Reactionary Petty-Bourgeois Utopia

Development, Part 2a

Reactionary Petty-Bourgeois Utopia

“To understand the controversies of the present day intelligently” (just to borrow a phrase from the main linked downloadable text, below) one needs to go back. Yesterday we went back to Engels’ book on “The Housing Question”, and today we go back to Lenin, in 1905.

Lenin’s “Petty Bourgeois and Proletarian Socialism” is an example of the antipathy of both these writers, Engels and Lenin, towards “reactionary petty-bourgeois utopia”. Both of them opposed the liberal view of emancipation, whereby the worker’s household is re-constituted as a miniature image of the bourgeois household, and the worker's entire family is drilled and regimented in bourgeois emulation and thought-patterns.

The relevance of this text is also to the concept of “development”, a word that is not used in Lenin’s article, by the way. But clearly, Lenin is looking at a situation wherein “development” in our modern, vulgar sense is very much on the agenda. The masses are poor. Something must be done.

Lenin points out the class realities: “Will the fullest liberty and expropriation of the landlords do away with commodity production? No, it will not.”

“…after destroying the power of the bureaucracy and the landlords, it will set up a democratic system of society, without, however, altering the bourgeois foundation of that democratic society, without abolishing the rule of capital.”

Lenin, already, 15 years before he launched the concept of the National Democratic Revolution while giving the report-back of the Commission on the National and Colonial Question to the Second Congress of the Communist international in 1920, had fully grasped the necessity of such an NDR, and its close relationship to the trajectory of social development taken in its full, dialectical sense. He writes:

“Can a class-conscious worker forget the democratic struggle for the sake of the socialist struggle, or forget the latter for the sake of the former? No, a class-conscious worker calls himself a Social-Democrat for the reason that he understands the relation between the two struggles. He knows that there is no other road to socialism save the road through democracy, through political liberty.”

But Lenin refuses to allow the revolution to ossify into any sort of equivalent to the idea of a static, perpetual “National Democratic Society”. He says:

“The peasants' struggle against the landlords is now a revolutionary struggle; the confiscation of the landlords' estates at the present stage of economic and political evolution is revolutionary in every respect, and we back this revolutionary-democratic measure. However, to call this measure "socialisation", and to deceive oneself and the people concerning the possibility of "equality" in land tenure under the system of commodity production, is a reactionary petty-bourgeois utopia, which we leave to the socialist-reactionaries.”

What is a reactionary petty-bourgeois utopia? The illustration above, a German Nazi poster dating from about 25 years after Lenin wrote the linked article, expresses the full picture: a reconstruction and development programme that presents itself as purely utilitarian and even innocent. The progress that it offers is also offered as the end of all progress. This is the kind of thing that Paulo Freire referred to as “necrophilia” (i.e. love of death).

Please download the document, read it and appreciate the extraordinary clarity and foresight that Lenin was able to achieve, aged 35, in 1905, and how much of it rings true even today.

Download:

Petty-bourgeois and Proletarian Socialism, 1905, Lenin (3415 words)

Further reading:

The Housing Question, 1872, Part Three, Frederick Engels (9957 words)

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Previous main Communist University posts:
Channel [members]	Course Archive	Weeks	Last Posted
SADTU Pol Ed [434]	Development, Rural and Urban	2/10	26 July 2010
CU Africa [230]	Marx’s Capital, Volumes 1, 2 & 3	7/33	20 July 2010
CU [2872]	Philosophy and Religion	5/10	21 July 2010
Courses completed in 2010 to date:
SADTU Pol Ed	Lenin’s The State & Revolution	6	June - July
	National Democratic Revolution	12	March - June
	Basics	10	January - March
SADTU Pol Schools	3-Day School	3 days	2-4 June
CU	No Woman, No Revolution	10	March - June
	Basics	10	January – March
Click here to visit Marxists Internet Archive

The Housing Question

Development, Part 2

The Housing Question

Thanks to his book, “The Condition of the Working Class in England”, Frederick Engels is among many other things considered to be the father of modern urban studies and town planning.

Therefore one might approach his book “The Housing Question” (linked below) expecting answers to that same housing question. One might hope for instructions about what to build. One might expect sermons about “delivery”, or even model house-plans. Instead, one finds severe polemic about very fundamental issues of class struggle. Why is this?

Before trying to answer that question, let us first use the opportunity provided by this example, to examine what polemic is. Engels begins the linked text with references to his opponent Mulberger, who had complained that Engels had been blunt to the point of rudeness. Engels concedes little more than sarcasm:

“I am not going to quarrel with friend Mulberger about the ‘tone’ of my criticism. When one has been so long in the movement as I have, one develops a fairly thick skin against attacks, and therefore one easily presumes also the existence of the same in others. In order to compensate Mulberger I shall try this time to bring my ‘tone’ into the right relation to the sensitiveness of his epidermis.”

But later, admitting that he had misrepresented Mulberger on a particular (quite small) point, Engels lambastes himself as “irresponsible”.

“This time Mulberger is really right. I overlooked the passage in question. It was irresponsible of me to overlook it…”

The rules of polemic are roughly these: It is done in writing. It is always against another named individual’s writing. It is direct and frank and pays little regard for bourgeois squeamishness; on the other hand, it pays the utmost respect to the meaning of the opponent’s words. Opponents in polemic never misrepresent each other. Everything is permissible, except misrepresention.

Development is class struggle

After his remarks about “Mulberger”, Engels goes straight into a long paragraph (the second half of page 1, going over to page 2) that contains a summary of theory and practice, vanguard and mass, from the 1840s up until his point of writing, just one year after the fall of the Paris Commune. The paragraph mentions “the necessity of the political action of the proletariat and of the dictatorship of the proletariat as the transitional stage to the abolition of classes and with them of the state.”

This is the Communist Manifesto all over again. So, we can ask, why does Engels “go to town” to this extent? Is this not merely “housing” we are talking about? Is not housing something that everybody needs? Classless, surely? A win-win situation? Motherhood and apple-pie?

Engels says: NO! Engels says: the class struggle is here.

What we can read in Mulberger, through Engels’ eyes, is the petty-bourgeois (and full bourgeois) greed for this Housing Question as a means, or a tool, for reproducing petty-bourgeois consciousness, and this is just exactly how the post-1994 South African Government started dealing with the housing question. Yes, there should be lots of houses, it said in effect, but they must be petty-bourgeois-style houses, both in type, and in form of ownership.

The argument about housing is an argument about the reproduction of capitalism. It is an argument about the continuation of the ascendancy of bourgeois values over those of the working-class. For the bourgeoisie, the creation of a dwelling is an opportunity to invest that house with peasant-like values of individuality, and with petty-bourgeois ideas of “entrepreneurship”, and to regulate and control the people, according to these values.

Everything that happened in “housing” in South Africa post-1994 is pre-figured in the banal prescriptions of Mulberger that Engels lambastes. Any critique of housing in South Africa will inevitably have to follow the example of Engels if it is to be of any use. Please, comrades, read the first pages and the last paragraphs of this document, if you cannot read all of it.

As the Communist Manifesto says, he history of all hitherto-existing societies has been a history of class struggle. The coming “development” period of South African history will also be a period of class struggle. We may not necessarily win every specific struggle. But what this text of Engels says is: let us never fool ourselves. Win or lose, we are in a class struggle and there is no neutral ground, least of all on the question of housing and land development. There is much more to be studied here, but the key is political.

Please download the text and read it.

[Pictures: Shack, Abahlali BaseMjondolo; RDP House, David Goldblatt (“Miriam Mazibuko watering the garden of her new RDP house, Extension 8, Far East Bank, Alexandra Township, Johannesburg, 12 September 2006. It has one room. For lack of space, her four children live with her parents-in-law.”)]

Download:

The Housing Question, 1872, Part Three, Frederick Engels (9957 words)

Further reading:

Petty-bourgeois and Proletarian Socialism, 1905, Lenin (3415 words)

Previous main Communist University posts:
Channel [members]	Course Archive	Weeks	Last Posted
SADTU Pol Ed [434]	Development, Rural and Urban	1/10	21 July 2010
CU Africa [230]	Marx’s Capital, Volumes 1, 2 & 3	7/33	20 July 2010
CU [2872]	Philosophy and Religion	5/10	21 July 2010
Courses completed in 2010 to date:
SADTU Pol Ed	Lenin’s The State & Revolution	6	June - July
	National Democratic Revolution	12	March - June
	Basics	10	January - March
SADTU Pol Schools	3-Day School	3 days	2-4 June
CU	No Woman, No Revolution	10	March - June
	Basics	10	January – March
Click here to visit Marxists Internet Archive

The SAA lesson

Umsebenzi Online, Volume 9, No. 14, 22 July 2010

In this Issue:

• The SAA lesson: Intensify working class struggles against corruption

Red Alert

The SAA lesson: Intensify working class struggles against corruption          

Blade Nzimande, General Secretary

The findings of the KPMG report about possible large scale corruption and embezzlement of SAA monies, as well as the decision by the current SAA board to recoup these monies, is a decisive moment in working class struggles to fight corruption and defeat tenderpreneurship. The main lesson from this SAA saga is that the working class, and indeed the entire mass of our people, must not allow themselves to be intimidated in the struggle to expose corruption wherever it occurs.

The SACP does indeed welcome the findings of KPMG on allegations of corruption and possible self-enrichment at the SAA, as well as the decision of its board to further investigate this matter, including possible criminal actions against all those involved.

The SACP must salute the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU) for having issued a 'red card' against corruption at the SAA. This goes to show the extent to which the workers and the poor in general, and the organized working class in particular, have the power to be at the head of the struggle against corruption. Therefore the SAA developments must act as a lesson for the rest of the organized working class; that it must intensify its struggle against corruption on all fronts and with even more vigour.

We are however heartened by the fact that a number of other progressive trade unions, both in the public and private sectors, are intensifying the struggle against corruption on all fronts.

The latest SAA developments also have other lessons for us. Those amongst our ranks who might have begun to doubt the efficacy and impact of our campaign against corruption must now learn a lesson that we must be decisive and also persevere in our struggles to defeat the scourge of corruption.

'Tenderpreneurs' of all sorts, including of late 'mediapreneurs', have left no stone unturned to try and tarnish the image of all those in the forefront of the campaign against corruption. Some of these elements have tried to intimidate us by trying to project our campaign as being a campaign against the ANC and our government. Nothing is further from the truth. This has just been one of many attempts to try and kill our campaign against corruption. Proof of this is that most, if not all, of those who have been trying to project this as a campaign against the ANC, have not lifted a finger or participated in the many activities and debates we have embarked upon to highlight the dangers of corruption in society. The most important lesson from this is that we should refuse to allow any of our organizations and components of our alliance to be used as refuge pillagers of state resources.

Our campaign against corruption, we must reiterate, is not a campaign against the ANC, nor is a campaign that implies that ANC and government leaders are corrupt. This is one of the scarecrows used by tenderpreneurs, especially those within our own ranks, to try and scuttle legitimate working class struggles to intensify the struggle against corruption.

Another critical lesson from this is that the SACP, and indeed the working class as a whole, must not succumb to, or be intimidated by, media attacks and other attempts to discredit us, individually or collectively, as a way of diverting us from this principled campaign against corruption.

If anything, the SAA victory points to the actual and potential successes and victories we can still score against tenderpreneurs and those who steal public monies and resources.

Whilst welcoming the stance taken by the SAA board to go into the bottom of these allegations in the light of the forensic report, we must however express our serious reservations about its reluctance to probe the reasons why the previous SAA board failed to detect and act on this problem. It is only proper that the previous board should equally be called to account as to how such things happened under its watch. Otherwise failure to do this can only give an impression that corruption is being selectively dealt with outside of a holistic approach to call everybody to account.

It is also important that we re-iterate our stance that our struggle against corruption is not merely a moralistic struggle, important as the moral dimensions of this struggle are. It is fundamentally a political struggle that locates corruption as one of the major stumbling blocs in the building of a developmental state. Corruption is tantamount to theft from the state and the people, thus seriously undermining the capacity of the state to use the resources in its hands to advance our developmental objectives.

Coming back to the SAA and other state owned enterprises, it is important to use these latest revelations about the SAA to begin to advance concrete perspectives about the role of the SoEs in the national democratic revolution. SoEs must not be treated as private corporations in the hands of the state. They should be seen as important components of a developmental state. Therefore corruption undermines the entire developmental outlook of SoEs.

The above also means that we need a complete review of the salaries, conditions of service and bonuses of SoE executives, their investment priorities and their relationship to the overall developmental policies of the state. Salaries and conditions of service of SoEs must not be benchmarked against those of the private sector, much as we should also intensify the struggle against the obscene salaries and bonuses of private sector executives.

As the SACP we should advance, within the context of the Industrial Policy Action Plan 2 and the proposed new growth path, a completely new role for the SoEs; that of taking forward our overall developmental objectives in the spheres in which they operate. SoEs should not be treated as private corporations in the public sector, but as critical capacity in our struggle to eradicate poverty through, amongst other, transformation the current growth path into a developmental one.

Exposure of actual and possible corruption in the public sector and in the state owned enterprises should also not be distorted to suggest that corruption is only to be found in the public sector. There is large-scale corruption the private sector as well. Therefore, the working class should intensify the struggle against corruption in the whole of society.

We are indeed emboldened by SATAWU's actions at the SAA!

Planet of Slums?

Development, Part 1a

Planet of Slums?

Today’s main text is Mike Davis’ brilliant and celebrated essay, “Planet of Slums”, published in 2004 and later made into a book. It is appropriate to have it here, because of its early allusion to Engels’ “Condition of the Working Class in England” (“when the young Engels first ventured onto the mean streets of Manchester”), and because of Davis’ constant references back to what he says were the “predictions” of “classical Marxism”.

Davis starts by announcing the fact that at some point between 2004 and now, the world would change forever when, for the first time, the number of human beings living in cities would exceed those remaining in the rural areas.

The world moved from being majority-rural to being majority-urban.  It is good that Davis reminds us of this fact. The newspapers probably failed to notice it. Says Davis, in his opening summary:

“In 1950 there were 86 cities in the world with a population over one million; today there are 400, and by 2015, there will be at least 550. Cities, indeed, have absorbed nearly two-thirds of the global population explosion since 1950 and are currently growing by a million babies and migrants each week. The present urban population (3.2 billion) is larger than the total population of the world in 1960. The global countryside, meanwhile, has reached its maximum population (3.2 billion) and will begin to shrink after 2020. As a result, cities will account for all future world population growth, which is expected to peak at about 10 billion in 2050.”

The cities that soaked up all the people were of different types, according to Davis. Using Marx’s and Engels’ foundational work as his polemical foil, Davis implies that Engels foretold a future of Manchester Capitalism, whereas, Davis says, the most massive cities and conurbations of today exhibit features that contradict Engels’ and Marx’s “predictions”. Davis is trying to argue that the urbanisation that Engels described in his pioneering work, no longer applies. Perhaps he is trying to argue that the class struggle no longer applies, or has been cancelled.

Davis is undoubtedly wrong in this overall argument of his, but at least he succeeds in producing a stimulating focus on urbanism, and in highlighting a few facts, as he had previously done with his book “City of Quartz”, a class-based analysis of town planning in Los Angeles, California, USA.

Here are three of Mike Davis’s quotes, the first two from this essay:

“Classical social theory from Marx to Weber, of course, believed that the great cities of the future would follow in the industrializing footsteps of Manchester, Berlin and Chicago.”

“The global growth of a vast informal proletariat, moreover, is a wholly original structural development unforeseen by either classical Marxism or modernization pundits.”

And the third from a separate interview (in “Space and Culture):

“Neither classical Marxism, nor any other variety of classical social theory or neoliberal economics, ever predicted that such a large fraction of humanity would live in cities and yet basically outside all the formal institutions of the world economy.”

This is actually a literary fraud on Davis’ part, because Marx and Engels were never in the prediction business. It is true that they sought to understand the world and made many observations about that, but “the point is to change it”, as Marx noted in the 11^th Thesis on Feuerbach.

A conception of the world as developing by itself in a certain direction, without the help of political consciousness and political agency is something that has always been denounced by “classical” Marxists. Lenin called it “economism”. The inadequacy of “economism” is the reason why the vanguard Party is a necessity.

So Davis is wrong about Marx and the Marxists. Whether he is wrong in other respects is worth examining and debating. Please click on the download, save the file, and read it.

Download:

Planet of Slums, 2004, Mike Davis (11522 words)

Further reading:

Condition of the Working Class in England, Chapter 2, Great Towns, 1845, Engels (20411 words)

Previous main Communist University posts:
Channel [members]	Course Archive	Weeks	Last Posted
SADTU Pol Ed [438]	Development, Rural and Urban	1/10	20 July 2010
CU Africa [230]	Marx’s Capital, Volumes 1, 2 & 3	7/33	20 July 2010
CU [2899]	Philosophy and Religion	5/10	15 July 2010
Courses completed in 2010 to date:
SADTU Pol Ed	Lenin’s The State & Revolution	6	June - July
	National Democratic Revolution	12	March - June
	Basics	10	January - March
SADTU Pol Schools	3-Day School	3 days	2-4 June
CU	No Woman, No Revolution	10	March - June
	Basics	10	January – March
Click here to visit Marxists Internet Archive