[YCLSA Discussion] Re: Local Class Alliance [CU751]

[Dominic Tweedie]

Dear Cde Xoli, comradely greetings reciprocated. The first thing that we have to seize hold of in this matter is the one of the "working class consciousness" that you refer to. "Working class consciousness", all other things being equal, is not different from bourgeois consciousness. The ideology of the entire society is the ideology of the ruling class. That is the situation as we find it, and it is the reason for having a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries. This case was made most succinctly by Lenin, in "What Is To Be Done?" Lenin (and Marx before him, in e.g. "Value, Price and Profit) wrote that trade union struggles, whether won or lost, would not change the nature of the society. For that revolution to happen, a higher form of struggle is required. Gwede Mantashe, in a lecture on Con Hill, also said that trade unions are reformist. It is the truth. So that is something we have to take on board, and nail down. The working class is not automatically revolutionary. The working class can learn revolutionary lessons in direct class struggle, and the job of the professional revolutionaries - the communists - is to assist this process of revolutionising class struggle, through education, organisation and mobilisation. As to what the state of class-consciousness is at any time, well, that is a matter of fact and you need empirical research to find it out. Or, you need experience of class struggle. In my experience, it is true that the South African working class is quite outstandingly class-conscious. That is my impression. It is also the case that the intellectuals of the labour movement in South Africa are predominantly reformist, in my opinion, with the exception, generally speaking, of the SACP communists. Put simply, while the working class is very advanced in South Africa, COSATU and the ANC are currently sitting with reformist blinkers on. This is the nature of the current conjuncture, in my opinion, although it is disguised by "militant" rhetoric. The reformists are often the ones who shout loudest. As to the peasantry, well, there are academic researchers who will say that there are several million people in South Africa who continue to survive by subsistance agriculture. I can't say from personal knowledge whether this is true or not, but I do think it is very possible, and even likely. There will be many more who are in an intermediate position, no doubt. It is undoubtedly true that the peasantry and the working class are very closely connected. They can be brothers or sisters in the same family. For some workers it may be a surprise and a shock to be told that your brother is in a different class to yourself. But the lesson here is not that the classes are far apart, like two distant armies, but that they are intimately connected, and that it has always been so. Undoubtedly the working-class do influence the peasantry, but also the peasantry when working for wages often remain to an extent peasants. That is why so many workers in South African cities still regard themselves as "temporary sojourners", which is exactly what the old apartheid regime used to call them. They dream of buying a house or a little farm, and going back to the individualistic life of a peasant. The close connection between workers and peasants is a good thing insofar as it can assist in an organic way, the consolidation of a class alliance, but it should not make us think that these two classes do not exist as different classes. I suspect that you are mistaken to say that "the most fertile ground for the seeds of socialism will be the rural areas". Where is the evidence for that? What is the state of the co-operative movement in the rural areas? Where is the literature of this rural revolution? I think you are presuming that work has been done, which still remains to be done. I think that the SACP Special National Congress is going to review these matters, and will help us to a better assessment. In struggle, VC Xoli Dlabantu wrote: I think it is a very dangerous and gravely wrong to view South african peasants in particular as petty beorgoise particularly because: 1. The South African development path (CST) has left the South African society with no peasants but semi-peasants who have been for decades been subsidised by the proletariat, which without saying therefore subjects them to working class consciousness inclination or affinity.This in turn has far reaching implications on the logical negation in terms of the consequent rural development strategy that has to be informed by the same working class hegemony. In South africa, the most fertile ground for the seeds of socialism will be the rural areas. Comradely regards, Xoli On 10/1/09, Dominic Tweedie <dominic.twee...@gmail.com> wrote: <http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_D4UK2kWf5ik/SsSchsl02GI/AAAAAAAABbM/GrCJP5bp5Nk/s1600-h/EbenezerHowardThreeMagnets.jpg> [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<http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum/web/national-democratic-revolution-console> * (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 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?<http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/index.htm> *” (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<http://africanactivist.msu.edu/video.php?objectid=5> * relates, was set up in the textile manufacturing centre of *Ivanovo<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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 “*18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/index.htm> *” 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<http://yclsa-eom-forum.googlegroups.com/web/1503%2C+Housing+by+People%2C+C1%2C+C6%2C+Who+Decides%2C+Turner.doc?hl=en&gda=-kJ15nQAAAAFjQ6FFq8vKuwi7yizXsX1_KIka77lHkVwTxhqgZ9g09x8AV9R8GfbyynxPODKU-sQy1id3x8cInJTS_Ccdrzs0WB9P8W3Z_Kkr7uLRS4DprnCy8f58nL8bUvXB44> * (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<http://amadlandawonye.wikispaces.com/1976,+Turner,+Housing+by+People> * (7901 words) *Barking dogs, building bridges, Lauren Royston<http://amadlandawonye.wikispaces.com/2004,+Royston,+Barking+dogs+and+building+bridges> * (5469 words) *Thinking out of the matchbox, Glen Mills, Business Day<http://amadlandawonye.wikispaces.com/Thinking+out+of+the+matchbox,+Glen+Mills,+Business+Day> * (1199 words) *Reform or Revolution, Chapters 2, 7, 9 & 10, Luxemburg<http://amadlandawonye.wikispaces.com/1908,+Luxemburg,+Reform+or+Revolution,+compilation+of+C2,+7,+9+and+10> * (10250 words) -- Blog at: http://domza.blogspot.com/ Communist University web site at: http://amadlandawonye.wikispaces.com/ Subscribe for free e-mail updates at: http://groups.google.com/group/Communist-University/ Library of documents (CU "CD") at: http://cu.domza.net/ dominic.twee...@gmail.com --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You are subscribed. 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