Are we ready for revolution?

  

Are we ready for revolution?

School Introduction - 4th Session

Why “The State and Revolution”?

In the classic revolutionary literature one work, an unfinished work, stands out for its immediacy and for its closeness to the frontier of political thought, where experience and theory meet the unknown. This is Vladimir Lenin’s “The State and Revolution”, commenced in between the two Russian Revolutions of 1917 but interrupted half-way through by the Great October Revolution led by Lenin himself.

This school has to anticipate the most difficult kind of decision-making, which is precisely the kind that has to be done at the creative frontier beyond the safety of practiced moves and wide consensus.

This is where Lenin found himself in the months before the October Revolution. What he did was to rehearse the revolutionary record, so as to secure everything that could be secured in terms of theory and recorded practice. It is of great interest what he chose to revise.

Lenin went back to Marx and Engels. The first three of the six chapters focus successively upon the eighteen-forties, the 1848 revolutions, and the Paris commune of 1871, through the eyes of Marx and Engels.

Problematisation

The question that Lenin puts unavoidably in front of us is that of the State. The problem that appears is: whether or to what extent the State can be treated as benign, or developmental? We do not repudiate Lenin, yet we still praise state ownership and state “delivery”. How are these things reconciled? If the State is benign, then why would we want it to wither away? If the state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie [Marx/Engels, Communist Manifesto], and “an Instrument for the Exploitation of the Oppressed Class” [Lenin, State & Revolution] then how can it at the same time be beneficial?

Here are two texts that may assist:

CU Introductions to “The State and Revolution”

State & Revolution, C3, The Paris Commune, Lenin

Permanent Revolution

Taking a cue from Lenin, we can find in Karl Marx’s work the same kind of on-the-edge writing in decisive moments. In 1850 Marx was heavily involved, working from England, in revolutionary agitations in Germany. As always, the whole matter depended upon the balance of class forces from moment to moment, with the “democratic petty bourgeoisie” constantly vacillating and backsliding. The working class was obliged to ally with them, but according to Marx, in the last sentence of this speech, the proletariat should look forward to a “Permanent Revolution” when the gains made would be for practical purposes irreversible.

In the “Critique of the Gotha Programme” when the social democrats were attempting to unite, Karl Marx reluctantly (he was ill) went through the documents and marked all the “newspaper scribbler's phrases” that he could not swallow, which was many.

In parts III and IV Marx deals with the the state and “present-day society” with impatience. It is clear that Marx is facing the same problems among his comrades and allies as Lenin was facing in 1917, which are also the problems we face today. Marx rejects “state aid” to co-operatives. In effect, Marx is rejecting what we would now call “developmentalism”.

Problematisation

If Marx rejected developmentalism, who are we to restore it? And why would we want to do so? Is there any way to reconcile the Critique of the Gotha Programme with today’s developmentalism?

Address to CC of Communist League, March 1850, Marx

Critique of the Gotha Programme, Karl Marx, 1875

Withering Away of the State: an urgent question

Lenin thought that the Withering Away of the State was a matter of urgency. He wrote a full section of his Chapter One on the matter, and then came back with a full chapter on it (Chapter 5, download linked below).

In Chapter One, Under “The "Withering Away" of the State, and Violent Revolution” and after quoting Engels at some length, Lenin wrote:

‘The current, widespread, popular, if one may say so, conception of the "withering away" of the state undoubtedly means obscuring, if not repudiating, revolution.

‘Such an "interpretation", however, is the crudest distortion of Marxism, advantageous only to the bourgeoisie. In point of theory, it is based on disregard for the most important circumstances and considerations indicated in, say, Engels' "summary" argument we have just quoted in full.

‘In the first place, at the very outset of his argument, Engels says that, in seizing state power, the proletariat thereby "abolishes the state as state". It is not done to ponder over the meaning of this. Generally, it is either ignored altogether, or is considered to be something in the nature of "Hegelian weakness" on Engels' part. As a matter of fact, however, these words briefly express the experience of one of the greatest proletarian revolutions, the Paris Commune of 1871, of which we shall speak in greater detail in its proper place. As a matter of fact, Engels speaks here of the proletariat revolution "abolishing" the bourgeois state, while the words about the state withering away refer to the remnants of the proletarian state after the socialist revolution. According to Engels, the bourgeois state does not "wither away", but is "abolished" by the proletariat in the course of the revolution. What withers away after this revolution is the proletarian state or semi-state.

‘Secondly, the state is a "special coercive force". Engels gives this splendid and extremely profound definition here with the utmost lucidity. And from it follows that the "special coercive force" for the suppression of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie, of millions of working people by handfuls of the rich, must be replaced by a "special coercive force" for the suppression of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat (the dictatorship of the proletariat). This is precisely what is meant by "abolition of the state as state". This is precisely the "act" of taking possession of the means of production in the name of society. And it is self-evident that such a replacement of one (bourgeois) "special force" by another (proletarian) "special force" cannot possibly take place in the form of "withering away".

‘Thirdly, in speaking of the state "withering away", and the even more graphic and colorful "dying down of itself", Engels refers quite clearly and definitely to the period after "the state has taken possession of the means of production in the name of the whole of society", that is, after the socialist revolution. We all know that the political form of the "state" at that time is the most complete democracy. But it never enters the head of any of the opportunists, who shamelessly distort Marxism, that Engels is consequently speaking here of democracy "dying down of itself", or "withering away". This seems very strange at first sight. But it is "incomprehensible" only to those who have not thought about democracy also being a state and, consequently, also disappearing when the state disappears. Revolution alone can "abolish" the bourgeois state. The state in general, i.e., the most complete democracy, can only "wither away".’

At the end of Chapter 5 Lenin describes the transition to communism (shortened)

‘Accounting and control--that is mainly what is needed for the "smooth working", for the proper functioning, of the first phase of communist society. All citizens are transformed into hired employees of the state, which consists of the armed workers... All that is required is that they should work equally, do their proper share of work, and get equal pay; the accounting and control necessary for this have been simplified by capitalism to the utmost…

‘The whole of society will have become a single office and a single factory, with equality of labor and pay.

‘But this "factory" discipline, which the proletariat, after defeating the capitalists, after overthrowing the exploiters, will extend to the whole of society, is by no means our ideal, or our ultimate goal. It is only a necessary step for thoroughly cleansing society of all the infamies and abominations of capitalist exploitation, and for further progress.

‘The more complete the democracy, the nearer the moment when it becomes unnecessary. The more democratic the "state" which consists of the armed workers, and which is "no longer a state in the proper sense of the word", the more rapidly every form of state begins to wither away.’

Our own SACP comrade, the late Ron Press, in his “New tools for Marxists”, shows how the new mathematics of “chaos theory” has made it possible to understand how the kind of society described by Lenin can and must work.

Further, Ron press shows, as Lenin understood, that the withering away of the state was an urgent matter, and the contrary danger is always imminent, which is that the worker’s state becomes once more a bourgeois state.

Problematisation

How can these undoubtedly true conceptions of the state, democracy and the withering away of both the state and democracy, be preserved when the language of the current conjuncture is all in favour of democracy and the state? How can the urgency of decentralisation of power be transmitted when we are still in the process of centralising power? Here are two downloadable texts that can assist:

State and Revolution, C5, Withering Away of the State, Lenin

New tools for Marxists, 1995, Ron Press

Synthesis

Lenin realised that the transition to communism had to be secured in the process of the transition to socialism. Lenin realised that there was a moment of danger when it would be possible that the worker’s state could redevelop the characteristics of the bourgeois state. This is what happened in the Soviet Union under Stalin, and the eventual consequence was the collapse and break-up of the Soviet Union into a scattering of bourgeois states.

The revolution was not permanent, after all. The undead bourgeois state re-grew itself.

How can we institute the kind of freedom envisaged by Ron Press, so that it, and not the reverse tendency, will be the permanent result of our revolutionary work?

NUM scheme is for 31% state ownership only

NUM tables new plan for state mining  

  

Florence de Vries, Business Report, Johannesburg, 31 May 2010

The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) on Friday challenged previous proposals on the structure of a proposed state-owned mining firm.

And it said nationalisation of existing mines should remain on the agenda.

Addressing Parliament's portfolio committee on mining at the weekend, NUM spokesman Madoda Sambatha said the union gave its full backing to the establishment of a state-owned mining company and called for it to be established by June next year.

Sambatha opposed the idea of the state owning the majority stake in the company and said private investors, "irrespective of race or gender", should hold 49 percent while the state held only 31 percent.

"A further 10 percent shareholding should be allocated to an employee share ownership scheme and another 10 percent is to go to the community, traditional authorities or worker co-operatives," said Sambatha.

ANC Youth League president Julius Malema last week proposed that the state hold a minimum of 60 percent shares in the company and that private corporations would hold the remaining 40 percent and be responsible for the payment of royalties and taxes.

Matt Brenzel, a portfolio manager for Cadiz Asset Management, said NUM's proposal appeared to favour private investors, but that "the state could co-opt the other shareholders in a blocking move".

"It would also have to be established how the projects will be funded and whether state resources will be utilised, because if the state chips in the money, one has to wonder whether these resources could be better utilised elsewhere.

"Interestingly, there might be private investors for whom the profit motive is not that important, whereas security of supply is. China is a vast consumer of resource products and might be less sensitive to the profit argument, as long as its appetite is fed," he said.

Sambatha also said there was a need for a comprehensive mining strategy, which he believed was not currently the case. "The National Planning Commission, the Department of Mineral Resources, organised labour and organised business should play the most active role in this regard."

From: http://www.busrep.co.za/index.php?fSectionId=561&fArticleId=3973162

SACP: "Towards a new growth path" et cetera

SACP Central Committee Press Statement, 30 May 2010

The SACP Central Committee met in Johannesburg on the 28th and 29th May. The CC discussed a comprehensive political report, and it reviewed the Party’s organisational gains and international work. Also on the agenda was an input to the CC by the Governor of the Reserve Bank, Gill Marcus.

The SACP wishes Bafana Bafana good luck

The CC joins fellow South Africans in conveying to our Bafana Bafana team best wishes. We are confident that they will do our country proud. The SACP also looks forward to a World Cup that will be celebrated and enjoyed by all South Africans and by the hundreds of thousands of guests coming from all parts of our continent and the world at large.

Let us make sure that the coming weeks will lay down a lasting legacy of goodwill, a sense of common South Africanness, and a platform for ongoing development in our communities and schools. The SACP urges all involved to ensure that this event also benefits the workers and the poor of our country. Let this be truly a World Cup for All!

Towards a new growth path

For several years the SACP has been advancing the perspective that the key strategic task of our democracy is to place our economy upon a new and different growth path that is job creating and more egalitarian in its outcomes. This requires, amongst other things, a break with many of the formerly dominant neo-liberal dogmas of the recent past. The CC is pleased to note that this general perspective is gaining ground within the broader ANC-led alliance and in government itself.

Part of what is impelling this is the undermining of previously held neo-liberal certainties occasioned by the global recession of 2007-9. The SACP said a year ago that, far from being over, the crisis was likely to break out in new epicentres. The deepening crisis within the European Union is evidence of this. Choked by the strictures of a monetary union that favoured bankers and undermined sovereign national social policies, countries like Greece and Spain are being forced into swingeing budget cuts that will only make recovery more difficult, with a very real possibility of major countries in the developed world going into sovereign default. Locally, some who still cling to the old dogmas, are insisting that the crisis in southern Europe is due to the fact that they “lived beyond their means”, and that this is a “lesson for us in SA”. While economic discipline is important, the question to ask always is: discipline on behalf of whose class interests? The UK actually has a much bigger deficit than Spain, but because it is not part of the monetary union, it has greater room for manoeuvre.

In the context of charting a new growth path policy, the SACP is active in its own right and within broader Alliance structures. The CC engaged with a discussion paper on the critical role of our mineral sector in a new growth path. The paper notes the central and ongoing strategic importance of this sector to our country. Contrary to the common view that the entire sector is now a “sunset” industry, a recent City Group study estimated that SA has the largest reserves of minerals (excluding oil and coal) by value, and is the second in the world in terms of estimated reserve life-span, at 184 years. This is a major national asset, and the key question is how to ensure that this asset is used wisely in ways that ensure a sustainable growth path that benefits all of our people and over many generations to come. In addressing this question, the CC was particularly critical of the role of narrow BEE interests in the mining sector, and called for major changes in the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act to address this and other issues. The CC discussion paper will be released shortly.

The CC also commended the leadership role played by the Young Communist League in convening a Youth Summit on Jobs which brought together youth formations from a wide range of sectors and political formations – including the ANCYL, COSAS, SASCO, the DA Youth, and Solidarity Youth. The struggle against the crisis of youth unemployment requires the maximum participation and mobilisation. The SACP will continue to support our YCL in playing a leading role in confronting the many challenges facing our youth in South Africa.

The fight against corruption

The greatest threat to any nation-wide effort at placing our country onto a new job-creating growth path lies in the corrosive impact of corruption in the private and public sectors. The red lights are flickering on this front. We require decisive action. Corruption loots public resources, it bedevils organisations and it saps the capacity of the state to play an effective developmental role. Corruption in the private sector robs our fiscus of billions of rands and becomes an added burden on the working class.

The CC received reports on the SACP’s April month of heightened activism against corruption. We also noted and saluted the role that SACP branches and provinces have been playing in this crucial fight.

As we take up this struggle, together with our allies and all others in our country who abhor the impact of corruption, we can expect fierce resistance. Already SACP lives have been lost. In Mpumalanga a fearless and outspoken critic of corrupt practices, cde Bomber ‘Radioman’ Ntshangase, was murdered on the night of 4 May. Other senior SACP leaders in the province have been threatened. We are deeply concerned that no arrests have yet been made in these cases. We express our full support for our comrades in the province and together with them we resolve never to be intimidated.

In KZN the SACP has been active in mobilising against corruption. In particular, SACP structures in the province have been raising questions around the role of Ithala Bank. In our interaction with the Reserve Bank governor, the CC learned that, apart from two small mutual banks, Ithala Bank is the one bank in our country that has an exemption from Reserve Bank regulatory oversight. Why does it enjoy this exemption? The exemption must be lifted. Ithala is a very strategic development finance institution and must come under the full regulatory oversight of the Reserve Bank.

The Reserve Bank and vulture share-holders

In what Reserve Bank governor Gill Marcus concedes is an anomaly; our central bank has private share-holders, although the bank is a legal personality in its own right and is not owned by these share-holders. Nonetheless, a small clique from among the current share-holders has been running a campaign, trying to force the bank to buy them out (to “nationalise” their shares) at a hugely inflated price. Other central banks have faced similar “vulture” share-holder raids.

It is in this context that the SACP fully supports the intention behind legislation currently before Parliament’s Finance Portfolio Committee. It is legislation that seeks to avert the danger of this kind of predatory behaviour.

In our interaction with the Reserve Bank delegation, the CC welcomed the refreshing openness and spirit of engagement of the governor and her team. We respect the constitutional operational independence of the Bank. However, it was agreed that this necessary independence of the Bank does not mean that the Bank should or could operate in ignorance of the key challenge of placing our country onto a job-creating and more egalitarian growth path.

We call for stability in the SABC

The SACP is concerned that the SABC is once more showing signs of returning to its chronic instability of previous years. The SACP calls for stability in our public broadcaster and for good governance and collective rather than individualistic approaches. We need a public broadcaster that indeed represents the broad public of SA and particularly the great majority of workers and poor. Poor governance in the SABC also sets a poor example for governance in all of our public sector entities.

Freedom of speech and respecting cultural diversity

The SACP has noted Friday’s back-down and apology from the Mail & Guardian and its cartoonist Zapiro. The newspaper has conceded that it needlessly offended many members of the Muslim community. In welcoming this apology, the SACP believes that both the Mail & Guardian and Zapiro (and indeed all of us) should use the opportunity to consider other instances, affecting other communities, in which cartoons, for instance, have displayed gross insensitivity.

The SACP certainly upholds the critical right of freedom of speech. After all, it was the SACP that was the very first victim of apartheid-era banning and attempts to silence our members and our publications. Many of us went to jail for defying these anti-democratic measures. We certainly all need to have a sense of humour and be able to laugh at ourselves. But any journalist or graphic artist with a general commitment to building a non-racial and tolerant democracy in SA should always weigh the right to freedom of speech against the responsibility for not perpetuating demeaning racial or other stereotypes – whether intentionally or otherwise. As many progressive and moderate members of the Muslim faith have commented over the past week, gross insensitivity simply aids and abets chauvinism and backwardness on every side. But what applies to the Muslim faith also applies, and with even greater force in our situation, to racial stereotyping.

It is in this broad context that the SACP welcomes President Zuma’s proposed national dialogue aimed at promoting a country-wide discussion on our cultural unity and diversity.

100 years since the Union of South Africa

Monday 31st May marks 100 years since the establishment of the Union of South Africa. While it is not exactly an anniversary to celebrate, it is an occasion to look back and reflect upon a key moment that shaped our shared and often highly conflictual reality.

The Union of South Africa for the first time established the geo-political space that we now take for granted as our country. Its formation was preceded by two-and-a-half centuries of colonial wars of dispossession and, in many cases, genocide. The 1910 union was also preceded by a major war pitting two semi-feudal Boer Republics against a British Imperial Army and two local British colonies. It was essentially a war for control over the gold and diamond mines and over the super-exploited labour required to work them.

Following the defeat of the Boer republics, in a pattern that was to be repeated somewhat in its own way many decades later, Boer generals and Randlords made peace and formed, in effect, the first government of (white) national unity – the better to ensure profits and stabilise the accumulation process.

The Union of South Africa bestowed a common citizenship on white South Africans and excluded the great majority of blacks. 1910 marked the beginnings of a shift from external colonial domination to what the SACP was to describe as colonialism of a special type – in which the colonial power and the colonised majority occupied the same national territory. The unjust exclusion of the majority in 1910 was the immediate catalyst for the formation of the ANC in 1912.

While the Act of Union changed the state form in SA to a special colonial state of white minority rule, this politico-juridical change served to strengthen and perpetuate the capitalist accumulation path set in motion in the last quarter of the 19th century with the mining revolution. That accumulation path integrated us into a global capitalist system as a primary commodity exporter and an importer of capital and luxury goods.

The 1994 democratic breakthrough abolished the special-colonial state of white minority rule and replaced it with a new, non-racial democracy. However, 100 years after Union, and 16 years after the democratic breakthrough, the same fundamental accumulation path that reproduces racialised inequality remains hard-wired into our reality. Placing our economy onto a radically different trajectory is now the central task of our democracy.

Issued by the SACP. 

Contact Malesela Maleka, 082 226 1802

Marx's Capital Volumes 1, 2 & 3

Marx's Capital Volumes 1, 2 and 3

School Introduction – 3^rd Session

First division: Overview

The Communist University Course on Capital, Volume 1 is in 24 parts. The design problem for this course was a matter of dealing with all of the work’s 33 chapters, which are of very uneven length, and to have some kind of key to the work that would carry the study through the entire work.

This key is provided by Marx. His quest throughout Capital Volume 1 is for “the secret of the self-increase of capital” and his constant answer is the same: surplus-value, being the excess product of labour worked, over the value of labour-power paid for.

With this key it is possible to follow the development of Marx’s thought from the 1847 “Wage Labour and Capital”, at which point he had yet to make the crucial distinction between “labour-power” and “labour”, through several preliminary essays and through all of the chapters of the Volume 1 which Marx had published in 1867.

The set of introductions to this Communist University course are linked below this section; they can serve as a short version of Capital, Volume 1 or as a “crib” to the work, and they contain all necessary links to the actual work itself, whether as printable documents downloads or as links to the book on Marxists Internet Archive.

At the very moment when this course had been finished in the second half of 2009, certain meetings and publications that took place showed clearly that in SACP leadership circles and in ANC government circles, as well as in the academy, Capital Volume 3 was being widely consulted and quoted.

The Capital, Volume 1 benchmark had been surpassed. Or had it? Does Capital, Volume 3 supersede Capital Volume 1? This was now a challenge.

Frederick Engels seemed to think that Capital Volume 3 was boss. In his Preface to Volume 3 he says that it contains “the most important parts of the entire work”.

This challenge to Volume 1 turned out to be the key problematisation that made it possible to deal with both Volume 2 and Volume 3. The key question to apply was “Is Capital Volume 1 made obsolete by these further writings?”

It becomes clear, and clearer the more you go along, that the answer to this question, repeatedly given by Marx himself, is an emphatic “No!”

Volumes 2 and 3 confirm Volume 1, build on Volume 1, and repeatedly return to Volume 1 to emphasise that there is nothing in the world of finance, or of landowning, or of any other kind or variation of capital, that adds value under capitalism other than surplus-value. All else is an apportionment of surplus-value, if realised, or otherwise it is a financial fiction, ruse or swindle.

The Communist University’s introductions to the ten parts of Marx’s Capital Volumes 2 & 3 are linked immediately below.

Problematisation

For a first division, if necessary, we can take the two sets of Introductions covering the entire work, and interrogate or test the above argument. Is it the case that Capital, Volume 1 is nothing but a very gentle, sometimes repetitive, but comprehensive proof of the proposition that surplus-value is the one and only cause of the “self-increase of capital”? And having shown that it is, is it then also the case that Volumes 2 & 3 are concerned with the further division of the increased capital, but do not discover any new source of it?

One might add that whereas Volume 3 in particular examines the derivative machinations of banks and other “financial institutions”, there is nothing in the recent “global economic meltdown”, or in the current “debt crisis” in Europe, that is not clearly anticipated by Marx.

Finally, the Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (Volume 3, Part 3) is no more or less than the a confirmation that the only source of increase under capitalism is the excess labour realised over labour-power paid for; and that this being the case, all increases in “capital-intensiveness” that result from the constant advance of science and technology will tend to reduce profit. Therefore, it is necessary to show the capitalists that this is so. It is necessary for them to see that higher employment is the only way to more profit.

CU Introductions to Capital, Volume 1

CU Introduction to Capital Volume 2 & Volume 3

Second division: Capital and the Working Class

The working class of South Africa faces a problem of unemployment that is worse than most other countries.

On the potential up-side South Africa’s existing and well-organised working-class can, if it is brought to a condition of steady expansion, become the generator for a transformation of the entire continent of Africa.

In Value, Price and Profit, a lecture given by Karl Marx that is a short version of “Capital”. In this lecture, Marx reminded his working-class audience that labour-power is in normal circumstances paid for at its full value. Trade union combination is necessary to prevent employers from reducing pay below that value. Trade union struggle is a prerequisite for political struggle.

In Lenin’s “What is To Be Done”, Lenin makes clear that trade union organisations are not adequate for the political struggles of the working class and trade unions or federations of trade unions cannot play the role of political parties. The working class requires a dedicated political party - a communist party.

In South Africa, the demand of the working class, addressed to the bourgeoisie, is: Employ more people! In other words, both COSATU and the SACP are to that extent demanding more capitalism.

The strategic aim of the working class is to increase its size as a proportion of society, to increase the socialisation of production, and to organise itself both defensively and offensively.

Problematisation

In this set of circumstances, what is a “different growth path” as described as desirable in the media statement of the Central Committee of the SACP (30 May 2010)?

In China, the bourgeois class is permitted to expand its operations under the rule of the People’s Republic, led by the communist party. One consequence of this has been the growth of the Chinese working class from a numerically-small part of the Chinese population to the situation now where it is the largest national proletariat that has ever existed on the planet.

In the new growth path, what must grow? Is it the bourgeois way of life, or the proletarian way of life?

Value, Price and Profit, Parts 6 to 10, Marx

What is to be Done?, extract, Lenin

Third division: Topping and Tailing Capital

Chapter 1 of Capital, Volume 1, on commodities, and Chapter 13 of Volume 3 on the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall may be the most famous two chapters of the 106 chapters of the three main Volumes. These two are given at the bottom of this section.

Problematisation

Also bearing in mind the presentation prepared by the Communist University, but also looking at these two typical chapters in Karl Marx’s words, how can the propagation of the knowledge of the three Volumes of Capital be undertaken?

Presuming that this knowledge is both the highest and the most essential political knowledge we have, and also the benchmark for all of the rest, how can we make it familiar to millions of people, both within and outside the SACP and SADTU?

Capital Volume 1, Chapter 1 parts 1, 2 and 4, Marx

Capital Volume 3, Chapter 13, TRPF: The Law As Such

Synthesis

Capital, the full work, is the best guide to what is really happening in the bourgeois economy. Marx, in the book itself, constantly upbraids the “vulgar” bourgeois economists.

The publication of Volume 1 in 1867 coincided with the launch of the “marginal theory of value” by W S Jevons and also the “Vienna school”. Bourgeois economists who followed included Alfred Marshall and W M Keynes, followed in turn by the “neo-liberals” and the “neo-conservatives” of recent years. All maintain a strict seal between themselves and the Marxists, with few exceptions.

None of them have succeeded, and currently all of them are out of favour in the metropolitan capitalist countries, as well as in the third world.

South Africa has a substantial body of intellectuals both academic and actively political, a relatively large communist party, and a vigorous press. South Africa presents a “public realm” where, perhaps for one of the first times in world history, it may be possible to conduct a proper and inclusive economic dialogue that pays proper attention to the insights of Karl Marx.

While the Marxists appear to have a bias in favour of confrontation with capital, yet there is not necessarily any call for this. History will arrive in its own good time. Socialism, if it is to be the rule of the proletariat, may actually be a boom-time for capital, as it is in China. What the working class needs is an organised hegemony of ideas, and not necessarily the immediate destruction of the bourgeois class and its economic operations.

Even if the current state (which is a bourgeois state) were to nationalise parts of the economy, or develop new parts to the economy, these would at present have to be based upon capitalist relations of extraction of surplus value from workers. “Differential rents” in mining may be negligible or non-existent. Nationalised industries will operate on the basis of the same surplus-value and the same normal rate of profit in the same market as the bourgeoisie.

Pecuniae non olet. Money has no smell. In that case, what special features distinguish one “growth path” from another? If the black cat and the white cat can both catch mice, what difference does it make which one we use? (This was Deng Shaoping’s triumphant argument.)

Problematisation

Can it be possible to develop in South Africa a constructive dialogue with bourgeois business so that the country can have a single business culture with two main classes, as in China? Can it be possible to restore Karl Marx’s works, and in particular “Capital”, to the mainstream of intellectual leadership in business? How can such an educational project be furthered?

Women, a necessary democratic mass?

Women, a necessary democratic mass?

School Introduction - 2nd Session

First Part

“The feminists seek equality in the framework of the existing class society; in no way do they attack the basis of this society.” 

“Where, then, is that general ‘woman question’? Where is that unity of tasks and aspirations about which the feminists have so much to say? A sober glance at reality shows that such unity does not and cannot exist,”

Thus wrote the Russian revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai over 100 years ago in the document called “The Social Basis of the Woman Question”.

For Kollontai, feminism was synonymous with bourgeois feminism, and she thought that bourgeois feminists would always dominate any general-purpose organisation of women. The class question came first.

South African experience confirms the tendency of bourgeois women to turn women’s organisations to their personal and class advantage.

However, Kollontai does not settle the question of women’s organisation. We know that the Russian revolution did establish a Working Women’s Movement. Lenin addresses its Congress. We also know that the Communist International rejected women’s autonomous democratic organisation. Later, in 1954 in South Africa a Federation of South African Women (FedSAW) was founded by the trade unionist Ray Alexander and others; but it did not result in a lasting democratic mass organisation of women. It was dominated by the ANC Women’s League, which is first and foremost an ANC organisation.

Is there a “woman question”, after all? Referring back to Frederick Engels’ “Origin of the Family, Private Property and The State" reminds us of the historical arrival, together, of property and the State of class-domination, and that this catastrophe was also the occasion for the downfall of the women.

The downfall did not happen simultaneously across the globe. In Africa, we are still in the presence of state-formation, class differentiation, and the primary subjugation of women. It is a process that is not yet at its lowest point.

At the same time, subjective political agitation anticipates women’s liberation, but without the organised agency of women as a democratic mass.

Problematisation

Is there a Woman Question? Could a mass Working Women’s Movement organised on trade union lines be useful? Could such a movement be established in the face of opposition from the ANC WL and others? The origin of women’s oppression as women and as part of the proletariat are the same; can these aspects be united again to form the concrete basis of concrete struggle?

The school offers two reading texts to place comrades in a better position to answer such questions:

The Social Basis of the Woman Question, Kollantai

Origin of Family, Private Property, and the State, Chapter 9, Engels

  

Second Part

“No Woman, No Revolution” is a slogan that approaches the question of women from the point of view of the general revolutionary imperatives of our time. It refers both to the current National Democratic Revolution that has the aim of creating an organised, self-conscious collective Subject of History, and also to the historical revolutionary stages that must inevitably follow.

Women being more than 50% of the population, no revolution can succeed without them. This is not in the first place an argument for women, but for revolution. It says that without the women, revolution is not possible.

The argument develops, to say that to enrol the women into the revolution, the revolutionaries must initiate the same kinds of mass-membership structures for women as have been organised by and for the working class, such as trade unions.

But the women of South Africa have been influenced by those who have been selling an idea that constitutional democratic organisation is odiously masculine or patriarchal in nature. Among the women, some have been able to demobilise their sisters with this mistaken idea.

In particular, the opposition among women to constitutional, democratic organisation is evidenced by what happened to the Progressive Women’s Movement. The insistence that it be “organic – not a formal structure” has meant that no-one has rights, and even that the PWM has not existence as a juristic person. It cannot own property. It has no constitution, employees, or even a web site. Both policy and leadership are decided by “string-pulling”. Transparency and accountability do not exist. Collective mass agency, the very stuff of the NDR, is rendered impossible in the PWM. Then, the notional existence PWM acts as a barrier to, and a blight upon, any further organisational initiatives.

Problematisation

Is it possible to create a mass, democratic, constitutional Working Women’s Movement as a component of South Africa’s National Democratic Revolution? How soon can this be done? What will it require?

The given texts that may assist with these questions include the notes to the Communist University ten-part course “No Woman, No Revolution”. They are as follows:

CU Introductions “No Woman, No Revolution”

PWM Base & Founding Documents, & Declaration, 2006

  

Third Part

If we do not draw women into public activity, into the militia, into political life; if we do not tear women away from the deadening atmosphere of household and kitchen; then it is impossible to secure real freedom, it is impossible even to build democracy, let alone socialism.

Lenin, Third Letter from Afar, Zurich, March 1917

“Let the liars and hypocrites, the dull-witted and blind, the bourgeois and their supporters hoodwink the people with talk about freedom in general, about equality in general, about democracy in general.

“We say to the workers and peasants: Tear the masks from the faces of these liars, open the eyes of these blind ones. Ask them:

“Equality between what sex and what other sex?

“Between what nation and what other nation?

“Between what class and what other class?

“Freedom from what yoke, or from the yoke of what class? Freedom for what class?”

“Down with the liars who are talking of freedom and equality for all, while there is an oppressed sex, while there are oppressor classes, while there is private ownership of capital, of shares, while there are the well-fed with their surplus of bread who keep the hungry in bondage. Not freedom for all, not equality for all, but a fight against the oppressors and exploiters, the abolition of every possibility of oppression and exploitation-that is our slogan!

“Freedom and equality for the oppressed sex!

“Freedom and equality for the workers, for the toiling peasants!

“A fight against the oppressors, a fight against the capitalists, a fight against the profiteering kulaks!

“That is our fighting slogan, that is our proletarian truth, the truth of the struggle against capital, the truth which we flung in the face of the world of capital with its honeyed, hypocritical, pompous phrases about freedom and equality in general, about freedom and equality for all.

Lenin, Soviet Power and the Status of Women, November 1919; written for the second anniversary of the Great October Revolution (and linked below):

None of the above from Lenin is at variance with what the SACP has published, from the pen of its General Secretary, in the Party’s fortnightly e-mail newsletter, Umsebenzi Online, linked below.

In the most recent of these articles, Cde Nzimande wrote of “Concrete women's struggles under concrete conditions”. In earlier articles, the SACP General Secretary had written that the Progressive Women’s Movement should be working-class led, and that it should not just set up structures for their own sake, without political content.

Problematisation

Where we failed before, how are we now to succeed? Why has there been development of superstructure (PWM, Women’s Ministry) but no recruitment of women in general into the National Democratic Revolution?

Documents given to assist this discussion are as follows:

On Status and Tasks of Women, Compilation, Lenin

Umsebenzi Online on Women, 2006-2009, Nzimande

Synthesis

The class question and the woman question have a common origin and a common solution. Similarly, the National Democratic Revolution is the way forward for the working class and also for women as such. In this case, the synthesis of women in mass and workers in mass is the essence of the problem.

The ANC Women’s League and its creature the PWM have a virtual “monopoly” on women’s questions in South Africa, yet these are subsidiaries of the ANC and are not dedicated to women in the first place, but to the ANC in the first place. In practice, the ANC in this regard is largely present in its bourgeois or middle-class aspect, and not showing its proletarian face.

Apart from the ANC WL and the PWM, there are for practical political purposes as women only NGOs, organised around issues of abuse and issues relation to lesbian women. (Like the ANC WL, the Black Sash is an organisation of women, but not primarily for women as such.)

The great Ray Alexander (pictured), Josie Mpama and Dora Tamana raised the flag of working-class-led mass women’s organisation in the 1950s but their work was attenuated by the ANC women’s League’s insistence that it should be a federation, which the ANC WL was bound to dominate, and not a membership organisation.

The UDF women’s structures of the 1980s and the Women's National Coalition of the 1990s likewise gave way while the ANC WL survived. Will this happen again, indefinitely? Is it the case that women as women are locked out of politics in South Africa, forever?

Three Horizons of Education

Three Horizons of Education

School Introduction - 1st session

This is an introduction to the first session of the joint SADTU/SACP political school, to be held from 2nd to 4th June 2010 at The Lakes, Benoni, sent in advance, with links to supportive reading material (see further general notes on the school at the bottom of this post).

The programme has been re-designed following a request that provision should be made for “breaking up into workshops”, and re-convening as a “plenary”. This has been done, and the new programme will be published shortly. Nevertheless, the event remains a school, and not a conference. There is no basis here upon which the “plenary” can resolve on anything or bind any structure to its decisions.

For each session, a basis will be offered in case the school should wish to “break up into workshops”. These will tend to be divisions into three, with a potential fourth that would work on the overview or synthesis of the other three. This will be the case here, in this first instalment, having to do with education. There will be three “problematisations”, followed by a fourth part that problematises the synthesis of the other three.

The first session, then, is about education, at three horizons.

The first horizon is that of the present school itself. What is it doing? What is its aim? What is its pedagogical method?

The second horizon is that of the country and also the continent of Africa. It asks the question: How? How is political education to be extended to the nation and to the continent?

The third horizon is that of national policy on education and the actual practice of SADTU members.

Finally, there is the synthesis of these three into one.

First horizon

This school is attended by top leadership of the SACP and of SADTU. It must be set up to challenge and to extend this top cadre and thereby to prepare those attending to be effective actors in the middle of revolutionary changes. Consequently, the school must locate itself at the frontier of revolutionary theory and practice, where guides are few and fully-developed experts are non-existent.

In this terrain we need pedagogical theory and methodology that is adequate to our revolutionary purpose. The most advanced such theory and practice is the “critical pedagogy” of the late Paulo Freire, and his followers.

This pedagogical theory conforms with long-standing communist study-circle practice, where one comrade “opens the discussion”, problematising the matter in question. In the ensuing debate, leadership may come from any quarter. Dialogue is expected to create a socialised knowledge, and not commodified, individual expertise. Learning is treated as continuous, with little or no attempt at “closure”. Decisions are taken in constitutional structures, of which an ad hoc political school or study-circle cannot be one.

The loudest lip-service is paid to Paulo Freire by those who have the least intention of conducting themselves in a Freirean manner. The problem confronting those who would promote this revolutionary educational practice, therefore, is the constant warfare that is conducted against it, which in the first place employs deception and sabotage, and afterwards, blatant destruction. All educationists, including those from the world of politics, are conflicted, precisely in the manner described by Freire in “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed”. As much as they preach, so to that same extent do they fail to liberate. To the extent that they liberate, so to that same extent does their authority disappear.

Problematisation

Freire describes how the road to educational hell (i.e. the reproduction of oppressive relations), is paved with good intentions of “upliftment”. A sophisticated pedagogical theory is required to defeat this tendency and still preserve the subjective freedom of the educator, and Freire provides just such a theory. Yet the “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” can itself be subverted if we are not vigilant.

This school offers three texts as background reading on basic revolutionary pedagogy:

Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire, C1

Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire, C2

Organic Intellectuals, Critical Pedagogy, McLaren, Fischman

Second horizon

Here we consider how to extend revolutionary political education to the South African nation and beyond, to the boundaries of the African continent.

In the first place this task is going to require a methodology that is replicable. This school of ours is a laboratory in that respect. It contains elements that are replicable and others that are not replicable.

The expensive venue and the travelling costs of the participants to this school are elements that are not widely replicable.

The reading material, on the other hand, transmitted by e-mail and/or printed in booklet form, available around the country, in advance of the school, is a form of propaganda that is very much replicable. Printing costs of material for this three-day course are projected to cost less than R100 per participant.

Thus, what is arguably one of the most important components of political education, is actually one of the cheapest. (Not forgetting that any text is no more than a stimulus for dialogue, and therefore that the gathering of people is in itself the most crucial resource).

The extension of political education must be a dialogical “movement”. It must constitute a “republic of letters” conducted through all available media, whether advanced, like e-mail and Internet, or established , such as hard-copy print media, or hybrids of these two, such as “Print-on-Demand”.

The roll-out of a national and continental dialogical movement of revolutionary political education may be conceived of in two parts.

The first part is enabling. This includes the firm adoption of a revolutionary pedagogy; the secure possession of an expanding archive of source material; the establishment of lines of communication; and the preparation and communication of ready material that can be used as a basis for educational dialogue.

The second part is the work of organising study circles in all parts of the country and the continent. At the local level this means the establishment of a regular programme on given dates at a certain time and venue. It means the constant announcement and communication of these details to an ever-widening circle of contacts. It means the onward deployment of cadres formed in political education, to action stations in the mass organisations of the revolutionary struggle.

In short, political education becomes a revolutionary transmission-belt. It moves people via education to organisation and mobilisation, or in other words, to action.

Problematisation

As a way of problematising this question of extension of political education beyond the present school, one may ask: How can I set up a long-lasting weekly study circle? What minimum inputs will it require? Can it be sustained by the resources of the participants? If not, why not?

Political education that is not sustainable within the resources of the political community will be open for manipulation by those controlling the resources. This is why the technology of propagation (for example e-mail, booklets, and Print-on-Demand) becomes a political question.

This school offers three texts as background reading on the propagation of revolutionary pedagogy:

To Political Education Workers Conference, Lenin, 1920

Cuba - A Nation Becoming a University, 2005, DuRand

Organic Intellectuals, Critical Pedagogy, McLaren, Fischman

Third horizon

The third horizon is that of national policy and practice of education in South Africa.

By this is meant the political role of education in society as it is presented to the national polity.

An exhaustive discussion of educational theory and practice will not be practically possible in this school, notwithstanding the presence of distinguished leadership of SADTU, unless the other general political questions are to be dropped.

The question of education as it appears in mass debate through the mass media and to a great extent in the deliberations of the African National Congress in particular is largely treated as utilitarian and quantitative as opposed to politically qualitative.

In terms of the individual, education is widely accepted as being the process of commodification of human labour-power for the capitalist market.

At the aggregate level, “skills training” or skills acquisition is commonly presented as a greater imperative, and therefore a greater good, than education. This paradigm is not only built into capitalism, but is also built into developmentalism.

The sense of education as human political development falters and fails in this environment because it cannot be conceived of as a quantifiable “outcome” and therefore cannot easily be funded or operationalised within the same framework as the utilitarian provision of “skills”.

At the same time, the education system in South Africa is clearly failing to provide “skills” that would commodify all individuals to a level suitable to and advanced productive economy, or a “knowledge economy”.  According to the bourgeois newspapers, the education system cannot even manage to produce sufficient commodified candidates for the job-opportunities that are available.

This situation drives discussion back to the political aspect of education. In practice, the contradiction between education as political practice, versus education as utilitarian bourgeois process, can never be put to bed.

Problematisation

The problematisation of this part of the session on education is therefore the question of whether the state education system can ever be used to transmit revolutionary political ideas.

To put this in terms that correspond to Freirean pedagogy, the question is whether state schooling can contribute to the development of a collective mass revolutionary Subject of History, and whether such a kind of schooling could ever co-exist with the powerful and contradictory existing practice of commodification of individuals through the state education system.

Not the least part of this problem is the powerful subjective motivation of a dominant part of the school pupil population, and their parents, towards “qualification” for the capitalist labour-market, even in the face of unemployment of qualified people including university graduates.

Consequently, the public dialogue around education contains mixed messages.

To characterise this contradiction, this school offers two texts to help stimulate discussion. These are both addressed to the ANC (in “ANC Today”) by ANC government ministers. The one from the Minister of Higher Education is more political. It projects an image of the future leadership of the South African polity as such. The one from the Minister of Basic Education is thoroughly programmatic, hardly questioning the underlying assumptions of bourgeois state education, and relying quite heavily, for example, on the provision of a billion rands-worth of pre-printed workbooks. These examples are:

Developing a new generation of leaders, Blade Nzimande

Basic Education, Angie Motshekga

Synthesis

As SACP and SADTU, we may wish to consider how the state education system, the organised cadres of educators in the form of SADTU, and the political formations of the liberation movement including the ANC, SACP, YCL and ANCYL could all be aligned to provide a continuum of revolutionary political education.

Consider: At present, sixteen years after the “democratic breakthrough” of the 1994 universal-franchise election, the political movement that gave birth to that political victory remains an unresourced volunteer movement coexisting with but not touching the machinery of capitalist reproduction in the sphere of education.

The democratic teachers’ union’s members are employed to propagate the essentials of bourgeois society to each new generation of young people and they do so, while negotiating for pay and conditions like any other workers. Whatever revolutionary aims they may harbour, these are still effectively “private” from the point of view of the state education system.

The two worlds of education, bourgeois and revolutionary, are not synthesised but remain contradictory. Can this be altered? How?

On the school in general

This introduction, or draft opening to the discussion, for the first session, on education, has been posted to the dedicated school blog at http://sadtu-eight.blogspot.com/. From that blog it is posted automatically by e-mail to a list which includes many who will be attending the school, and others who will not. Others again who will be attending the school are not yet on the e-mail list. As usual, like any other educational project, we are a work in progress.

The e-mail list is set up as a “forum”, meaning that replies will go to all of the other members of the list, subject to moderation. Discussion can also take place in the form of “comments” to the blog.

The links in this message are to downloadable MS-Word format documents, which should also be available in hard copy at the school itself. Most of these documents, and many more, are available to Print-on-Demand from a stock list at Jetline outlets. To access these materials, please go to the blog address given above, and follow the instructions at the top of the right-hand column.