Capital, the book: All the rage

The CU will continue to aim to publish so as to be in your Inbox first thing on weekday mornings. To achieve this, it will usually be posted the evening before, or during the day on a Sunday, as today. That's the routine. This week we feature the last two sections of the CU's 24-part division of Karl Marx's Capital, Volume 1. See the link below and the “Intro” at the bottom for today's “backbone”.

As it turns out, the CU is by no means the only centre of enthusiasm for Capital Volume 1 at this time. Patrick Bond and the CCS crowd in Durban have put together a serious two-month programme that will run twice, starting next month, using videos of David Harvey's lectures on Capital. A short, recent, David Harvey seminar input can be seen on YouTube at http://davidharvey.org/2009/07/the-crisis-now/. It is deeply excellent and relevant. Please view it if you possibly can, comrades.

The details of the KZN “Capital” seminars are as follows: A pilot for 20 participants at UKZN Centre for Civil Society facilitated by Patrick Bond and Samson Zondi will run in August and September. A bigger group of 50 will run in October and November at Diakonia in central Durban, facilitated by Samson Zondi and Trevor Ngwane. Perhaps more details will appear on the CCS web site in due course. According to information received so far by e-mail, the draft programme looks something like this:

• 14 sessions (two per week) for participants who can become trainers

• 12h30-14h30, to include David Harvey seminar screening plus discussion

• Taxi fare, accommodation subsidy, lunch subsidy (to be eaten during sessions)

• Das Kapital book plus two DVDs (one with Harvey lectures, one with Brutus/Marx plus lots of other materials)

Click here for the full thirteen sessions called “Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey” which will be the basis of the above seminars.

Click on these links:

CU Backbone posting:

1867, Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 28, 29 and 30, Suppression, & Capitalist Farming (4803 words)

Note that nearly all the Marx, Engels and Lenin texts of the CU have been downloaded from Marxists Internet Archive, which is a vast store of revolutionary literature.

Intro to Chapters 28, 29 and 30 of Karl Marx's Capital, Volume 1

Marx's first concern in his description of Primitive Accumulation is to establish where the labour power came from, in the metropolitan countries where capitalism was established as a system for the first time, and where it proved itself even more profitable than the slave trade that stole people from Africa and worked them to death on plantations in North and South America, and in the Carribean islands.

This new abundance of available labour power in the metropolis, personified in citizens without property, was the consequence of deliberate dispossession. It had the immediate consequence of producing what we now call “unemployment”, which was immediately criminalised as “vagrancy”. The unemployment was an essential precondition for capitalism to arise, yet the bourgeoisie in its eternal hypocrisy, criminalised its own victims.

Chapter 28 is an easy read detailing the legal steps in the original case, that of England.

Having shown where the labour power came from, Marx at the beginning of Chapter 29 asks “whence came the capitalists originally?”. This very short chapter answers the question in the case of the capitalist farmers, who were the necessary original capitalists, and who were already a historically-existing class in England by the late 16^th century.

In Chapter 30, Marx turns his attention to the question of just how yet another of the necessary pre-requisites of capitalism came into being, namely the “home market”. The very same peasants who had been thrown off the land into the towns to live in shacks had to eat, whether they were working or not, and the farms that they had left were still the only source of food. Thus was set in motion the relation of demand and supply, and also of concentration of industries into “manufactories” as opposed to the family-scale production of earlier times. These kinds of changes can still be observed as they happen, in South Africa today.

Primitive Accumulation

Karl Marx begins Capital, Volume 1, with three great, defining chapters on Commodity, Exchange, and Money. On this groundwork he constructs an overall outline of capital. Then, through many chapters, patiently and eloquently, he builds an exact description of the essence of capitalism, which is the extraction of surplus value from the waged citizen proletariat.

The extraction of surplus value is what distinguishes capitalism from earlier bourgeois relations of production. Bourgeois propaganda pretends that capitalism has always existed, but really its full hegemony was achieved less than a century and a half ago, in the 1860s. Whereas the previously dominant bourgeois relation of production, the Atlantic slave trade (see image) and plantation system, had ruled for more than three centuries before that.

Capitalists found it necessary to suppress the slave trade with violent naval action, and then to purge what remained of slavery with a bloody war, the US Civil War. That ended in 1865, just two years before the publication of Karl Marx’s “Capital”. The incompatibility of slavery with capitalism has to do with surplus value. The Slave was a wholly-owned commodity, whereas the Proletarian possesses his own commodity labour power, only to be compelled to sell it daily for the bare price of survival. Capitalism turned out to be much more profitable than slavery and was for that reason enforced, by war.

Within his many, mostly short, chapters in Capital Volume 1 on Surplus Value, Karl Marx interweaves a lot of descriptive material about capitalism in practice, including the long Chapter 10, almost a book on its own, called “The Working Day”. At Chapter 19 Marx comes to Wages, which we studied two days ago, and follows with capitalist Accumulation, which we looked at yesterday. These are still a continuation of the long exposition of Surplus Value, which is the heart of the book.

How did capitalism start?

Only after this point in Capital, that is from Chapter 26 of Volume 1 onwards, does Marx begin to discuss “a primitive accumulation preceding capitalistic accumulation; an accumulation not the result of the capitalistic mode of production, but its starting point.” He goes back to the beginning. This is the point we have arrived at today. See the “backbone” link below and the “Intro” below the links.

Marx continues to examine Primitive Accumulation until his final Chapter 33, on Colonialism. The last eight chapters of the book are naturally of great interest to us in South Africa at this stage in our history.

The Communist University’s 24-part division of Capital Volume 1 (with some of its precursor texts) is available as a set of MS-Word downloads from the Internet for anyone who wishes to read the work in this way. But it is mainly designed for dialogue groups and study circles. Please feel free to download these texts and get on with it. There is no need to ask permission.

Native republic thesis – a precursor to the tripartite alliance

SACP GS Dr Blade Nzimande will address a seminar on the above topic on 7 August 2009 at 10h00 in COSATU House, 1 Leyds Street, Braamfontein, Johannesburg. Also present will be David Masondo (chairing) and Prof Eddie Webster.

Contact Priscilla Magau, priscilla.magau@gmail.com, pmagau@chi.org.za, or telephone 011 339 3040.

Books on education from MIA plus “Les Enragés” and Hegel:

Marxiststs Internet Archive books (these books can be bought, or downloaded free)

Click on these links:

CU Backbone posting:

1867, Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 26 and 27, Original Sin & Expropriation of People (5992 words)

CU additional posting:

What is to be done? (Extracts on Economism and the Vanguard Party)

Note that nearly all the Marx, Engels and Lenin texts of the CU have been downloaded from Marxists Internet Archive, which is a vast store of revolutionary literature.

Intro to Capital Volume One, Chapters 26 and 27, Original Sin & Expropriation of People

In the first of these two chapters on primitive accumulation, Karl Marx describes what is required before the system of surplus value can start pumping and reproducing itself. As he says, the myths around this origin are many, but the truth is written in blood and fire, the ruin of the feudal system, and the destruction of the semi-feudal, semi-bourgeois guilds in the towns of Western Europe. These revolutions made possible the existence of “free labourers”, which is to say people with no means of production or subsistence, who must sell their only possession – their labour power – in order to survive from day to day.

Chapter 26 is quite an easy read.

According to Marx, the capitalistic era began in the 16^th century, but he does not say that capitalism was dominant or hegemonic at that time. Many of the bourgeois institutions that are nowadays taken as part of capitalism, such as double-entry book-keeping, banks, stock and bond markets, insurance, contract law and global freight navigation, were first developed under late feudalism, but especially under the big, bourgeois, transcontinental business of slavery, which is very different from capitalism.

How the “free labourers” historically came into existence is exemplified in the second of the two chapters, where Marx takes the “classic form” of this process as being that of England, starting from the 16^th Century. Clearly the creation of the proletariat was contemporary with the slave trade while the latter was dominant. Capitalism only began to supersede slavery after it had matured during the period (roughly) 1500 to 1800.

The process of eviction of people from the land is popularly known in England as “the enclosures” and in Scotland as the “Highland clearances”. To South Africans, one can say that the book describes processes of dispossession that are familiar in South Africa even up to the present time. In the case of the Highlands of Scotland, one can also read that game parks (called deer forests) were replacing settlements of people from two centuries ago. The same thing is happening today in South Africa under cover of “green ecology”, and not only with game parks, but also with golf estates and the like.

With Chapter 27, it is not necessary to understand every local term, or remember every local event. What is applicable still is the class struggle that underlay it all, the victorious bourgeoisie that came out on top, and the great, dispossessed, working proletariat that was left as the principal basis for capitalist extraction of surplus labour from then onwards, but also as capitalism’s inevitable gravedigger.

Basics

In response to yesterday’s CU revival, Comrade Alroy Taai wrote:

“Dominic, this is great news! A little request: many youths (and some older comrades) that has not been exposed to the classics need to start first with some basic material on things like dialectical and historical materialism. Also the basics on colonialism. Could you assist with developing a course for ‘first time users’?”

Well, the gap that the CU is filling for the time being is the classics gap, and one of the reasons why the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and others do survive as classics is because they are simply the best, and literally as simple as they can be. Nevertheless, Cde Alroy’s suggestion is well understood, and the CU will assist.

The first assistance is to give an introduction to the day’s main (“backbone”) text in the blog. This I did not do yesterday, but I will try do it from now on, sometimes below the links, like today (scroll down). I have done a short intro to the chapters from Capital on Wages (and what could be more basic to capitalism than wages?) that were posted yesterday, plus another short intro on the next part, posted today, on the Accumulation of Capital (also basic).

In fact, Comrade Alroy, Karl Marx’s Capital Volume 1 is very basic altogether, and Marx takes care to put the important bits into simple language, as I will try to demonstrate in my intros, and he moves slowly, and in a carefully planned way through the material, and when he thinks it necessary he repeats. He does also deal with colonialism, in the very last chapter of Capital, Chapter 33.

The second is to offer, today, the CU “conspectus” of Tony Buzan’s “Use Your Head”, which is a very good guide on how to study (that is any study, whether CU, Matric, University, Post-grad, Professional, or any other). Among the advice it gives is that you should always skip over parts of a text that you don’t understand. Later on, we will come back to “pedagogy” as such, which is the theory of teaching and learning, with a particular stress on how to get profound ideas into the dialogue of ordinary people, because that is what, as revolutionaries, we have to do.

Third is to give you a quick way in to the scheme of thinking in Engels’ “Socialism, Utopian and Scientific” that was posted yesterday, in the shape of Lenin’s “Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism”. Lenin tries to say as much in eighteen hundred words as Engels said in sixteen thousand words, using a very similar layout.

Fourth is to commit the CU to posting a “course” on the “basics” soon (it is already in draft).

Click on these links:

CU Backbone posting:

1867, Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 23 and 24, Accumulation of Capital (14246 words)

CU additional posting:

1913, Lenin, Three Sources & Three Component parts of Marxism (1838 words)

1974, Tony Buzan, Use Your Head (4174)

Note that nearly all the Marx, Engels and Lenin texts of the CU have been downloaded from Marxists Internet Archive, which is a vast store of revolutionary literature.

Intro to Capital Volume One, Chapters 19, 20 and 21 on Wages (posted yesterday).

Marx begins by saying that the "value of labour… is an expression as imaginary as the value of the earth”. The commodity that is exchanged by the worker for money is not labour, but labour-power. After that, the entire product of the worker’s labour for the contracted time belongs to the boss. The product of the worker is greater than the payment given for the worker’s labour-power. The difference is surplus-value. The extraction of surplus-value from workers in this way is the defining characteristic of capitalism.

Through the three given chapters on wages Marx continues to discuss this basic point in different ways. The minimum price of labour power is that which is sufficient to keep the worker going until the next day. Or, it may be calculated over a worker’s lifetime, as Marx demonstrates here, and divided out to give an average day-rate. In all cases, including piece-work, the capitalist pays only for labour-power, and at the minimum price that will ensures the return of the worker to the workplace, next day.

Marx finishes Chapter 21 by declaring that if, under piece-work, the workers think they can get more by producing more, the boss will remind them quickly of the true relationship, which is not payment for labour, or the product of labour, but only payment for maintenance and reproduction of labour power.

“The capitalist rightly knocks on the head such pretensions as gross errors as to the nature of wage-labour. [19] He cries out against this usurping attempt to lay taxes on the advance of industry, and declares roundly that the productiveness of labour does not concern the labourer at all.”

Intro to Capital Volume One Chapters 23 and 24, the Accumulation of Capital

“The conversion of a sum of money into means of production and labour-power, is the first step taken by the quantum of value that is going to function as capital. This conversion takes place in the market, within the sphere of circulation. The second step, the process of production, is complete so soon as the means of production have been converted into commodities whose value exceeds that of their component parts, and, therefore, contains the capital originally advanced, plus a surplus-value.”

Thus Marx describes the working of capitalism, and he goes on to describe this cycle as the origin of capital. As chapter 23 goes on, Marx describes the position of the working class in terms that are easy to understand today. This chapter of Capital speaks of what has in recent years been referred to as the “accumulation path”. Marx concludes Chapter 23 by saying:

“Capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous connected process, of a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage-labourer.”

And he begins Chapter 24 by saying:

“Hitherto we have investigated how surplus-value emanates from capital; we have now to see how capital arises from surplus-value. Employing surplus-value as capital, reconverting it into capital, is called accumulation of capital.”

Later on, Marx writes that the result of capitalistic production is threefold:

1) “that the product belongs to the capitalist and not to the worker;

2) “that the value of this product includes, besides the value of the capital advanced, a surplus-value which costs the worker labour but the capitalist nothing, and which none the less becomes the legitimate property of the capitalist;

3) “that the worker has retained his labour-power and can sell it anew if he can find a buyer.”

This and the subsequent is material that is familiar and widely accepted today. “Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!” says Marx.

Back by popular demand

The Communist University (CU) was last published as a blog on 19 July 2008. There has been constant demand for its return. So here it is.

The blog, just to remind you, feeds by e-mail to a list of over about 2250 CU e-mail subscribers. The blog has generally carried a selection of links to documents, which are archived at the CU wikispace web site.

Weekly CU discussions were held for more than five years (2003-2008) at different venues. With help, these can also be revived. This revival of the CU blog and e-mail distribution is done to facilitate the possibility of comrades coming together to discuss the documents it carries. Dialogue is the essence of the Communist University. Such dialogues can be convened anywhere, by anybody.

YCL

In November 2007, a few weeks prior to the Polokwane ANC Conference that elected Jacob Zuma President of the ANC, the YCLSA Discussion Forum took off. It has kept going vigorously. It has about 900 subscribers plus a large number of non-subscribing readers.

At the same time (November 2007) a distribution group for the SACP’s “Umsebenzi Online” was set up which has since been grown to about 9000 effective subscribers. If you need help getting on to this or other lists, please e-mail me at dominic.tweedie@gmail.com.

There is a clear demand for political documents, and most especially for the “classics”, on the YCL forum. There has been no other steady stream of such material, other than the CU. So the CU mailing will now be sent to that forum, so as to stimulate dialogue there, and so as to adopt the YCLSA Discussion Forum as a de facto e-mail discussion forum of the CU.

Comments on the CU posts can also be published at the blog at http://domza.blogspot.com/.

Backbone

The backbone content for now and for a year or so will be a revival and re-examination of the “generic” programmes of the CU, with a view to building a simple selected resource bank of classic political education material, which will then be made permanently available on the Internet and other media.

The first of this “generic” backbone material will be the remaining five parts of the CU “Ghost Course”, the “Spectre of Capital, Volume 1”, which we did not quite complete last year. This is a 24-part “easy reading” breakdown of Karl Marx’s greatest work: “Capital”. Today’s part consists of Chapters 19, 20 and 21 of the book, all of which are about wages.

For a bonus I am also putting in Engels’ great summary called Socialism, Utopian and Scientific.

Click on these links:

CU Backbone posting:

1867, Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 19, 20 and 21, Wages (7291 words)

CU additional posting:

1880, Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific (16229 words)

Note that nearly all the Marx, Engels and Lenin texts of the CU have been downloaded from Marxists Internet Archive, which is a vast store of revolutionary literature.

Struggle Continues, Education Continues

We all have a human right to self-defence. Two days ago, in a post to the mighty 800-strong YCLSA Discussion Forum, a comrade quoted the late Comrade Harry Themba Gwala (pictured) as follows: “If the warlords come to fight, you must fight; if they come to kill you, you must kill them.” This is the simple truth.

In two successive issues of Umsebenzi Online, both linked below, SACP GS Dr Blade Nzimande, and Cde Solly Mapaila, SACP Secretary for Organising, Campaigns and Cadreship Development, have dealt with the recent sham furore that the friends of the bourgeois class have attempted to raise around this simple issue and around related claims of dictatorial power by the judiciary, amounting to barely-disguised tyrannical claims upon a monopoly of violence for the oppressors of the workers and the poor.

Just such an elite monopoly of violence, whether judicially sanctioned or de facto, was bequeathed upon more than 50 ex-colonial states of Africa through neo-colonialist manipulations, and it has caused untold suffering to the people of Africa. The monopoly of violence has been treated as a one-time trophy, and then turned against the free peoples. This monstrosity can be seen at this moment in Zimbabwe, where an electoral majority is daily being beaten down by bloody force, vile torture, and death.

COSATU has taken the initiative. See the historic third item below. Among other things it says (please note the events and the dates):

“We seek to declare Southern Africa an oppression-free zone and an oasis of justice and democracy for its people, who for years have suffered different forms of degradation, from colonialism through neo-colonial despotism to neo-liberal savagery with its resultant dehumanising poverty...

“The week from 10-17 August 2008 will be the busiest week in our international calendar this year, with the Zimbabwe and Swaziland Solidarity Conference hosted by COSATU on 10-11 August, the SADC Civil Society Conference on Zimbabwe on 12-14 August, the SACP African Conference on Participatory Democracy on 14-16 August, the SADC Heads of State Summit on 15-17 August, and COSATU’s mass rally on 16 August.”

The ANC has taken the initiative. See the historic fourth item below on the revival of liberation movements, by ANC President Jacob Zuma.

The SACP has taken the initiative. See the announcement of the SACP-hosted Conference scheduled for 14-16 August in Johannesburg (the fifth item below). Updated details are available on the SACP website, including a call for papers. Get your papers in quickly, comrades! There is serious business afoot!

The Communist University will not meet on Monday. Five years of work have not produced a collective cadre force that can keep the COSATU House sessions going, for the time being. Meanwhile, the command Asikhulume!! has repeatedly been heard and understood in the land. Consequently, comrades are meeting around the country in self-organised groups for umrabulo. There is arguably no need for a study circle located in the SACP head office. The Communist University was always “virtual”. It was never supposed to be centralised. A virtual university can never die. It is like a ghost. It is like the spectre of communism!

The “ghost” course on Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume 1 continues. See the last two links, below. Chapters 13, 14 and 15 were originally omitted from the schedule, to keep it brief, but they can still be accessed by clicking on the links in this sentence. Among other things, these chapters deal with work-organisation in an interesting and clear way.

Asikhulume!!

Click on these links:

Open letter to SA Human Rights Commission, Blade Nzimande, Umsebenzi Online (1560 words)

Judicial Dictatorship, Solly Mapaila, Umsebenzi Online (4875 words)

Oppression-free zone, oasis of justice and democracy, COSATU on SATUCC (801 words)

Revival and strengthening of liberation movements, Jacob Zuma (2213 words)

African Participatory Democracy Conference, Johannesburg, 14-16 July 2008 (brochure)

Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 12, Relative Surplus Value, Karl Marx, 1867 (4354 words)

Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 16, Absolute and Relative Surplus Value, Karl Marx, 1867 (4675 words)

Pause

The Communist University will meet on Monday evening, 7 July 2008, at 17h00, in the SACP boardroom, 3rd floor, COSATU House, 1 Leyds Street, Braamfontein.

(Just for the record, the seventh of July is “Saba-Saba Day” in Tanzania (seventh day of seventh month), which is the peasants’ holiday in that country, just as 1 May is the workers’ day.)

Our discussion will be based on Chapter 11 of Karl Marx’s “Capital”, Volume 1 (see the link below). This is a short chapter of only four pages, and it is the last part of Capital that we had planned to discuss in the CU “contact session” series.

Comrades, the Communist University is going to “pause” a lot of its operations at this time. We will continue to meet on Mondays for a while, and perhaps we can provide some material for discussion, distributed manually, with announcements henceforth by word of mouth.

The CU blog is paused, and the CU e-mails are consequently also paused. (The CU blog and the CU e-mails are made in one and the same process.) Comrades, the CU has run for five years. It is time to reflect.

We have shown that there is no limit on political education, when people are willing to educate each other in the Freirean way. There is no lower limit that needs to be put in front of any comrade, to say he or she is not ready to take part. There is no upper limit to say that any matter is too difficult.

We have shown that it is not the text but the dialogue that is the essence of political education.

We have been ahead of our time in the sense that the controllers of resources, as a rule, do not yet accept the Freirean way of education. Hence the Communist University has been left to its own devices, and perhaps that has actually helped us to show the way.

The lack of resources (and the other setbacks like the suspensions) have meant that we have laid down a track record of working that proves that revolutionary education can proceed without any support from above. Of course we are grateful for such support as we have had from time to time. Mostly, we had to do without.

The lesson seems to be that if comrades meet together for political discussion on a regular basis, with a chairperson, at a stable venue, and share texts that are not to be “learnt” but only meant to serve as a common basis (or “codification”) for discussion, then anything is possible. They can reach any imaginable heights of common understanding and knowledge.

If the knowledge of such comrades will never be recognised, it is because it is not commodified. We pass no examinations and give out no certificates. Our common study, and nothing else, serves to give us confidence in our understanding. This is socialised knowledge, which is the kind that we want in any case.

E-mail and the Internet are not of the essence but are good and useful means of communication and sharing of texts. They are cheaper and faster than any previous means of communication that we have.

With “hard copy”, the A4-folded-to-A5 “pamphlet” format has proved to be the popular one. Like any other human design, the Communist University could not exist until it was measured out in detail. These have been some of the details.

The CU web sites remain. They are http://amadlandawonye.wikispaces.com/, http://cu.domza.net/, http://groups.google.com/group/Communist-University/, and http://cu.domza.net/.

Don’t forget the Marxists Internet Archive at http://www.marxists.org/index.htm. It was this great resource, more than any other one (except for Paulo Freire’s book “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed”) that helped and inspired the Communist University of Johannesburg.

Click on this link:

Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 11, The Rate and Mass of Surplus Value, Karl Marx, 1867 (4 pages)

People's Education for People's Power

The Communist University meets tonight (Monday 23 June 2008) at 17h00, in the SACP Boardroom, 3rd Floor, COSATU House, 1 Leyds Street, Braamfontein.

We offer for discussion a compilation of SACP GS Dr Blade Nzimande’s Red Alert from the latest Umsebenzi Online (18 June 2008), and COSATU President Sdumo Dlamini’s speech given at the YCL Youth Day Rally on 21 June 2008.

Click on the link below to read the document.

The key phrase in Cde Nzimande’s text, “People's education for people's power”, is music to the ears of the Communist University.

So are the concluding paragraphs of Cde Dlamini’s address, as follows:

“We must go back to organize in our communities because it is through mobilization that people become actors in the stage of revolution. Without organization, despair, disillusionment and disgruntlement will creep in. This creates fertile ground, as we have seen recently with the xenophobic attacks, for reactionary forces to take advantage of the situation.

“The key message that I want to leave with you today comrades is that we must mobilize, organize and educate. Further, we need a Plan to take forward the transformation of our society.

“On behalf of COSATU I wish you success in all your work and pledge our unwavering support to the cause of organizing young people. Equally we expect from you to encourage your members to belong to COSATU unions in the workplace. We must rebuild the workers-student-and youth alliance of the 1980s. We must rebuild the all-round cadres of the movement of the 1980s.”

Comrades, Asikhulume!!

Click on this link:

16 June 2008, Education for People's Power, Blade Nzimande & Sdumo Dlamini (3177 words)

Youth, Google Earth, GIS, Street Committees, Study Circles, and more

How are Street Committees to be organised? Street committees are public structures and do not belong to any party, but organising is still organising. The generic name “Street Committee” includes Block and Village Committees, and perhaps more varieties than that, as we shall see.

This Youth Day CU post, marking the Anniversary of the organised township youth uprisings that started in Soweto 32 years ago, is the beginning of an investigation into the technical means that can assist young people to conceptualise, and then to execute, a systematic approach to organising Street Committees. The work of organising the people must once again largely fall upon young shoulders.

To the title above this post we could add “Know Your Neighbourhood”, “Door To Door”, Red October Campaign, Imvuselelo Campaign, Voter Registration Campaign, 2009 Election Campaign, and all kinds of public things, not excluding business, that involve people as they are found, socially organised on the ground.

It helps to see this social organisation in various ways, including in the “plan” view, meaning the vertical view, as if from an eye in the sky. The first document linked below is a view of a part of Johannesburg where one of the Communist University’s participants lives. It is taken from the Johannesburg Metro’s free “GIS” map service which is at http://eservices.joburg.org.za/joburg/eservices/#clkCntrl (or go to the “Joburg” site and click “e-Services”).

The GIS online image can be zoomed down to the level of individual stands and it shows street names and stand numbers, as well as political ward boundaries and many other things besides. This example has been scaled and sized for demonstration purposes. A bigger scale would show more detail.

The second linked document is made from images generated by Google Earth, a free service that you can get by first downloading free software from http://earth.google.com/. It is much more spectacular than the GIS map. It shows buildings, trees, sports fields, the true extent of the roads, paved and unpaved, and many other interesting things. It shows the inequality of South African society. It is sharp from a height of 2 kilometres or more (try zooming the image in Word) but gets grainy when you magnify it too much. It does not show street names, stand numbers, and political boundaries.

With these two kinds of imaging, one can start to literally “plan” possible street committee territories. Immediately, different possibilities are visible. One can imagine centring a “street committee” on a café, community hall, crossroads or open space, to give just a few examples.

The third linked document is a simple Excel spreadsheet (which can be modified, and which is sortable by any category of data) for listing the details of the residents in a chosen area for a “street committee. (All these documents will be made downloadable from the linked web pages, or if you want, by e-mail.)

If you have people’s cell numbers in a locality you can SMS them all at once when there is an event, or if a baby is born, or if somebody is in distress, or to invite them to “umrabulo”. Likewise with e-mail. Communication, education and organisation are inseparable. They make the fabric of the kind of popular socialisation that can break free of the imposed social framework that oppresses the people.

The last two items are Jacob Zuma’s remarks today about Joe Gqabi, which are relevant to the above, as you will see if you read it; and the current reading from Karl Marx, which we may discuss next Monday, unless there is a new Umsebenzi Online by that time. There being no available image of the great Joe Gqabi, the ANC logo must stand for him.

Click on these links:

Johannesburg Ward 81, River Park and LE Extension, Jhb Metro GIS map (1 page)

Johannesburg Ward 81, River Park and LE Extension, Google Earth image (1 page)

Draft Street Committee contact list form (Excel Spreadsheet)

Remarks at renaming of a region after Joe Gqabi, ANC President (1153 words)

Capital Volume 1, Chapter 10, The Working Day, parts 5 to 7, Karl Marx, 1867 (11734 words)

Tents

From SAMWU's Stephen Faulkner:

By way of wishing the Communist University a happy fifth birthday, I would like to respond to the points that Comrade Dominic has raised in relation to political education, because I think they are important issues.

The notion that political education (or any form of education for that matter) can be ‘given’ like development aid to solve problems is an extremely helpful analogy. Using a little of Paulo Freire’s approach, let’s reflect upon what is happening around us to explore this further.

The emergency development aid that we are witnessing in relation to the recent violence in poor communities is mostly aimed at relieving a very desperate situation, but one that has been almost exclusively and expediently defined by aid agencies and disaster managers. This is especially visible in the accommodation that is being provided for internal refugees. The professional agencies make clear that the provision of safe shelter is the overwhelming need at this time. And surely they must know best? If we can also relocate refugees out of police stations and municipal buildings while we are at it, then fine say some.

So what has been their response? Tents. Tents by the hundred. The fact that it is Winter, that there are no mattresses to keep out the cold, or any form of heating allowed, and that the tents are erected in places that are windswept and exposed to the weather, and where basic services are mostly absent, and which will incidentally make a more permanent relocation/reintegration strategy more difficult not less to achieve, are considerations that seem not to have featured in the rush to make an immediate response. But be warned. If you challenge this particular ‘camp orthodoxy’ as I have, you will be accused of being impractical, or cynical, or worse, super critical of anything that good people are trying to do.

Meanwhile, last Sunday, I simply asked five refugees what might be an alternative, and in ten minutes they suggested that the thousands of square metres of perfectly solid building space that is not in use in most urban areas could be made available, and at comparable costs could be utilized to safely house refugees like themselves. Over a short time, electricity, clean water, safe forms of heating, services and security could have been developed. After all this is what is being (slowly) made available at the camping sites. But with the added advantage of being close to transport hubs, schools and community life that are essential prerequisites to any form of integration. Ahhh but this is impractical, and unrealistic I hear the professionals say. Well, comrades, that’s what they say about socialism!

It’s a similar pattern in politics. When there is a crisis, the leadership calls for more political education, (like some form of emergency development aid!) as if the problem is that the masses are not sophisticated enough, are not ‘political’ enough to understand what the leadership is trying to achieve on their behalf. I am reminded of the brilliant poem by Bertolt Brecht where the leadership decide to re-elect the masses because they have failed and disappointed the leadership!

Of all strands of education, political education in particular, (supposedly an education to help make sense of power relations in society in order to challenge them), must empower the learners! When I hear leaderships call for more political education, (like the disaster managers and aid agencies mentioned above), they are trying to solve a complex series of problems through short cuts. It is as if they want to put up a tent that the membership must pass through, and at the other end they emerge enlightened, politically conscious, and ready to appreciate what the leadership is trying to do on their behalf! The membership once politically educated, will no longer be displaced! Ahhh, if it was only that simple.

A few years ago, I asked a veteran left politician in London what he thought members of a progressive political party needed to know in terms of political education, and he said first and foremost, they must know how to hold their own leaders to account, and secondly, how to replace them if need be! In other words, how to take control of their own struggles, their own organizations. How to build membership power, how to build active (as opposed to passive) relationships between memberships and leaderships. And that is why Dominic’s reference to Freire is so helpful. Political education is not simply about appreciating what the leadership are trying to do! It is not even about understanding the main ideas of Comrades Marx, Lenin, Luxembourg etc. Important though they are. Being able to quote Comrade Fidel at a branch meeting should not be central aim of political education however impressive!

So what is political education? Well, it certainly seems easier to define what it is not than what it is, but here goes….I would argue that it must be a dialectical process. Firstly it must be about creating the space for learners to critically engage with the challenges that they face, on every level, and as they themselves define them, including the type and character of the revolutionary organization needed to take the struggle forward. Secondly, it must be about accessing, engaging with, and drawing upon the lessons of all those revolutionaries who have gone before, and who are struggling now, alongside us, even in other countries. And at its core must be opportunities to talk/listen/connect/discuss with one another. Thirdly, to arrive at a place where learnings can be applied in practice, and learners feel sufficiently empowered to act together for change. And finally, to reflect on what has been done in order to inform further deliberations, in other words to use the collective experience as an on-going educational resource. Of course a process like this will be flexible, unpredictable even, and cannot be applied rigidly without being itself subject to change.

This is a process that is very different to a top down approach, and helping to facilitate such a space is amongst the greatest challenges for all those who subscribe to democratic popular education ethos. It seems to me that a leadership that could embrace such an approach would be signaling its maturity, and willingness to be held accountable.

Political education must be a liberating learning experience, and not simply be a conveyor belt for conformity, or complacency or for calming the frustrations of the leadership! Effective political education will produce uncomfortable questions and demands and require an engaged leadership. That’s how movements are built!

What do other comrades think?

With these few thoughts, I would like to congratulate the Communist University for emerging as one of the vital spaces where political education can begin to take place.

Comradely Greetings,

Stephen Faulkner
SAMWU Education Officer.

You can comment on this article below, or debate it on the YCLSA Discussion Forum

Organise by streets, blocks and villages!

The Communist University meets this evening (Monday) at 17h00 in the SACP boardroom, 3rd floor, COSATU House, 1 Leyds Street, Braamfontein. Instead of the second part of Chapter 10, of Karl Marx's Capital, "The Working Day", we will offer the latest Umsebenzi Online, with SACP GS Dr Blade Nzimande’s Red Alert on the subject of street committees, which is linked below. This Red Alert was also reproduced in The ANC's weekly online newsletter, ANC Today.

Comrades, the Communist University is five years old; it started in June, 2003. Have we made a difference? Who knows? Revolutionaries seldom, if ever, have the pleasure of knowing the measure of their success. The fruits of their labours are spread wide, and not hoarded up in closed places where they can be counted, as if by a miser like Scrooge McDuck (pictured).

Revolutionaries must also not take themselves, as individuals, too seriously.

One thing seems very clear: The message of Paulo Freire is not well received in high places. Although “political education” is all the rage at the moment throughout the Alliance, what exactly is meant by the phrase is not spelled out. “Political education” is recited like a mantra (a prayer).

When the time comes for practical application, the would-be political educators all too often reach for what they know, and what they know is unfortunately no better, most times, than what Freire called “the banking theory of education”.

So, one by one, the different parts of the alliance are approaching the Communist University and asking for help to compile school-books. Deposits of prescribed “nollidge” is what they are seeking, such as can be “delivered” to the masses like development aid, so as to produce a predictable “outcome”.

Education is not charitable food-aid, comrades. Education is a revolutionary action of the learners, who are at the same time teachers. Nobody must be willingly permitted to be a Scrooge McDuck of education. A miser’s idea of education is not education at all.

In the Communist University’s humble view, there is as yet one crucial ingredient that is absent from the preconception of street committees. We cannot see where their dynamism will come from, unless they are first-and-foremost organised for learning, in the Freirean fashion. Who will champion this view? No-one will, unless the comrades at street level do it, themselves, and not because they are told, but because there is not other way.

Once, long ago, there was a popular movement for parks and gardens at street level in this country. It was a matter of respect and self-respect. It was powerful in its way: ideologically powerful.

This time round we must cultivate the human garden: The garden of the popular soul. Do communists have soul? You bet they do!

Another time, long ago, there was a famous film of a joint concert of African-American and African Music, in Ghana. It was called “Soul to Soul”. Now, we need a new “Soul to Soul” thing, between South Africans and other Africans, right here and now. All the ingredients are available. Nobody needs to go far.

Comrades, the Communist University apologises for the reduced service level (but we are not a bank!). There has been a lot of very strong material, especially about the people displaced by the May pogroms, and more material continues to come through. Follow it on the YCL Discussion Forum, or come to our class this evening, or both.

Click on this link:

Umsebenzi Online, Volume 7, No. 9, 4 June 2008 (2285 words)