Comrades,
The Communist Manifesto says: “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”.
This is _not_ the same as the slogan of the French (bourgeois) Revolution: “Liberty. Equality. Fraternity.”
Equality is a liberal and not a revolutionary concern. Equalityhas a strong, but misleading, moral aroma. Its original force came from practical capitalist necessity. People were no longer to be serfs, or slaves. They were to be free. Free to starve. Or free to sell their labour-power on a day-to-day basis, as the working proletariat that capitalism required.
The proletariat is made up of citizens, who have rights, and who are not slaves or serfs. According to the liberal-bourgeois revolutionaries, the poor were now equal to the rich, because they all had the same freedoms! That's what you call "human rights", folks.
It is a small step from the above to the equally liberal conclusion that all that is missing is “economic freedom”, and this is just what Karl Marx’s early opponent Pierre-Joseph Proudhon thought.
Proudhon’s kind of liberalism, or reformism, like Julius Malema’s, says that what is wrong with capitalism is inequality, and therefore what needs to be done is to level the ownership, or the income, or both. This is petty-bourgeois socialism, a close relative of anarchism, and of syndicalism, which we in South Africa call workerism. Proudhon was no more of a revolutionary than Malema is. What he craved was the petty-bourgeois paradise of his imagination.
Marx wrote what Lenin called “the first mature work of Marxism” as a polemic against this kind of petty-bourgeois delusion. It was called “The Poverty of Philosophy”, published in 1847, the year before the Communist Manifesto was first published. It opposed Proudhon’s book “The Philosophy of Poverty”.
Marxism was defined in opposition to this kind of anti-revolutionary ultra-leftism, right from the start.
So you can see that it is not just Marx’s “Capital” that David “Harvey” Masondo (DHM) is up against. He is up against the whole of Marx’s work, from beginning to end, including, for another relevant example, “The Critique of the Gotha Programme” of 1875.
“The Critique of the Gotha Programme” explains, among other things, why the workers cannot have what DHM calls “the surplus they produce”.
DHM, like his namesake and mentor David Harvey of New York, relies upon a presumption that people in general have not read Karl Marx’s works, and that therefore they can be misled about revolutionary theory with impunity.
But in South Africa, unlike in the USA, it is unsafe to presume that readers do not know Marx’s work, or that they are unable to recognize populist demagogy when they see it.
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