[DEBATE] : Re: urban poor=bomb

Fri Jun 16 20:51:53 BST 2006

Dominic, really!

The position of the peasantry in Russia is that they were instrumentalised 
by Lenin and later had their land taken away by Stalin. Right up to 1917 the 
RSDLP(B) had no land policy because they were afraid that if they 
distributed land to the peasantry they would be actually advancing 'the 
development of capitalism in Russia'. After the Revolution (or maybe between 
February and November) the Social Revolutionaries, who did have a 
land-distribution policy, were afraid to carry it out. Lenin, who never let 
theory get in the way of politics, simply applied the SR policy. The result 
was, indeed, to create a nation of peasant proprietors. There was then a 
policy of forced deliveries (war Communism), which was disastrous, famine, 
followed by the New Economic Policy (privatisation!), followed eventually by 
forced collectivisation, and the deportation and deaths of millions of 
'kulaks' (a kulak, or middle-peasant, was anyone who stood in the way of 
Soviet power in the countryside). Lenin, just before he died, and 
recognising the rural problem he had himself created, wrote his little piece 
on cultural revolution through the development of rural cooperatives. We 
will leave aside the ecological destruction caused by the Soviet state in 
the post-WW2 period.

The above is a sketch done from memory. And I guess I could give a similar 
sketch for China even BEFORE it began its present policy of taking land away 
from the peasants.

To compare the 'achievements' of Communist Revolutions with the disastrous 
condition of the Indian peasantry, still under semi-feudal conditions, is 
hardly flattering to the former. Perhaps one should rather compare the 
results of the Communist Revolutions for the peasantry with the results of 
the 'capitalist revolutions' (or land reform policies) carried out in Japan, 
Korea and Taiwan.

As for your disparaging account of the urban and rural poor in South Africa, 
there seems to me here a lack of simple respect for the mass of the working 
population. But certainly this is not your intention, with this image of 
incoherence and disorganisation acting as a rhetorical foil to that of the 
organised working class. Well, the problem here, as you certainly know, is 
that however well-organised and class-conscious, the percentage of 
wage-earners, in the strict sense, has been dropping since apartheid was 
ended! Worldwide, only one in 15 workers are unionised (which may or may not 
include those in state-controlled unions in China).

So, either one has to address the working people as a whole, or depend upon 
the one-in-fifteen who, even if not self-interested are increasingly aware 
of their precarious and meagre privileges, and whose unions may act less as 
tribunes of the working people as a whole, more as representatives of this 
tiny minority of the working people. Situations vary by country and over 
time.

But a repetition of ancient mantras is the worst service one can provide the 
unions, giving them a sense of superiority over or amongst the working 
people, rather than a frank recognition of the major crisis of the class and 
their organisations in 200 years. The labour movement has to be re-invented 
to meet the conditions of a globalised, neo-liberalised capitalism, in which 
employment growth seems concentrated in sub-contracted production, services 
(including security workers!) and tourism (globally one of the largest 
employment sectors). To re-invent the labour movement means, first of all, 
to have an understanding of the present condition of labour. It is no longer 
what it once was or was expected to be in the writings of Marx, nor in the 
movies of Eisenstein. And its advanced sectors are as likely to define 
themselves as Aymara (Bolivia) or Immigrants (USA) as they are to define 
themselves as 'the working class' in any classical or contemporary 
Marxist-Leninist sense.

Best,

Peter

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dominic Tweedie" <hypercube at telkomsa.net>
To: "debate: SA discussion list " <debate at lists.kabissa.org>
Sent: Friday, June 16, 2006 6:30 PM
Subject: [DEBATE] : Re: urban poor=bomb

Peter W,

Simply put, one's prospects as a peasant would have been a lot better in
Russia or China than in India or many other places, over the last half
century. As far as I can see.

But that is not really the thing you need to grasp. The point is that the
larger part of our country, South Africa, is either peasant, destitute
unemployed, or dirt-poor petty-bourgeois. This is an extremely difficult
mass to organise as a whole. It is inchoate. It is eclectic. You may
disagree with my historical references, or my conclusions, and that is fine.
What you should not do is deny that it is within these histories, and only
there, that the question of what can be done for the petty-bourgeoisie as a
class is intelligently discussed, starting with "Class Struggles in France
1848 to 1850" and the "18th Brumaire", by Marx.

The working class with its a priori organisation (thanks to capitalism) is
not at all the same. But so long as this huge burden of 40% unemployment is
hanging around all our necks, we as the working class are handicapped. That
is why COSATU has invested such a lot in the "Jobs and Poverty" campaign
over the last 12 months, including two full general strikes. (In Britain
they still talk about 1926 in hushed tones, but we have general strikes
every year).

Yet the disorganisation of this great part of our population continues.
Those on the streets demonstrating during the stay-aways are mostly not
them, but rather are the organised proletariat. Q.E.D. Hence we realise that
we have to help, to reach out. Not that we have to organise people locally
or sectionally so much. All human beings have the innate tendency towards
organisation. We as the organised working class (I'm speaking for our lot
now) need to consciously supply the organisation at the level of the class,
which is what the petty-bourgeoisie can never do for itself.

(Of course there is the example of Poujade, if you like. But it was a flash
in the pan, and it ended quickly, and in tears. And even in that case,
without the initial encouragement of the Communists, nothing would have
happened.)

In my opinion working class assistance to the organisation of the poor has
to be in the context of organs of joint popular power, as in soviets, UDF,
or panchayats, always different in different places and times. One is not
trying to be prescriptive. That won't work, for sure. But one does have to
be class-conscious and aware of the shifting political economy (as Mao was,
acutely, and Lenin was, and Marx was).

Class-neutral "social movement" or "civil society" theories don't do it. If
they did - what a pleasure! The CIVICUS World Assembly starts on Thursday,
for example, in Glasgow. Did you know? Do you give a four-x? No, and neither
does anybody I know in SA, except maybe Kumi Naidoo and his pals in Newtown,
Johannesburg, which is where the CIVICUS head office is located.

Dominic.

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-----Original Message-----
From: debate-bounces at lists.kabissa.org
[mailto:debate-bounces at lists.kabissa.org]On Behalf Of Peter Waterman
Sent: 16 June 2006 05:39 PM
To: debate: SA discussion list
Subject: [DEBATE] : Re: urban poor=bomb

Dominic:

You continue to simultaneously amaze and disappoint me:

'The only mass organised force of sufficient power to push through a
historically adequate transitional provision for the urban petty-bourgeois
poor is the working class. The working class has the potential power and
sufficiently clear vision to do the job, as it did the job for the rural
peasants of Russia and China.'

Which Russia and China are we talking about here? When? Clearly not today.

The last time the urban working class played some kind of leading social
role in Russia was 1917 - and even then it was precisely the existence,
alongside the old working class, of a new ex-peasant segment, that provided
for insurrectionary will and force. During immediately following years the
urban working class was deprived of its own immediate organs and then
leached of its most active elements by recruitment into the Army, the Party
and State (only the last two in Durban, late-1994).

In the case of China, it was in the Shanghai uprising of...umm...1927? -
supported by the Comintern, crushed in blood. After this came Mao with his
proletarian rhetoric but peasant-based movement.

But in both cases your working class, full of power, full of vision, was
incapable of controlling the state created in its name, the Party that
'represented its longterm general interests'.

The tragic results of 'proletarian revolutions', the failure of such to
occur in industrialised capitalist countries, and the quite understandably
ambiguous attitudes and political role of 'the organised working class' in
South Africa, Brazil, South Korea, should surely be enough to warn those of
us with an emancipatory project (rather than one of either subordination to
capital and state, or with a kakikaze project of self- and class-suicide) to
abandon archaic rhetoric.

Capitalism has become immensely more universal and complex. To surpass it
requires, surely, something more than the simplistic slogans of 1848, 1917
or 1949. Repeating this is liable to mean in practice a rhetoric of
proletarian leadership combined with a practice of political
self-subordination.

Over to you,

Peter Waterman

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