Downsizing Human Ambition

The Communist University meets tomorrow evening at 17h00 at the 1st floor, COSATU House, 1 Leyds Street, Braamfontein. The topic is Volodia Teitelboim’s “1000 Days of Popular Unity”, an assessment of the fall of the Chilean broad-front, unity-in-action government which won the affection of people around the world until the vile Pinochet coup of September 11th, 1973. If you think it can’t happen again, or happen in an even worse way, or perhaps even happen here in SA, consider the following from SACP GS Dr Blade Nzimande’s report from Cuba in the latest Umsebenzi Online. It is based on a July 2006 declaration by “Mr Danger”, G W Bush, and other officials of the Imperialist US regime. They called it “Assistance to a Free Cuba”. In the USA the word “free” means the opposite of what it means elsewhere. "All properties would be returned to former owners, including all the homes from which millions of families would be dislodged, in less than a year and under the supervision and control of the US government via a US Commission for the Restitution of Property Rights. "All aspects of the economy would be privatized including education and health services; all the co-operatives would be dissolved and grand estates of old restored; social security and assistance would be eliminated including all pensions and retirement pay; and a special programme of public works would be organized for senior citizens that would employ them as long as their health allows… All of this would be the responsibility of another US government apparatus, the Standing Committee for Economic Reconstruction. "Since upon carrying out the above they would encounter the tenacious and invincible resistance of the people, maximum priority would be given to massive and generalized repression against all members of the (Communist) Party, all members of the social and mass organizations as well as other government symphathisers." It was clear yesterday at the Harold Wolpe Seminar addressed by Zac Yacoob and Geoff Budlender that South African development is presently held within a veterinary or livestock-rearing framework because of the usurpation of popular power by utilitarian constitutionalists. This is the syndrome that Frank Furedi refers to as “downsizing human ambition” (see the link below). The Wolpe seminar resembled nothing more than a convocation of (mostly white) farmers discussing the state of their cattle – the barns, the boreholes, the flukes, ticks and worms, and the grazing. “Socio-economic” was what the two learned judges called it, but their concern was almost entirely agricultural, with a slight leaning towards accounting, at the shop-keeping level. “Socio” certainly does not mean that they regard it as their duty to introduce socialism (proletarian power of the Paris Commune type would be “the law of the jungle” according to Zac Yacoob) any more than the ANC’s Joel Netshitenzhe did from the same pulpit a few weeks earlier. Next week’s CU text is “Barking Dogs and Building Bridges”, by Lauren Royston (see below). Trapped within the banality of petty incrementalism, South Africans can be suckers for cock-eyed charlatan schemes such as those of Hernando de Soto, which Royston successfully takes apart, and Peter Bruce’s fantasies about “Saving Capitalism” in last month’s “Maverick” magazine. P W Botha was another pinhead. He died some days ago. COSATU gives him a fitting send-off - see below. Thank goodness for Renée Bonorchis. Her open letter to Dali Mpofu (see below) is a joy to read. Mpofu is another man who has occupied the Wolpe podium in the cause of utopian petty-bourgeois so-called “development” of the “entrepreneurial” kind, not a lot different from de Soto’s. He was touted as a big millionaire at the time. That was just before he got his present salaried job at the SABC. Being a millionaire is no good in itself. It only works if everybody else can be persuaded to strive to emulate you. Otherwise you are not at the top of any human heap, you are just a poor little rich boy, all alone. Hence what Karl Marx and Frederick Engels called “bourgeois socialism” (in the 1848 Communist Manifesto). There will be a memorial meeting for Hilda Bernstein on Sunday, November 12th at 15h00 in the Women’s Jail Atrium, 1 Kotze Street, Constitution Hill. Hilda Bernstein was one of the last people to be elected to public office as a Communist in Johannesburg, among many other things in an extraordinary South African life. She died on September 8th, 2006 at the age of 91. This is a chance to pay respect to her memory. Click on these links: Putting the human back into humanism, Frank Furedi, Spiked (2669 words) Royston, Barking dogs, building bridges, contra de Soto (5469 words) P W Botha, COSATU Media Release (363 words) I understand you Dali, Renee Bonorchis, Business Day (728 words)