
Socialism means shared ownership, Communism a stateless, classless society, and Capitalism free markets and private ownership. The second General Secretary of the Communist Party of South Africa, Abraham Fischer, was a doctrinaire Stalinist because he believed in the theory and practice of Communism, applied uncompromisingly through rigorous totalitarianism. Succesive ANC-SACP leaders like Bill Andrews, Abram Fischer, Yusuf Dadoo, Joe Slovo, and Ronnie Kasrils did not believe that revolution would happen on its own, that Marxist theory and Lenin’s communist dogma would be enough to start and sustain a revolution in Southern Africa. The working classes (proletariat) had to be galvanised to act to transform society, and that this had to be done by a revolutionary elite, meaning themselves.
The Revolutionary Elite
The five or six central leaders of the ANC-SACP in South Africa believed that the proletariat had to be stirred into action and they had be led. The masses would not rise up on their own against the South African government – it was ‘incumbent’ upon the revolutionary elite to seize power by violence, and then use that power to introduce Communism by force on their behalf.
Many of Karl Marx’s ideas in Das Kapital are not new or revolutionary at all – he plagiarised freely from the original thoughts of his intellectual mentor, Georg Hegel.[2] Hegel developed his original dialectical thought system, and Karl Marx added his ideas on economics and materialism, providing Vladimir Lenin with the foundation for dialectical materialism and practical communism in the early Twentieth Century.[3]
Lenin initiated the idea of the Revolutionary Elite, not Hegel, Marx, Engels, or Trotsky. Lenin’s idea of an elitist revolutionary group was taken to rather gruesome extremes by Joseph Stalin in the 1930’s, contradicting Lenin’s ‘iskra’ of a group of selected ‘uncontaminated’ workers (proletarians) who would gather ‘to lead and guide’ the working class. This elitist group of revolutionary ideologues would be ruthlessly unwilling and uncompromising to make any concessions to the bourgeoisie, meaning the politicians currently ruling a country.
The Revolutionary Elite would ensure that the bourgeoisie and the current politicians have no role in a post-revolutionary new communist government. The concept of total non-cooperation had sprung from the total disgust that Communists hold for ‘former’ ruling elites, whom they regard as endemically corrupt and the vile oppressors of the proletariat.
Modus Operandi of the Revolutionary Elite
To gain power, the Revolutionary Elite in South Africa called for strikes against the government and the capitalists, for example the violent and bloody Mineworkers’ Strike of 1922. The success of the 1922 strike became the playbook of the ANC-SACP and hundreds of similar labour strikes and violent uprisings followed in the period 1922 to 1994. The strikes and concomitant mass action paralised the South African economy and contributed to the 1976 Soweto uprising – a watershed moment in South Africa’s violent revolutionary history.
To succeed, labour union strikes and mass action against capitalism would require nationwide protest marches, disruption of the economy and commerce, Molotov cocktails, sabotage, and fire-bombs in bus stops and restaurants. But to succeed, the revolution in South Africa required more than mass action against the incumbent government – it required a utilitarian ideology to mobilise and galvanise the masses (the proletariat).[4]
Because the general population knows virtually nothing of the doctrines of Georg Hegel, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Bolsheviks Plekhanov, Bauer, and Martov, Lenin or Trotsky (the first Revolutionary Elitists) it needed a mythical idea, not a logical one. What mattered about the Communist ideology was not its righteousness (the LPE concept of science), but whether it had the power to create a mythical idea.
Lenin himself provides the answer to this Communist doctrine and his own legendary question after the success of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 – propaganda. Hence Trotsky’s eternal statement: ‘he who lies first, writes history.’
The Message of the CPSA and SACP Revolutionary Elite
The message of South Africa’s CPSA and SACP was simple: ‘How can a country that holds trillions of rands worth of minerals be so impoverished, and how can a country with such a large black majority be held to ransom and suppression by a small number of white colonial settlers? You, the workers, are poor because of the legacy of colonialism caused by Britain and Holland, who invaded South Africa, and then conquered and oppressed the majority of inhabitants by way of a system called apartheid. They pillaged the country, which belongs to you, of its raw resources. Leaving the country and the rest of the African continent impoverished, its majority populations suppressed, and permanently exploited.
Therefore, when the right conditions have been created by the Revolutionary Elite, it is time for a revolution.
- Henning van Aswegen (10 March 2026).
- Trotsky, Leon. 1 971. On Lenin – Notes towards a biography. George G. Harrap & Company, London. ‘Lenin and the Old ‘Iskra.’ Pp 27-67. Leon Trotsky was the primary apostle of the doctrine of a permanent international communist revolution. ↑
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the father of ‘Hegelian Thought’ (1770-1831) is said to be the political philosopher who “bridged the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. ↑
- ‘Dialectic’ means a way or model (template) for investigating and analysing the truth of opinions, in other words, a way to test the truth by way of logical disputation. One could argue that Hegel is the father of the LPE concept of science, and that Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky used this framework to turn communism into a practical political tool. I would dearly like to argue with somebody on this topic, but first read Robert Heiss’s excellent Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx (1975), Dell Publishing, New York, NY. ↑
- Utilitarianism is the consequentialist ethical theory that holds that the best action is one that maximises overall symmetry and orchestration of thought (while minimising pain for the greatest number of a population. ↑