Mineral-Energy Complex

Development, Part 9

Mineral-Energy Complex

  

South Africa’s largest centres of material production are in minerals and energy, and these two “sectors” are highly interdependent. For example the mineral, coal, is the mainstay of the electricity-generating industry of the country, while electric energy is in turn indispensable to the gold, platinum and other mines.

No question of “development”, in the material sense, in South Africa can be properly addressed without reference to the mineral-energy complex.

The SACP’s discussion document “Expanding Democratic Public Control over the Mining Sector” (attached) therefore has implications beyond the mining sector, and beyond the energy sector. This document is a window on the way that development - the dialectical, dynamic, unity-and-struggle-of-opposites otherwise called the class struggle, and its relationship with the state, are playing out before our eyes.

It is a remarkable document. Not only is it a theoretical masterpiece, helping us to see clearly what is what and who is who, but it also stands comparison with the best of journalism, because it illuminates the South African situation so well, as a narrative.

One of the quotations given in the document is from Frederick Engels, on nationalisation, as follows:

“the transformation…into state prop­erty, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces… The more it [the bourgeois state] proceeds to the tak­ing over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The work­ers remain wage-workers – proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head.” (En­gels, “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”, 1880).

The workers in nationalised industries, including teachers, remain proletarians. They sell their labour-power for cash and they have constantly to renegotiate their pay and conditions with an employer who can be as ruthless as any other capitalist.

This is the second last week of the “Development” series. In the remainder of this part we will look at the South African National Planning Commission’s draft National Development Plan.

·        The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Expanding Democratic Public Control over the Mining Sector.

The New Growth Path

Development, Part 8c

Ebrahim Patel

The New Growth Path

On 23 November 2010 South Africa’s Minister of Economic Development, Ebrahim Patel, introduced “The New Growth Path” (NGP). His four-page introduction is attached.

Minister of Trade and Industry Rob Davies had issued the 2010/11 – 2012/13 “Industrial Policy Action Plan” ("IPAP2") earlier in the same year (18 February 2010), as we noted yesterday.

On 30 April 2010 the 24 members of the National Planning Commission were appointed, with an expectation that they would work publicly and transparently to produce a 25-year National Strategic Plan and/or a 5-year Medium Term Strategic Framework within one year, with subsequent annual updates.

The last to publish their projections was the National Planning Commission, not counting the two earlier (and quite instructive) Green Papers published by the National Planning Minister and Commission Chair, Trevor Manuel, which have already been sent out in this part. We will return to the National Development Plan in the next part of the course.

The Soviet Union’s “GOELRO” plan is the grandfather of all such plans. Here is an image of it, with a link to further reading about it:

GOELRO Plan document, 1920

The struggle continues.

           

Image: Ebrahim Patel; GOELRO Plan document, 1920.

  

·        The above is to introduce the original reading-text: The New Growth Path Framework, 2010.

Industrial Policy Action Plan

Development, Part 8b

Industrial Policy Action Plan

On 18 February 2010 South Africa’s Minister of Trade and Industry Rob Davies introduced “IPAP2” in a speech to the National Assembly, attached here in the form of a 4-page document (download linked below). Introducing the Plan, he wrote:

“As a country, South Africa has no alternative to the course of action we propose. Manufacturing and other productive sectors of the economy are the engines of long-term sustainable growth and job creation in developing countries such as our own.”

The full 2010/11 – 2012/13 Industrial Policy Action Plan (4-part PDF) is at:

http://www.thedti.gov.za/ipap/ipap.htm

This is the Industrial Policy document that Polokwane promised, and it has since been produced in updated versions, which would be available from the DTI.

Towards the end of the introductory document Dr Davies writes

“It is estimated that the IPAP will result in the creation of 2 477 000 direct and indirect decent jobs over the next ten years. It will diversify and grow exports, improve the trade balance, build long term industrial capability, grow our domestic technology and catalyse skills development.”

This is the kind of good work that puts empirical meaning into the term “developmental state”.

Image: Dr Rob Davies. Cde Davies is also a member of the Central Committee of the South African Communist Party.

·        The above is to introduce the original reading-text: National Assembly Statement on IPAP2 by Dr Rob Davies, 2010.

Green Paper Revised

Development, Part 8a

GOELRO Plan

Green Paper Revised

The Revised Green Paper on the National Planning Commission of January 2010 (attached) resolves the question of authority as follows:

“Cabinet would be ultimately responsible for adopting a national vision and strategic plan. A clear understanding of how government works as well as independent input that clearly articulates the aspirations of ordinary South Africans are two essential ingredients of this national vision and strategic plan.”

The document is brief and concerns itself with some definitions. In conclusion it says:

“The Revised Green Paper: National Planning Commission is thus now published in the Gazette, proclaiming the establishment of the Commission and inviting nominations.”

The nominations from the public were many and rumoured to be in the thousands, but the names of neither the nominees nor any intermediate shortlist were published, but only (on 30 April 2010) the list of 24 appointed Commissioners, who were:

Bobby Godsell	Mariam Altman	Joel Netshitenzhe	Jerry Coovadia
Elias Masilela	Chris Malikane	Anton Eberhard	Karl von Holdt
Jerry Vilakazi	Vivienne Taylor	Bridgette Gasa	Mohammed Karaan
Noluthando Gosa	Marcus Balintulo	Thandabantu Goba	Tasneem Essop
Jennifer Molwantwa	Vuyokazi Mahlati	Phillip Harrison	Pascal Moloi
Mike Muller	Malekgapuru Makgoba	Ihron Rensburg	Vincent Maphai

Next, we will look at the IPAP2 document.

Image: GOELRO Plan (Electrification of the Soviet Union) as imagined by artist Pavel Filonov, (1883-1941). The GOELRO Plan was published in 1920 and completed by 1931.

What Lenin wrote:  Communism = Soviet power + electrification

·        The above is to introduce the original reading-text: National Planning Commission Revised Green Paper 2010.

National Plan

Development, Part 8

National Plan

The 40-page Green Paper on National Strategic Planning (attached) is a discussion document, but its release in September 2009 was followed by complaints. COSATU’s General Secretary lambasted it. NEHAWU lambasted it because it was drafted and issued by the South African government, not the National Democratic Revolutionary Alliance. NEHAWU wrote:

“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.”

One of this Green Paper’s merits was that it made a strong case for regular central 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 it does not compromise with neo-liberal laissez-faire (French for “leave alone”). With this Green Paper, the necessity for planning (dirigisme or “steering” in French) became orthodoxy in South Africa.

The first National Strategic Planning Green Paper

This first Planning Green Paper was not itself a plan. It committed the Minister to produce the first national plan within a year (it actually took more than two years). It laid down the process by which the planning would 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 of weaknesses 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 in the Green Paper, 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 and/or black 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 approach remains unchanged, then the strategic plans produced by the process described are bound to fall far short of what is necessary.

Class formation

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.

There is a great deal inside the Green Paper about protocol and government etiquette. Whether these things are really crucial will become apparent. We now have the “IPAP2” and the “New Growth Path” (NGP). How these other two planning exercises will correspond with the eventual National Plan is something we will have to wait to see.

Our graphic, above, representing communist planning, is the symbol of the former German Democratic Republic, which was in its time a good friend to South Africa.

In the next post we will contrast and compare the revised and much shorter Green Paper that arrived in January, 2010 and was executed.  The commissioners were appointed on 30 April 2010. Their first effort was the “Diagnostic”, in June 2012, which as foreseen (in 2010) by the Communist University, proceeded to list various ills that were to be cured. The National Development Plan was published on the 11^th of November, 2011 and was endorsed by the ANC just over a year later, at its 53^rd National Conference in December, 2012.

• The above is to introduce the original reading-texts: SA Government Green Paper on National Strategic Planning, Part 1 and Part 2.

The Rise and Fall of Neo-Colonialism

Development, Part 7b

Jomo Kenyatta, 1894 - 1978

The Rise and Fall of Neo-Colonialism

Today’s main item is Chapter 8 of Colin Leys’ 1975 book “Underdevelopment in Kenya” (attached, and downloadable from the link below).

This book was researched in Kenya and published 2-3 years after Rodney’s Dar-es-Salaam-written “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”.

“Underdevelopment in Kenya” is remarkable (like Engels’ “Condition of the Working Class In England”, for example) for being written in the right place at the right time, by a man who was able to see what he was looking at, know that it was something new and important, and describe it properly.

What Leys saw was not only post-colonial class formation, but also the beginnings, in 1975, of the “neo-liberal” and “Washington Consensus” policies that have cursed us ever since, but which now, at last, appear to be on their way out.

The fourth linked item of the week  is a more deliberately scholarly essay by David Moore, as compared to the short newspaper article of his that we used two days ago written in the same year, 2004.

Moore’s essay rehearses parts of the factual background of capitalist colonialism and reviews some of the works of the then-fashionable theorists, who now, ten years later, seem out-of-date (which 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.

The two documents introduced above are together bigger than a normal post in this series. But both are valuable and both contribute substantially to this collection of material on development. Therefore they go out together, today, for the sake of maintaining a well-rounded archive, and for those who may wish to read them.

Images:

Top: Photo of the then President of the Republic of Kenya Jomo Kenyatta posing in pseudo-traditional regalia prepared by former colonialists (Disclosure: I, your VC, was working for a different department in the company that made this regalia at the time);

Middle: photo of a bronze public statue of Kenyatta wearing the same phony theatrical robes, providing a long-term image of the neo-colonial mummeries for posterity.

·        The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Contradictions of Neo-Colonialism, Leys, 1875; The Second Age of the Third World, Moore, 2004.

Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Development, Part 7a

Europe Underdeveloped Africa

“Colonialism had only one hand - it was a one-armed bandit.”

So as not to forget that the National Democratic Revolution, as well as 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 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 (used yesterday), 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.”

On a personal note, this VC of yours is one who attended, with my parents, aged 12, the opening of Embakasi Airport in Nairobi, mentioned on page 4 of this Walter Rodney text as “the world's first handmade international airport”. I can tell you that Embakasi on the face of it appeared at that moment to be a perfect, and dazzling, advertisement for modernity. This contrast of reality and appearance was typical of colonialism.

There is 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, were conceived of all together in 2009 as a virtual “SACP Special Congress Reader”. We hope to include some of the SACP’s documents in the concluding parts of this course.

Rodney divided this crucial chapter of his book into four parts, which are:

6.1 The Supposed Benefits of Colonialism to Africa

6.2 Negative character of the social, political and economic consequences

6.3 Education for Underdevelopment

6.4 Development by Contradiction.

Reading this document again reminds one of many things about the recent colonial past that are already being forgotten, even while they are being reproduced in new ways. Rodney is especially valuable because he wrote from the other side of the apartheid “front line” but was very well aware of the inter-dependence of all colonialism, whether of a “special type” or not, and also of neo-colonialism.

Walter Rodney belongs in the company of the greats like Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral, whose work he knew and quoted.

Image: The late, immortal Walter Rodney, assassinated by a bomb, in 1980.

·        The above is to introduce the original reading-texts: Colonialism as a System for Underdeveloping Africa, Walter Rodney.

Development is Class Struggle

Development, Part 7

Sao Paulo, Brazil

Development is Class Struggle

David Moore’s article (attached; download linked below) “The Brutal Side of Capitalist Development” appeared in the now-defunct Johannesburg newspaper “ThisDay” in 2004, as an “op-ed” feature.

At the time, at the height of the Mbeki Presidency, the article was remarkable in the mainstream South African 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 had 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, he says. Like a new broom, Moore swept away all the “happy synergistic tales”, while reminding people of “capitalism’s brutal genesis” and also its saving grace, the “vibrantly emerging working classes.”

The document is a nice, short read, though packed with hints and pointers. Now in 2013, eight years later, there is continuing talk of a “developmental state” and perhaps an implied assumption that what we already have is that very “developmental state”. Yet the diverse origins of “developmentalism” have hardly been re-examined. Hence the other, longer documents that will be introduced this week, for the sake of completeness. But this article of David Moore’s will be more than adequate as a discussion text.

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” wrote Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, meaning that the entire historical development of humanity had been driven by the dynamic of class struggle. It still is being driven by class struggle.

·        The above is to introduce the original reading-text: The Brutal Side of Capitalist Development, Moore.

Trade Unions in a NEP-like country

Development, Part 6b

Trade Unions in a NEP-like country

Today’s attached text by V I Lenin 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”, in both private and public enterprises.

We have seen that Lenin was ill from the start of the NEP, then progressively more ill, and finally bedridden and unable to speak for months until his death in January, 1924. If we read the documents we would also have noticed that the Civil War was also continuing until 1922.

Later, the richer, capitalising peasants or “kulaks”, who employed others as proletarian workers, were demonised, correctly or not, and the NEP came to an end around 1928. The NEP therefore had a short and constrained life, and consequently, a limited literature. But ours is not to examine the NEP in great detail. We just want to note that in Lenin’s view, this was the correct transitional arrangement, and to see why Lenin thought so.

Large-scale industry was mostly in state hands but small businesses were capitalist. This was not merely expedient. It was necessary. It was the right way, and not a liberal way.

Here in South Africa we do not yet have proletarian state power in the way that the Russian workers obviously had it at the time of Lenin’s writing of this text (1922). But in other respects we have a similar set of circumstances. Big-scale industry is either in the hands of monopoly capital or of the state, leaving a very large portion of the population having to fend for itself, as survivalists, entrepreneurs, SMMEs and all the rest of conceptual divisions of the petty-bourgeoisie. These are mostly poor people, and they have to be helped to survive.

But above all in South Africa, just as under the NEP in Russia in the 1920s, the class struggle continues. Lenin is very frank about this. In the end there is not going to be a win-win situation, and there is no win-win along the way, either, but only class struggle with both winners and losers. Here is an example of what Lenin had to say on this score, in this work:

“As long as classes exist, the class struggle is inevitable. In the period of transition from capitalism to socialism the existence of classes is inevitable; and the Programme of the Russian Communist Party definitely states that we are taking only the first steps in the transition from capitalism to socialism. Hence, the Communist Party, the Soviet government and the trade unions must frankly admit the existence of an economic struggle and its inevitability until the electrification of industry and agriculture is completed—at least in the main—and until small production and the supremacy of the market are thereby cut off at the roots.”

Trade unions are all about “contact with the masses” and therefore cannot be sectarian:

“Under no circumstances must trade union members be required to subscribe to any specific political views; in this respect, as well as in respect of religion, the trade unions must be non-partisan.”

The interest of the working class is “developmental” in a material sense, namely an “enormous increase in the productive forces”. Lenin puts it like this:

”Following its seizure of political power, the principal and fundamental interest of the proletariat lies in securing an enormous increase in the productive forces of society and in the output of manufactured goods.”

Lenin concludes:

“The Communist Party, the Soviet bodies that conduct cultural and educational activities and all Communist members of trade unions must therefore devote far more attention to the ideological struggle against petty-bourgeois influences, trends and deviations among the trade unions, especially because the New Economic Policy is bound to lead to a certain strengthening of capitalism. It is urgently necessary to counteract this by intensifying the struggle against petty-bourgeois influences upon the working class.”

A NEP-like situation, or developmental state, which South Africa now has, involves a deliberate transitional expansion of the petty-bourgeoisie, and therefore also requires a constant struggle to maintain a “superstructure” over this petty-bourgeoisie. Such is the lesson of Lenin in this case.

The formation and the growth of the proletariat will in due course become determinant, because class struggle is the motor of history, and because the proletariat is the gravedigger of capitalism. But in the mean time, the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie must continue with their historical role of creating employment and by doing so, creating the bigger, and finally overwhelmingly massive and politicised proletariat.

·        The above is to introduce the original reading-texts: Role and Functions of the TUs under NEP, Lenin, 1921.

From the NEP Russia will come the Socialist Russia!

Development, Part 6a

From the NEP Russia will come the Socialist Russia!

The attached short speech to the Moscow Soviet in November 1922 gives more of the background and history of the NEP. 

There is so much that is strong from Lenin, and it ranges so widely, that it is difficult to keep in mind that after the October 1917 revolution he only had four years of relatively good health, and that was interrupted by the assassination attempt of August 1918. During 1922 and 1923 he was mostly ill, and he died in January 1924.

Therefore Lenin’s direct leadership of the policy that he, more than any other, is associated with - namely the New Economic Policy or NEP - only went for about a year from its beginning, which was in March, 1921.

The NEP was abandoned in favour of collectivisation and full central planning in 1928, under the leadership of J V Stalin.

As can be seen in the last paragraph of this speech of Lenin’s, he intended “that NEP Russia will become socialist Russia.” This phrase is echoed in the translation given on the Internet for the slogan in Russian on the NEP poster (above). The other image is of a peasant produce market held during the NEP.

How the transition to socialism was to take place, or exactly what it meant in Lenin’s mind, is a matter of study. We will continue this study with the next of these three items on the NEP.

·        The above is to introduce the original reading-texts: Plenary Session of Moscow Soviet, Speech re NEP, Lenin.

New Economic Policy

Development, Part 6

New Economic Policy

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 after 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 followed on from “the struggle”, as it were.

The NEP was not a substitute for big-scale, planned industrial development. Early in today’s main document, “The Tax in Kind” (1921) (attached), 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.”

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 whole document is worth reading and re-reading. Note that the actual “tax in kind” is not particularly prominent in the text. The sub-title, “The Significance of the New Policy and its Conditions” is more apt.

The actual “tax in kind” policy meant that peasants in particular had the option to pay tax in the form of produce, not cash, after which they were free to sell any additional produce they had on the open market. The tax in kind was a component within the overall scheme of the NEP, which in total amounted to a revival of small-scale market-capitalist production.

It is clear that what Lenin is doing is ordering priorities and synthesising all of the factors that were in play. There is no crude dichotomy here that would cancel out the small-scale producers in favour of the larger 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 the 1990s.

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.

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 above is to introduce the original reading-texts: The Tax in Kind, Lenin, 1921, Part 1 and Part 2.

Entrepreneurship

Development, Part 5b

Entrepreneurship

In the Umsebenzi Online of 30 June 2010, SACP GS Dr Blade Nzimande wrote that we must “Fight Tenderpreneurs to defend entrepreneurship!!”

The GS wrote: “Entrepreneurs, found in co-operatives, small and medium sized businesses, are all those who genuinely and honestly go about doing business, including tendering for government work.”

The attached item today is a short article of Professor Michael Morris’s, 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 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.

Morris also says: “Entrepreneurial individuals are opportunity-driven, not resource-driven.” This may be the truest of the many true things that Morris noticed about entrepreneurs.

Business is driven by the customer. It is not true, as Jean-Baptiste Say used to believe, that supply creates its own demand. The entrepreneur’s job is to identify demand, where demand means people wanting goods or services, and ready and willing to pay for them promptly and at a price that will ensure a profit to the entrepreneur.

Most co-ops in South Africa are set up in what Lenin referred to as the “Asiatic manner”, expecting to produce first and sell later. Whereas, as Lenin pointed out, to be a good co-operator one must be what he called a “cultured trader”. Above all, this means securing the demand before you make (or buy) and supply. The entrepreneur is a trader, and a cultured trader.

A great deal follows from that, and these are the considerations that define the world around the co-operatives, small and medium sized businesses that Dr Blade Nzimande referred to. Most of these considerations are obscured or downright lied-about in capitalist literature. Morris’s short article is a rare example of relative candour in the business press, which makes it very well worth reading.

The market is crucial, but contrary to what the bourgeois ideologues keep on saying, the market is not free or open. It is we, the opponents of monopoly capitalism, who are the true “free-marketeers”. Small businesses, including co-ops, to survive, must have access to markets that are not dominated by predatory monopolistic market manipulators; and if they are selling to the state, they must be paid on time and in full. These conditions hardly exist in South Africa, which has historically been monopolistic in the extreme, and whose government, on the other hand, is a notoriously slow payer.

The Chinese delegation that visited South Africa in 2009 told us that the Chinese peasants are guaranteed a market by the state, at the same price that private buyers are prepared to pay.

South Africa will also have to pay attention to the question of the market for peasant, petty-bourgeois, and co-operative production, which is so clear in Lenin’s approach and which he explicitly recommends.

Even if it may not always be a matter of the state setting up co-ops, yet the mass social development of peasants and petty-bourgeois is always going to be a matter of educating, organising, and mobilising. Paradoxically, and for this reason, the petty-bourgeoisie needs the communists.

Illustration: “Entrepreneur” means one who “holds together”, as the ring in the picture holds together the chains. Most especially the business entrepreneur holds together demand and supply.

·        The above is to introduce the original reading-texts: Dismissing Myths and Misunderstandings of Entrepreneurship, Morris.