Course on Anti-Imperialism, War and Peace, Part 6b
How to Master Secret Work
The third linked item is the 1980 clandestine SACP publication “How to Master Secret Work”. It makes a point that we need here, which is that there is no virtue in being illegal.
The communists do not volunteer for that position. The nature of secret work is really that it is a systematic struggle against banning and persecution. As much as it is secret, yet its purpose is the re-expansion of communication and the re-legalisation of the Party. Its purpose is the renaissance of the organisation politically.
In the case of the SACP, within less than ten years of the publication of this document, the Party was unbanned and declared fully legal again, as it has been ever since, and up to today.
The SACP had been banned and was underground (clandestine) from 1950 to 1990, a total of forty years. All that time the Party struggled to reverse the situation of banning and illegality. It announced its existence with the publication of the African Communist from 1959. “How to Master Secret Work” was published in Umsebenzi.
The great majority of secret work is directed at communicating and in that way, deliberately reversing the banning of the Party, which is primarily an excommunication from society.
There is no imaginable situation where the political vanguard will deliberately choose to be clandestine and make a virtue of its excommunication from the masses. There is no virtue in secrecy.
Unfortunately we have none of the lively illustrations from this historic document.
Please download and read this text:
How to Master Secret Work, 1980, SACP (13929 words)
Further reading:
On the Time for Armed Struggle, 1974, Pomeroy (6800 words)
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