Whilst on a small family vacation in the Karoo shadows of the Free State’s Gariep Dam remote lands, I had an opportunity to read a piece authored by Eric Gaborone (15/09/2025).
The piece quotes some revolutionary scientists and activists like Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, President OR Tambo, on a desperate, frantic attempt to justify the unfortunate narrative that “ANC councillors must learn from DA to run municipalities”.
There are grave misinterpretations of Marxist and revolutionary theory in general that I have identified from the above piece, and I will now elaborate on these below.
The essence of the piece has become irrelevant because both President Cyril Ramaphosa and the ANC have since reneged on the earlier argument, with the President clarifying in a recorded interview that audit outcomes are not the only indicator of a well-run municipality, and that the DA has misunderstood his remarks.
The author was confronted with a dilemma of trying to identify any piece in the revolutionary literature where revolutionaries “learned from the enemy” and when he didn’t find such, he distorted the dialectical materialistic theory that allows revolutionaries to study phenomena in their totalities.
But the two concepts alluded to above are not the same. Learning from an enemy is counter-revolutionary, but to defeat an enemy, Marx taught us to study the capitalist system in its entirety, including governments, corporations, political parties, and individual persons that advance the capitalist system, not to learn from them.
Karl Marx studied and produced all his classical writings while staying in Britain,the belly of the capitalist system.
His writings advocated for the destruction of the capitalist class and for the working class to rise and be the leaders of societies whilst in a country where the capitalist class was in charge. He didn’t say, “I have learned their beautiful things from the capitalist class. Therefore, let us as revolutionaries integrate them in our theory”.
The author has joined the bandwagon of modern revolutionary laziness to read and to quote President OR Tambo out of context. Let us correct these distortions.
While addressing students at Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College in Tanzania, 1984, President Tambo dealt with the enemy’s propaganda that there were divisions in the ANC. To this end, he asked rhetorically, “Are there splits in the ANC? Let us be truthful to ourselves. Let us tell the truth even if the truth coincides with the enemy’s accusations… The truth is, there are no splits.” President Tambo was using scientific tools of analysis and teaching students to be frank to themselves. Whilst he found there were no splits in the movement, there is nowhere he argued that we must publicly profile the enemy’s accusations. He said we must be truthful to ourselves. The quotation is therefore irrelevant in this regard.
Again, President Tambo addressed combatants in 1977 and stated, boldly, that comrades “must learn from other people’s revolutions, and learn from the enemy also.” Again, President Tambo was talking in context, and using the theory of dialectical materialism, that one must study the revolution using comparative assessments of other progressive revolutions waged, like those in Cuba, China and Russia, and also study the methods and tactics of the enemy, to advance the revolution. This was relevant both in war and in the advancement of the revolution. To use this revolutionary quotation to justify profiling of the enemy as the messiah of the people is flawed.
The author makes another incorrect statement that the “DA has perfected certain administrative mechanisms that ensure financial accountability and operational efficiency in governance.” This is flawed.
Apart from elaborating on this unscientific conclusion, the author must go and tell the people of Gugulethu, Kheyelitsha etc, that their government has operational efficiency in governance, and see whether he will come out alive from those townships.
Lastly, the author makes a fatal error in science, of failing to distinguish between a subject of examination and a laboratory.
Alleging that the enemy is a laboratory of the revolution is a betral of the revolution and an insult to the revolutionary work of the people he quoted in his piece.
The enemy is a subject of examination for revolutionaries, not a laboratory of the revolution, I argue.
The primary enemy of the revolution, which is the white monopoly capitalist class, must be studied daily by revolutionaries. These studies must extend to all agents of the enemy, including fascist NGOs, liberal organizations like the DA.
When I was still Coordinator of Research in the ANC Free State’s Provincial Elections Team (PET), late Comrade Tate Makgoe, who was the Head of Elections, used to instruct us to analyze and study the opposition, as part of the overall revolutionary task of studying the enemy, a task we performed to the best of our abilities.
We must not learn from the enemy, but study them in order to defeat them. We must not profile the enemy because by doing so, we are empowering them to defeat us.
We must avoid using revolutionary lexicon to justify nonsensical statements by comrades.
Makhele is a member of the ANC in Mangaung region, and an African Marxist. He writes what he likes
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