Respect

[CU for Tuesday, 13 October 2009]

At long last, the SACP web site is carrying the Communist University!

This is a great honour. It is the high point of more than six years’ work since June, 2003 when the first Communist University study circle sessions started in Johannesburg, convened by Makhi Ndabeni, Zico Tamela, and Dominic Tweedie [The image is of Domza, the VC, for the first and last time].

Click here to go to the main Communist University index page on the SACP web site

It’s great to see that the SACP site is now also carrying a link to the Marxists Internet Archive, which has always been the biggest single source of material for the Communist University. The MIA is a huge library and resource, and is a great boon to the world.

The CU’s blog/e-mail output since July 2009 has been oriented towards reviewing and re-publishing the original set of “Generic Courses” that were put up on the CU “amadlandawoye” Wikispace web site in 2005.

These will now number eight, of which five have so far been put up on the SACP web site. The full set of 8 will be (links are to CU Google-group sites):

• Basic Communism
• No Woman, No Revolution
• Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume 1
• Lenin’s “The State and Revolution”
• National Democratic Revolution (NDR)
• Urban/Rural, Local/Provincial Development (awaiting SACP discussion documents)
• Anti-Imperialism, Peace and Socialism (under construction)
• Philosophy, Religion and Revolution (under construction)

“NDR” and “Urban/Rural, Local/Provincial Development” have been prepared as contributions to the discussions around the 2009 SACP Special National Congress.

The final total number of prepared discussions in these eight Generic Courses will be 100. Each one has a corresponding downloadable MS-Word file, plus an “opening” text of commentary and continuity from the CU. There are also 78 additional (optional) downloadable files for further reading or supplementary discussions.

On hundred weekly sessions would stretch over a period of between two and three years; but in practice, other material would be used, such as some of the 20 issues of Umsebenzi Online that are published each year, for example.

So we can now say that the availability of material for study-circle dialogue from the SACP web site is abundant, and is not a constraint to political education in South Africa.

Naturally, comrades from other African countries, and from other parts of the world, are very welcome to use this material. This is the free university for people who love to read and who love dialogue.

Viva SACP, Viva!

Gramsci and ‘Hegemony’

[CU for Monday, 12 October 2009]

On 19 September 2009 a review by Devan Pillay in the Johannesburg “Weekender”, of a collection of interviews published by Vishwas Satgar and Langa Zita, included the following sentence:

“The thinking of the late Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci featured prominently then, and formed the basis of an undogmatic, more flexible approach to Marxist thinking, which placed democratic practice at the centre of both the organisation and mobilisation for change, as well as the conduct of parties once in power.”

This review was posted (by your VC) to the “DEBATE” e-mail forum and gave rise to more than 50 e-mail responses from several countries, including more contributions from Devan Pillay. The larger part of this debate was concerned with the question of whether Antonio Gramsci was a different kind of communist from his contemporaries, V I Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, with an “undogmatic, more flexible approach”; or whether, on the other hand, this is a mythical view of Gramsci, dishonestly propagated by anti-communists and liquidationists and renegades of various kinds including the former “Eurocommunists”.

This debate about Gramsci [Image] concluded with a complete victory of those who held that Gramsci was indeed an orthodox communist, and was not in the least bit opposed to Lenin, in particular. It showed conclusively that all the material published in recent decades to the effect that Gramsci was a soft kind of communist, or even that Gramsci had a theory of revolution that could succeed without any rudeness or unpleasantness of the Lenin kind, is all spurious and fraudulent.

Several full articles were quoted and posted. Two of them are linked below. Here is a (shortened) quotation from Perry Anderson’s article of 1976:

“The term ‘hegemony’ is frequently believed to be an entirely novel coinage—in effect, [Gramsci’s] own invention. Nothing reveals the lack of ordinary scholarship from which Gramsci’s legacy has suffered more than this widespread illusion. For in fact the notion of hegemony had a long prior history. The term gegemoniya (hegemony) was one of the most central political slogans in the Russian Social-Democratic movement, from the late 1890s to 1917.

“In a letter to Struve in 1901, demarcating social-democratic from liberal perspectives in Russia, Axelrod now stated as an axiom: ‘By virtue of the historical position of our proletariat, Russian Social-Democracy can acquire hegemony (gegemoniya) in the struggle against absolutism.’ [19] The younger generation of Marxist theorists adopted the concept immediately.

“Lenin could without further ado refer in a letter written to Plekhanov to ‘the famous “hegemony” of Social-Democracy’ and call for a political newspaper as the sole effective means of preparing a ‘real hegemony’ of the working class in Russia. [21] In the event, the emphasis pioneered by Plekhanov and Axelrod on the vocation of the working class to adopt an ‘all-national’ approach to politics and to fight for the liberation of every oppressed class and group in society was to be developed, with a wholly new scope and eloquence, by Lenin in What is to be Done? in 1902—a text read and approved in advance by Plekhanov, Axelrod and Potresov, which ended precisely with an urgent plea for the formation of the revolutionary newspaper that was to be Iskra.”

What Perry Anderson and Trent Brown (also linked) demonstrate is that “hegemony”, far from being an alternative to the working class ascendancy otherwise referred to as the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, is in fact exactly the same idea, and was understood as such without any reservations at all, by Antonio Gramsci in all his works.

All of this turns out to be useful in assessing the first discussion document prepared by the SACP for the Special National Congress to be held in December, 2009, and particularly the following section, taken from the last page of the document.

“… it is important that as communists we are clear that working class HEGEMONY doesn’t mean working class exclusivity (still less party chauvinism). Working class hegemony means the ability of the working class to provide a consistent strategic leadership (politically, economically, socially, organisationally, morally – even culturally) to the widest range of social forces – in particular, to the wider working class itself, to the broader mass of urban and rural poor, to a wide range of middle strata, and in South African conditions, to many sectors of non-monopoly capital. Where it is not possible to win over individuals on the narrow basis of class interest, it can still be possible to win influence on the basis of intellectual and moral integrity (compare, for instance, our consistent ability, particularly as the Party, to mobilise over many decades a small minority of whites during the struggle against white minority rule).”

While we may note that the discussion document never mentions Gramsci, yet clearly the above passage is the product of the same general debate, and tends to perpetuate the same false dichotomy about “hegemony” that has in the past tried to falsified Gramsci’s legacy and attempted to recruit Gramsci posthumously to the liquidationist Eurocommunist cause.

The passage also conflates (as does the entire discussion document) the National Democratic Revolution (which is a class alliance for the democratisation of the nation) with the revolution for working-class hegemony, which is likely to require a different set of alliances, ranged against a different set of opponents.

The document manages to do this by using, of all things, the example of the small fraction of the former white oppressor minority who had gone over to the revolutionary side. Not that this group of individuals is without honour or significance, but surely we cannot hang our whole revolutionary theory upon this relatively tiny number of people?

It is difficult not to read this passage as anything other than the Achilles heel of the entire document. In it we find the attempt to conflate the NDR with the direct struggle for socialism, as well as the fatal theoretical weakness of this shortcut type of thinking.

In “Petty-Bourgeois and Proletarian Socialism” (1905), Lenin wrote:

“Can a class-conscious worker forget the democratic struggle for the sake of the socialist struggle, or forget the latter for the sake of the former? No, a class-conscious worker calls himself a Social-Democrat for the reason that he understands the relation between the two struggles. He knows that there is no other road to socialism save the road through democracy, through political liberty. He therefore strives to achieve democratism completely and consistently in order to attain the ultimate goal - socialism. Why are the conditions for the democratic struggle not the same as those for the socialist struggle? Because the workers will certainly have different allies in each of those two struggles. The democratic struggle is waged by the workers together with a section of the bourgeoisie, especially the petty bourgeoisie. On the other hand, the socialist struggle is waged by the workers against the whole of the bourgeoisie. The struggle against the bureaucrat and the landlord can and must be waged together with all the peasants, even the well-to-do and the middle peasants. On the other hand, it is only together with the rural proletariat that the struggle against the bourgeoisie, and therefore against the well-to-do peasants too, can be properly waged.”

Why are we taking it for granted that the present Alliance will serve us for all future purposes? If Lenin is correct, then we will be making a trap for ourselves if we do that.

Joe Slovo wrote (in the SA Working Class and the NDR, 1988):

“There is, however, both a distinction and a continuity between the national democratic and socialist revolutions; they can neither be completely telescoped nor completely compartmentalised. The vulgar Marxists are unable to understand this. They claim that our immediate emphasis on the objectives of the national democratic revolution implies that we are unnecessarily postponing or even abandoning the socialist revolution, as if the two revolutions have no connection with one another.”

The first 2009 discussion document “telescopes” the two revolutions into one and thereby fails to focus on either of them.

Click on these links:

The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci, 1976, Perry Anderson (36070 words)

Gramsci and Hegemony, 2009, Trent Brown (3949 words)

Building Hegemony on National Democratic Terrain, 2009, SACP (13222 words)

National Plan

[CU for Friday, 9 October 2009]

What’s wrong with the Green Paper (linked below) on National Strategic Planning?

It is a discussion document. The SACP has called for more time to discuss it. COSATU’s General Secretary has lambasted it. NEHAWU has lambasted it. But they have not made clear what is wrong with central planning. NEHAWU wrote (on Tuesday) that:

“It is a known fact that the need for a high level planning and the planning commission and other modalities towards the establishment of the developmental state were agreed upon at the Alliance summit in October 2008.

“NEHAWU therefore believes that it is only proper that the Green Paper should be considered in the impending Alliance summit and that this should take place prior to further processes in parliament and government.”

Our concern in this series is with the pre-SACP-Special-National-Congress debates. The Green Paper has to be taken in this series. It is directly relevant to the SACP discussions. It is taken as the eighth out of ten, where the remaining two places are reserved for the SACP’s announced discussion documents on: “Industrial Strategy and Rural Development”, and on “The State and the Future of Local and Provincial Government”, (which should be sufficient to conclude the series, when they come out).

We must discuss this Green Paper, and we must discuss it on its merits. Its greatest merit is that it makes a strong case for regular planning on three “time horizons”: 1-year Programmes of Action, 5-year Medium Term “Frameworks” corresponding to a maximum term of office between elections; and Long-Term, plus/minus 15-year, “Visions”. It makes this case in common-sense or bourgeois-bureaucratic terms, but given that limitation, yet it does not compromise with neo-liberalism. The necessity for planning has become orthodoxy.

For those of us who have been banging the planning drum for many years past, this is a moment of deep joy.

The Green Paper is not itself a plan, but it commits the Minister to produce the first plan within a year from now. It lays down the process by which the planning will be done – centrally, of course, but transparently, and not secretly or pre-emptively.

The major de-merit of the Green Paper from a communist point of view is shown by its frequent mention of something resembling an imaginary table of weaknesses and problems. In this list you find women, children, the disabled and the old, and those with low “social status”- meaning the working class. Race, gender and lack of education are mentioned, but never “class”, or the “working class”. Instead, where race is mentioned you get more (balancing?) remarks about low “social status”, as if being working class is a disability or a disease that needs to be palliated, treated or cured.

The class struggle may be the engine of history, the Green Paper seems to imply, but it can’t be considered in plans. The plans imagined in the Green Paper will be curative courses of treatment for ills. If this remains unchanged, the strategic plans produced by the process described are bound to fall far short of what is necessary.

The historical measure of change and of progress is the rate of class formation. The basis of Chinese revolutionary planning success in the last sixty years, for example, has been their constant attention to class formation. (Even their few, now-long-past failures were a consequence of the same, correct, focus).

None of the goods, whether public or private that the planning process is designed to maximise will be secure unless there is a steady and eventually overwhelming growth of the working class. By treating the working class as a “social status” problem, the Green Paper has the whole matter upside down, and will fail, if it does not get corrected.

Without any positive class orientation, the planning process as outlined in the Green Paper will default back to conservative bourgeois utilitarianism. The determination towards planning that the Green Paper represents is a great leap forward, but it will come to nothing if the planning process is not infused with revolutionary class-consciousness. This is a job for the communists, and we must get to work on it.

The objections of NEHAWU and of COSATU have not up to now revealed any matters of substance that could be a cause for conflict, but only matters of protocol. There is a great deal inside the Green Paper, too, about protocol and government etiquette. Whether these things are really crucial will become apparent, provided transparency is observed, and will be capable of correction.

We as the Communist University have always dwelt in the public realm, where “a cat may look at a King”. So long as planning is a public process, and the communists are not lazy, then we should be able to get a result, with or without any elaborate prior protocols and laid-down pecking orders.

While this series has been going on it has been debated, and there has been feedback, including one full-dress Economic Policy planning document for South Africa by Xoli Dlabantu (linked). Contributions that are conceived and executed at this bold scale make one extremely proud to be involved with this rolling-mass-university we call the CU.

Many, many thanks Cde Xoli.

[Graphic: Symbol of the former German Democratic Republic, a good friend to South Africa, founded 60 years ago this week]

Click on these links:

SA Government Green Paper on National Strategic Planning (14354 words)

National Integrated Development Strategy, Xoli Dlabantu (3799 words)

Development is Class Struggle

[CU for Thursday, 8 October 2009]

David Moore’s (linked) article, “The Brutal Side of Capitalist Development” appeared in the now-defunct Johannesburg newspaper “ThisDay”, just over five years ago, in 2004, as an “op-ed” feature. At the time, at the height of the Mbeki Presidency, it was remarkable in the mainstream media for being frank about the class struggle. Most of such material one would read at that time, in the depths of the 1996 Class Project years, was of the one-eyed “Development Studies” variety.

Moore only has to say how dull and derivative all this other material had been, to win the case unarguably. The dispute between “neo-liberal GEARs and social-welfarist RDPs” is a sterile one. Like a new broom, Moore swept away the “happy synergistic tales”, while reminding people of “capitalism’s brutal genesis” and also its saving grace, the “vibrantly emerging working classes.”

So as not to forget that the National Democratic Revolution, and also the contested concept of “Development”, arose from the anti-colonial and then anti-neo-colonial struggles, it is worth reading some of the late Walter Rodney’s [Image] words. Linked below is Chapter 6 from Rodney’s 1973 book “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”, written while Rodney was a lecturer at the University of Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania. The first paragraph corresponds nicely with Moore’s article, denying

“that `after all there must be two sides to a thing'. The argument suggests that, on the one hand, there was exploitation and oppression, but, on the other hand, colonial governments did much for the benefit of Africans and they developed Africa. It is our contention that this is completely false. Colonialism had only one hand - it was a one-armed bandit.”

There is way too much reading here for a normal CU study group (but Moore’s newspaper article is suitably short and pointed). Part of the reason for including it is that this series, together with the material from the NDR series, and the State and Revolution series, are conceived of altogether as a virtual “SACP Special Congress Reader”.

Colin Leys’ book, researched in Kenya and published 2/3 years after Rodney’s, is remarkable (like Engels’ early work) for being written in the right place at the right time, by a man who was able to see what he was looking at and describe it properly. What he saw was not only post-colonial class formation, but also the beginning of the “neo-liberal” and “Washington Consensus” policies that have cursed us ever since, but now, at last, appear to be on their way out. See the linked item below.

The fourth linked item is a more deliberately scholarly essay by David Moore, also from 2004. It rehearses parts of the factual background of capitalist colonialism and reviews some of the works of then-fashionable theorists, who now, only five years later, seem curiously out-of-date in a way that Walter Rodney, for example, or Lenin, will never be.

No doubt David Moore contributed to the demise of the theories that he described and criticised, thereby doing a good service to us all.

Click on these links:

The Brutal Side of Capitalist Development, Moore (1137 words)

Colonialism as a System for Underdeveloping Africa, Walter Rodney (34211 words)

Contradictions of Neo-Colonialism, Leys (8510 words)

The Second Age of the Third World, Moore (12938 words)

New Economic Policy

[CU for Wednesday, 7 October 2009]

To read Lenin’s writings and speeches on the “New Economic Policy” (NEP) is to discover a process of comprehensive unpacking, and assessment, of factors and variables that are quite similar to those in play in South Africa at the present time. The NEP followed the “War Communism” that had been in effect during the Civil War in Russia after the Great October Revolution of 1917. [Picture: Lenin in Red Square, Moscow, 25 May 1919]

The NEP was not a substitute for industrial development. Early in our main document The Tax in Kind (1921) (linked below), Lenin emphasises:

“Socialism is inconceivable without large-scale capitalist engineering based on the latest discoveries of modern science. It is inconceivable without planned state organisation which keeps tens of millions of people to the strictest observance of a unified standard in production and distribution... At the same time socialism is inconceivable unless the proletariat is the ruler of the state.”- The Tax in Kind

Later, he sums up:

“The tax in kind is a transition from War Communism to a regular socialist exchange of products. The extreme ruin rendered more acute by the crop failure in 1920 has made this transition urgently necessary owing to the fact that it was impossible to restore large-scale industry rapidly. Hence, the first thing to do is to improve the condition of the peasants. The means are the tax in kind, the development of exchange between agriculture and industry, and the development of small industry. Exchange is freedom of trade; it is capitalism.” - The Tax in Kind

The whole document is worth reading and re-reading. It is clear that what Lenin is doing is ordering priorities and synthesising all of the factors in play. There is no crude dichotomy here that would cancel out the small-scale producers in favour of the large ones. On the contrary, the “development of exchange” between small and large is seen by Lenin as the “means”, both to improve the condition of the peasants, and to restore large-scale industry rapidly.

In the Soviet Union, a false dichotomy did subsequently develop between the small and the large, and it may have weakened that country and helped to set it up for the collapse that occurred. In China, on the contrary, the most scrupulous attention was paid to those peasants and petty-bourgeois who formed the (once-overwhelming and still-existing) majority of the population; but not at the expense of large-scale industrial planning and development. China has survived, and prospered.

Even if this is a rough and general assessment, yet it can serve the purpose of dramatising the problem that confronts the SACP Special National Congress in Polokwane in December, when it comes to discuss “Industrial Strategy” and “Rural Development”. Are these things separate? Are they contradictory? Or are they one?

There is in fact no choice. We must have it all: both large and small. We must also recognise the inter-relationship between the small-scale enterprises, that can activate large masses of our people, and the large-scale enterprises, that need the same people as providers of goods and services, and as a market. Industrial Strategy and Rural Development must be a unity.

The second linked item, the short speech to the Moscow Soviet in 1922, gives more of the background and history of the NEP. The third, on the Role and Function of Trade Unions under the NEP, speaks unequivocally of “the duty of the trade unions to protect the interests of the working people” but needs careful reading to the end, so that the crucial component of the working class is not altogether left out of the calculation between large and small business. Historically, it is the formation and the growth of the proletariat that will be determinant, because class struggle is the motor of history, and because the proletariat is the gravedigger of capitalism.

Click on these links:

The Tax in Kind, Lenin (14724 words)

Plenary Session Of Moscow Soviet, Speech re NEP (3513 words)

Lenin, Role and Functions of the TUs under NEP (4353 words)

Co-Operatives

[CU for Tuesday, 6 October 2009]

The Communist University is back in full force. On Sunday, in the name of the CU, the SACP UJ Branch and the SACP Johannesburg Central Branch, 32 people from a number of different formations gathered in a proper university lecture theatre to engage with the discussion document for the forthcoming SACP Special National Congress. This was the first CU contact session since mid-2008. We had a high-quality debate.

The next session will take place on Sunday 25 October 2009 in the same venue at the same time. We will continue with our programme of pre-Congress discussions.

A difficulty with the current series (provisionally called “Urban, Rural, Local, Provincial, Development”) is that we do not as yet have the discussion documents on industrial and rural development, and on local and provisional government, that are due to be published in preparation for the same SACP Special National Congress (that is to take place in December, 2009).

Therefore we are working to a temporary framework for considering these questions. We have followed the scheme announced in the first part of the series. We began with Engels’ “Condition of the working-class in England” and “Housing Question” and followed that with some urban and rural theoretical material of a mainly petty-bourgeois and peasant nature.

Then we said we would return to some of Lenin’s writings. We will do so in two parts. One (today) will take the question of Co-operatives, before and after the proletarian revolution. The other will look at the Soviet Union’s New Economic Policy (NEP), which was a broader dispensation, covering the entirety of relations with peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie, whether organised as co-ops, or not; followed by some newer material on development, and underdevelopment.

After that we will look for material on large-scale planning.

The classic literature on co-operatives divides into two parts, characterised first by Marx’s, Engels’ and Lenin’s disdain for co-ops under the bourgeois dictatorship, and second by Lenin’s embracing of co-ops as the sufficient and necessary means, under proletarian rule, of uniting the town and the country and effecting a transition, for the proletarian and non-proletarian masses together, into socialism.

This poses theoretical problems for South Africans. We cannot just ignore what the classics say about co-ops under capitalism, not because they are “classics”, but because the arguments are strong. We also cannot pretend that ours is not still a bourgeois state. Yet we appear to need the opportunity, that co-ops provide, of socialising fragmented and incomplete individual efforts, or in other words of organising the unorganised peasantry, petty-bourgeoisie, and more generally, those whom capitalism has failed to employ.

The main item today is Lenin’s “On Co-operation”, a short but very rich and extraordinary document written in January 1923, almost exactly a year before Great Lenin died. Before coming to it, let us first look at some of what Karl Marx said about co-operatives, 48 previously, in “The Critique of the Gotha Programme”. Most of it is scathing. The best Marx can manage to say is:

“That the workers desire to establish the conditions for co-operative production on a social scale, and first of all on a national scale, in their own country, only means that they are working to revolutionize the present conditions of production, and it has nothing in common with the foundation of co-operative societies with state aid. But as far as the present co-operative societies are concerned, they are of value only insofar as they are the independent creations of the workers and not protégés either of the governments or of the bourgeois.”

Prior to the above he remarks:

“Vulgar socialism (and from it in turn a section of the democrats) has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution. After the real relation has long been made clear, why retrogress again?”

The co-operation that is patronised by the state, as well as state distribution (i.e. what we now call “delivery”) is “vulgar socialism”, says Marx.

Lenin, writing in post-revolutionary conditions, briefly acknowledges the criticism that had been heaped upon co-ops under the bourgeois dictatorship: “There is a lot of fantasy in the dreams of the old co-operators. Often they are ridiculously fantastic,” says Lenin. Following which he proceeds to place an extremely high value on co-operatives, as almost the most important component of the advance to full socialism.

We can note that in this article, Lenin anticipates at least one or two decades of further life of the New Economic Policy (NEP). What actually happened was that within about four years after Lenin’s death the NEP had been reversed and the policy of the Soviet Union had become one of large-scale five-year plans, only. The centralisation of the economy, started under Lenin as a complement to the NEP, had in effect become treated as an either/or mutually exclusive alternative to it. Is this a necessary contradiction? Surely, our Special National Congress will be seeking to find ways both of popular organisation, and of planning at the national level, at the same time.

This whole article of Lenin’s on co-operation could be treated as a keynote text for our Special National Congress. It ranges more widely than simply on co-ops as such. Particularly interesting are the concluding paragraphs of Part 2 of the document, where Leinin refers to a “cultural revolution”. In the penultimate paragraph of Part1, Lenin had written:

“By ability to be a trader I mean the ability to be a cultured trader. Let those Russians, or peasants, who imagine that since they trade they are good traders, get that well into their heads. This does not follow that all. They do trade, but that is far from being cultured traders. They now trade in an Asiatic manner, but to be a good trader one must trade in the European manner. They are a whole epoch behind in that.”

The difference that Lenin refers to as between “Asiatic” and “European” trading is the difference between production for sale without having secured a market, and on the other hand, production for a known market, or for a previously-identified demand.

The third linked item today is a short article of Professor Michael Morris published in 1996 in the Business Day, which debunked a number of misconceptions about so-called “entrepreneurship”. Morris wrote, among other things, that: “The entrepreneurial individual recognises a trend, a possibility, an unmet demand. He or she comes up with a concept for capitalising on the trend or demand and does so while the window of opportunity is open.”

This is precisely the same point as Lenin is making. Lenin knew that the setting up of producer co-operatives without attention to their markets would be a disastrous waste.

The Chinese delegation that visited South Africa last month said that the Chinese peasants are guaranteed a market by the state, at the same price that private buyers are prepared to pay.

The Special National Congress will have to pay attention, perhaps above all, to the question of the market for peasant, petty-bourgeois, and co-operative production, and also to the subjective, exhortative, educational contribution, which is so clear in Lenin’s approach and which he explicitly recommends. Even if it may not be a matter of the state setting up co-ops (which could degenerate into inefficient state-run small enterprises), yet it is always going to be a matter of educating, organising, and mobilising.

In the next part, we will look more closely at the NEP as such.

Click on these links:

On Co-operation, Lenin (2611 words)

Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx (8317 words)

Dismissing Myths and Misunderstandings of Entrepreneurship, Morris (1170 words)

La Via Campesina

[CU for Monday, 5 October 2009]

Today’s is one item only, from a man called Rob Sacco, who has otherwise left little trace on the Internet. It is a letter from the bundu in reply to an e-mail that was printed by a friend and carried up to Sacco in the hills of Zimbabwe.

Sacco is a defender of the people’s history of Zimbabwe as he sees it, and he seems suspicious of nearly everyone else, but he is articulate and serious and obviously a practical person. He writes of “development by marginal adjustment”, which sounds right, for peasants. La Via Campesina means “the way of the peasant”.

While taking a swipe at the SACP for being “workerist” (which is certainly a bad mistake, but how would he know?) Sacco lays out his assessment:

“…the transfer of 10 million hectares plus of the best land from a post-colonial class perpetually externalizing wealth, to the mass of an African peasant class, and to an African petty bourgeoisie, generating indigenous wealth from the ground up, constitutes a genuine revolution.”

Sacco is not shy to defend the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie. This is something the Communist University needs for our current purposes. We need an advocate for the interests of the other masses, the ones that the working class needs as allies, so as to form an overwhelming popular majority.

If we are to be allies, we must be capable of understanding peasants and petty bourgoeis in their own terms, and we must be able to learn from them.

Sacco has a sense of place and a pride in the ability to bring forth nourishment for people from the land, by work and by skill and by knowledge and experience.

There is a lot of personal history in this piece, and a lot of political history of structures and institutions, and even a cat that breaks a bottle of whisky. This is all quite typical of the peasant approach to life, which is always as much of a narrative as it is a collective.

It would be nice to know what happened in the four years since this account was written. [Picture: Mozambique farmers]

Click on this link:

Peasant Revolution in Zimbabwe, Rob Sacco, reply to Bond (12877 words)

Local Class Alliance

[CU for Friday, 2 October 2009]

The politics of class alliance at national level are well understood and well executed in South Africa in terms of the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) policy developed during the last nine decades, which led to the democratic breakthrough of 1994 and which remains the dominant framework of South African politics, having been refreshed at Polokwane in 2007. At national level, the interests of the working class continue to be well articulated through the South African Communist Party (SACP), and the trade union movement whose largest centre is COSATU.

The petty bourgeoisie, on the other hand, has no dedicated political expression at national level, and nor has the peasantry. They are compelled to rely on others. This is in spite of the large size of these segments of the population in South Africa. It is a consequence of the “sack-of-potatoes” nature of both of these two classes, the rural petty-bourgeoisie who are the peasants, and the urban peasants, who are the petty-bourgeois.

Both classes are made up of individualists, who aspire to live autonomously, with everything of their own. The working class must represent the interests of these (mostly very poor) sections of the population at national level, while the established bourgeoisie would wish to exploit them as political foot-soldiers for capitalism, and also to exploit them directly, in the predatory way that the big bourgeoisie likes to feed off the small bourgeoisie, which Rosa Luxemburg described so well in Chapter 2 of “Reform or Revolution?” (linked below).

At local level, the situation is reversed. In South Africa, the organised working class has hardly any formal presence at, in particular, electoral ward level. Here the petty-bourgeois individualists are working on home ground and at the same scale as their own business operations. COSATU Locals and Socialist Forums are in the shade, if they exist at all. The SACP generates cadres, and organises and assists the masses, including the ANC, in many different ways, but it does not stand candidates in elections.

In terms of theory, too, there is very little that would serve as ideological guidance to the working class, locally. Whereas the petty-bourgeoisie has an abundance of material and history to rely on, some of which is linked below. The town is the birthplace of the bourgeoisie and the natural territory of the petty-bourgeoisie, and the municipality is the “executive committee” of the local bourgeoisie. Not only is it their instrument, but it is their regenerator, whose job it is to reproduce bourgeois relations at local level and to bring forth new generations of bourgeois-minded councillors and bureaucrats.

In the past, one effective working-class tactic was to confront this concentration of local bourgeois strength with an organised workers’ democratic power. In Russia, this took the form of the “soviet”. The first one, as Vladimir Shubin relates, was set up in the textile manufacturing centre of Ivanovo, in 1905. Another tactic, problematic though it has been, is the setting up of producer and consumer co-operatives. This discussion will have to develop both of these perspectives in due course.

For today, our CU job is to review some of the debate in the literature of petty-bourgeois development. Let it be understood that it is not the aim of the working class to drive any other class to early extinction. In the spirit of the same “18^th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” wherein Karl Marx described the peasantry, though sympathetically, as a “sack of potatoes”, because they could not unite, the working class must lead the weaker classes and make provision for them in terms that will satisfy them. For the classic peasantry, this meant giving them land and a market for their produce. For the petty bourgeoisie, it is the freedom to do business, and the guarantee, against the predatory monopolists, of a market. We, as the proletariat, also need these classes as allies against the monopoly bourgeoisie. Therefore, as partisans of the working class, we should read these works with a serious interest.

Housing by People (click this link for an MS-Word download, which includes diagrams that do not come through on the web page), by John Charlewood Turner, is a discussion of housing, from a partly-idealised but well-educated point of view, of where decisive power should lie, who should act, and how these responsibilities should be divided up. It can serve us as a small link to the great, beautiful and necessary field of study called urbanism, of which very little emerges into the general public realm. Urbanism is a site of ideological struggle. It is also a labyrinth, in which it is easy to get lost.

“Barking dogs and building bridges” is Lauren Royston’s subtle and patient destruction of the simplistic bourgeois platitudes of Hernando de Soto. Glen Mills’ 2006 Business Day article “Thinking out of the matchbox” briefly summarises the general situation in South African housing, which has not changed in the mean time. There is still no public discussion of design, except at the “Top billing” level of snobbery and eclecticism, or at the level of the most banal, hopeless utilitarianism, in the press. [Click the links below]

How will things change? The communists must strive to reproduce, in every locality, the same well-expressed and solid class alliance which has up to now underpinned the NDR at the national level. This means providing for both the petty-bourgeoisie/peasantry, and the working class. Both must be able to see a clear way forward, in alliance with each other, at local level, where, at present, it is working-class organisation that is lacking.

[Graphic: Ebenezer Howard’s “Three Magnets”, from “Garden Cities of To-morrow”, 1902]

Click on these links:

Housing by People, C1, C6, Who Decides?, John Turner (7901 words)

Barking dogs, building bridges, Lauren Royston (5469 words)

Thinking out of the matchbox, Glen Mills, Business Day (1199 words)

Reform or Revolution, Chapters 2, 7, 9 & 10, Luxemburg (10250 words)