With the family back from Port Elizabeth, life resumed its normal pattern. This meant endless political activities and meetings for the parents – although Becky avoided evening meetings to stay home with the children – and school for the children. Brian was still at Yeoville School, and Arthur was starting at Athlone High School in Judith's Paarl, known for its scholarly reputation.

In August the ECCI had sent the Party's central committee an unusual letter and a new resolution detailing the Party's tasks. The ECCI suspected that ‘some parts of the resolution, some new tasks of the Party, may give some difficulty to the members of the Party’. It advised the central committee to carefully study and publicize the resolution. But when the committee read the report of the Party's purported problems, it decided that it was ‘not a correct bird's eye view of local problems’.

The CPSA's criticism of the ECCI's resolution did not go without response. The Comintern was emphatic about the slogan it had proposed: ‘an independent native South African republic as a stage towards a workers’ and peasants’ republic with full safeguard and equal rights for all national minorities’. The native republic thesis, as it became known, was part of a broader strategy emphasizing the role of anti-colonial and national liberation struggles. Nikolai Bukharin was the chief architect of this strategy.

Bukharin's emphasis on national liberation struggles developed against the backdrop of Comintern power struggles.