Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Development, Part 7a

Europe Underdeveloped Africa

“Colonialism had only one hand - it was a one-armed bandit.”

So as not to forget that the National Democratic Revolution, as well as the contested concept of “Development”, arose from the anti-colonial and then anti-neo-colonial struggles, it is worth reading some of the late Walter Rodney’s words. Linked below is Chapter 6 from Rodney’s 1973 book “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”, written while Rodney was a lecturer at the University of Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania. The first paragraph corresponds nicely with Moore’s article (used yesterday), denying

“that ‘after all there must be two sides to a thing'. The argument suggests that, on the one hand, there was exploitation and oppression, but, on the other hand, colonial governments did much for the benefit of Africans and they developed Africa. It is our contention that this is completely false. Colonialism had only one hand - it was a one-armed bandit.”

On a personal note, this VC of yours is one who attended, with my parents, aged 12, the opening of Embakasi Airport in Nairobi, mentioned on page 4 of this Walter Rodney text as “the world's first handmade international airport”. I can tell you that Embakasi on the face of it appeared to be a perfect advertisement for modernity. For me it was the image of modernity that I carried for years afterwards. This contrast of reality and appearance was typical of colonialism.

There is too much reading here for a normal CU study group (but Moore’s newspaper article is suitably short and pointed). Part of the reason for including it is that this series, together with the material from the NDR series, and the State and Revolution series, were conceived of altogether in 2009 as a virtual “SACP Special Congress Reader”. We hope to include some of the SACP’s documents in the concluding parts of this course.

Rodney divided this crucial chapter of his book into four parts, which are:

6.1 The Supposed Benefits of Colonialism to Africa

6.2 Negative character of the social, political and economic consequences

6.3 Education for Underdevelopment

6.4 Development by Contradiction.

Reading this document again reminds one of many things about the recent colonial past that are already being forgotten, but need to be remembered. Rodney is especially valuable because he wrote from the other side of the apartheid “front line” from a South African point of view but was very well aware of the inter-dependence of all colonialism, whether of a “special type” or not, and also of neo-colonialism.

Walter Rodney belongs in the company of the greats like Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral, whose work he knew and quoted.

Image: The late, immortal Walter Rodney, assassinated by a bomb, 1980.

Please download this long document and read it if you can:

Colonialism as a System for Underdeveloping Africa, Walter Rodney (34211 words)

Further reading:

Contradictions of Neo-Colonialism, Leys (8510 words)

The Second Age of the Third World, Moore (12938 words)

The Brutal Side of Capitalist Development, Moore (1137 words)

Development is Class Struggle

Development, Part 7

Development is Class Struggle

David Moore’s (download linked below) article, “The Brutal Side of Capitalist Development” appeared in the now-defunct Johannesburg newspaper “ThisDay” in 2004, as an “op-ed” feature.

At the time, at the height of the Mbeki Presidency, the article was remarkable in the mainstream South African media for being frank about the class struggle. Most of such material one would read at that time, in the depths of the 1996 Class Project years, was of the one-eyed “Development Studies” variety.

Moore only has to say how dull and derivative all this other material had been, to win the case unarguably.

The dispute between “neo-liberal GEARs and social-welfarist RDPs” is a sterile one, he says. Like a new broom, Moore swept away the “happy synergistic tales”, while reminding people of “capitalism’s brutal genesis” and also its saving grace, the “vibrantly emerging working classes.”

The document is a nice, short read though packed with hints and pointers. Now in 2010, six years later, there is much talk of a “developmental state” and perhaps even an assumption that what we already have is that “developmental state”. Yet the diverse origins of “developmentalism” have hardly been re-examined. Hence the other, longer documents that will be introduced this week, for the sake of completeness. But this article of David Moore’s will be more than adequate as a discussion text.

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” wrote Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, meaning that the entire historical development of humanity had been driven by the dynamic of class struggle.

Image: Sao Paulo, Brazil

Please download and read this 2-page text:

The Brutal Side of Capitalist Development, Moore (1137 words)

Further (optional) reading:

Colonialism as a System for Underdeveloping Africa, Walter Rodney (34211 words)

Contradictions of Neo-Colonialism, Leys (8510 words)

The Second Age of the Third World, Moore (12938 words)

Unions in a NEP-like country

Development, Part 6b

Unions in a NEP-like country

Today’s text on the “Role and Function of Trade Unions under the NEP” speaks unequivocally of “the duty of the trade unions to protect the interests of the working people”, in both private and public enterprises. (Please download the 8-page text via the link below).

Lenin’s text is of particularly sharp interest at this time, when South Africa is in the middle of a mass strike of public service workers (state employees). Please read the eight pages, comrades.

We have seen that Lenin was ill from the start of the NEP, and progressively more ill, finally bedridden and unable to speak for months until his death in January, 1924. If we read the documents we would also have noticed that the Civil War was also continuing until 1922.

Later, the richer, capitalising peasants or “kulaks” became demonised, correctly or not, but the NEP came to an end around 1928. The NEP therefore had a short and constrained life and consequently limited literature. But ours is not to examine the NEP in great detail. We just want to note that in Lenin’s view, this was the correct transitional arrangement.

Large-scale industry was mostly in state hands but small businesses were capitalist. This was not merely expedient. It was necessary. It was the right way.

Here in South Africa we do not yet have proletarian state power in the way that the Russian workers obviously had it at the time of Lenin’s writing of this text (1922). But in other respects we have a similar set of circumstances. Big-scale industry is either in the hands of monopoly capital or of the state, leaving a very large portion of the population having to fend for itself, as survivalists, entrepreneurs, SMMEs and all the rest of it.

Above all in South Africa, just as under the NEP in Russia in the 1920s, the class struggle continues. Lenin is very frank about this. In the end there is not going to be a win-win situation, and there is no win-win along the way, either, but only class struggle with both winners and losers. Here is an example of what Lenin had to say on this score:

“As long as classes exist, the class struggle is inevitable. In the period of transition from capitalism to socialism the existence of classes is inevitable; and the Programme of the Russian Communist Party definitely states that we are taking only the first steps in the transition from capitalism to socialism. Hence, the Communist Party, the Soviet government and the trade unions must frankly admit the existence of an economic struggle and its inevitability until the electrification of industry and agriculture is completed—at least in the main—and until small production and the supremacy of the market are thereby cut off at the roots.”

Trade unions are all about “contact with the masses” and therefore cannot be sectarian:

“Under no circumstances must trade union members be required to subscribe to any specific political views; in this respect, as well as in respect of religion, the trade unions must be non-partisan.”

The interest of the working class is “developmental” in a material sense, namely an “enormous increase in the productive forces”. Lenin puts it like this:

”Following its seizure of political power, the principal and fundamental interest of the proletariat lies in securing an enormous increase in the productive forces of society and in the output of manufactured goods.”

Lenin concludes:

“The Communist Party, the Soviet bodies that conduct cultural and educational activities and all Communist members of trade unions must therefore devote far more attention to the ideological struggle against petty-bourgeois influences, trends and deviations among the trade unions, especially because the New Economic Policy is bound to lead to a certain strengthening of capitalism. It is urgently necessary to counteract this by intensifying the struggle against petty-bourgeois influences upon the working class.”

A NEP-like situation, which South Africa now has, involves a deliberate transitional expansion of the petty-bourgeoisie, and therefore also requires a constant struggle to maintain a “superstructure” over this petty-bourgeoisie. Such is the lesson of Lenin in this case.

The formation and the growth of the proletariat will in due course become determinant, because class struggle is the motor of history, and because the proletariat is the gravedigger of capitalism. But in the mean time, the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie must continue with their historical role of creating employment and by doing so, creating the bigger, and finally overwhelmingly massive and politicised proletariat.

Please download and read this text:

Role and Functions of the TUs under NEP, Lenin (4353 words)

Further reading:

Plenary Session Of Moscow Soviet, Speech re NEP, Lenin (3513 words)

The Tax in Kind, Lenin (14724 words)

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Previous main Communist University posts:
Channel [members]	Course Archive	Weeks	Last Posted
SADTU Pol Ed [441]	Development, Rural and Urban	6/10	23 August 2010
CU Africa [230]	Marx’s Capital, Volumes 1, 2 & 3	11/33	18 August 2010
CU [2811]	Philosophy and Religion	9/10	20 August 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

From NEP Russia will come Socialist Russia

Development, Part 6a

From NEP Russia will come Socialist Russia

The downloadable linked item, a short speech to the Moscow Soviet in November 1922, gives more of the background and history of the NEP. 

There is so much that is strong from Lenin, and it ranges so widely that it is difficult to keep in mind that after the October 1917 revolution he only had four years of good health (interrupted by the assassination attempt of August 1918). During 1922 and 1923 he was mostly ill and he died in January 1924.

Therefore Lenin’s leadership of the policy that he more than any other is associated with, namely the New Economic Policy, or NEP, only went for about a year from its beginning, which was in March, 1921.

The NEP was abandoned in favour of collectivisation and full central planning in 1928, under the leadership of J V Stalin.

As can be seen in the last paragraph of the speech of Lenin’s to the Moscow Soviet, he intended “that NEP Russia will become socialist Russia.” This phrase is echoed in the translation given on the Internet for the slogan in Russian on the NEP poster (above). The other image is of a peasant produce market held during the NEP.

How the transition to socialism was to take place or exactly what it meant in Lenin’s mind is a matter of study. Which we will continue to do with the next of these three items on the NEP.

Please download and read this text:

Plenary Session Of Moscow Soviet, Speech re NEP, Lenin (3513 words)

Further reading:

Role and Functions of the TUs under NEP, Lenin (4353 words)

The Tax in Kind, Lenin (14724 words)

New Economic Policy

Development, Part 6

New Economic Policy

To read Lenin’s writings and speeches on the “New Economic Policy” (NEP) is to discover a process of comprehensive unpacking and assessment of factors and variables that are quite similar to those in play in South Africa at the present time.

The NEP followed after the “War Communism” that had been in effect during the Civil War in Russia after the Great October Revolution of 1917. [Picture: Lenin in Red Square, Moscow, 25 May 1919]. It followed on from “the struggle”, as it were.

The NEP was not a substitute for big-scale, planned industrial development. Early in today’s main document, “The Tax in Kind” (1921) (download linked below), Lenin emphasises:

“Socialism is inconceivable without large-scale capitalist engineering based on the latest discoveries of modern science. It is inconceivable without planned state organisation which keeps tens of millions of people to the strictest observance of a unified standard in production and distribution... At the same time socialism is inconceivable unless the proletariat is the ruler of the state.”

Later, he sums up:

“The tax in kind is a transition from War Communism to a regular socialist exchange of products. The extreme ruin rendered more acute by the crop failure in 1920 has made this transition urgently necessary owing to the fact that it was impossible to restore large-scale industry rapidly. Hence, the first thing to do is to improve the condition of the peasants. The means are the tax in kind, the development of exchange between agriculture and industry, and the development of small industry. Exchange is freedom of trade; it is capitalism.”

The whole document is worth reading and re-reading. Note that the actual “tax in kind” is not particularly prominent in the text. The sub-title, “The Significance of the New Policy and its Conditions” is more apt.

The actual “tax in kind” policy meant that peasants in particular had the option to pay tax in the form of produce, not cash, after which they were free to sell any additional produce they had on the open market. The tax in kind was a component within the overall scheme of the NEP, which in total amounted to a revival of small-scale market-capitalist production.

It is clear that what Lenin is doing is ordering priorities and synthesising all of the factors that were in play. There is no crude dichotomy here that would cancel out the small-scale producers in favour of the larger ones. On the contrary, the “development of exchange” between small and large is seen by Lenin as the “means”, both to improve the condition of the peasants, and to restore large-scale industry rapidly.

In the Soviet Union, a false dichotomy did subsequently develop between the small and the large, and it may have weakened that country and helped to set it up for the collapse that occurred.

In China, on the contrary, the most scrupulous attention was paid to those peasants and petty-bourgeois who formed the (once-overwhelming and still-existing) majority of the population; but not at the expense of large-scale industrial planning and development. China has survived, and prospered.

Are these things separate? Are they contradictory? Or are they one? There is in fact no choice. We must have it all: both large and small. We must also recognise the inter-relationship between the small-scale enterprises, that can activate large masses of our people, and the large-scale enterprises, that need the same people as providers of goods and services, and as a market. Industrial Strategy and Rural Development must be a unity.

Please download and read the following text:

The Tax in Kind, Lenin (14724 words)

Further reading:

Plenary Session Of Moscow Soviet, Speech re NEP, Lenin (3513 words)

Role and Functions of the TUs under NEP, Lenin (4353 words)

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Previous main Communist University posts:
Channel [members]	Course Archive	Weeks	Last Posted
SADTU Pol Ed [440]	Development, Rural and Urban	5/10	18 August 2010
CU Africa [230]	Marx’s Capital, Volumes 1, 2 & 3	11/33	18 August 2010
CU [2813]	Philosophy and Religion	9/10	20 August 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

Entrepreneurship

Development, Part 5b

Entrepreneurship

In the Umsebenzi Online of 30 June 2010, SACP GS Dr Blade Nzimande wrote that we must “Fight Tenderprenuers to defend entrepreneurship!!”

The GS wrote: “Entrepreneurs, found in co-operatives, small and medium sized businesses, are all those who genuinely and honestly go about doing business, including tendering for government work.”

The linked, downloadable item today is a short article of Professor Michael Morris’s, published in 1996 in the Business Day, which debunked a number of misconceptions about so-called “entrepreneurship”.

Morris wrote, among other things, that: “The entrepreneurial individual recognises a trend, a possibility, an unmet demand. He or she comes up with a concept for capitalising on the trend or demand and does so while the window of opportunity is open.”

This is the same point as Lenin is making. Lenin knew that the setting up of producer co-operatives without attention to their markets would be a disastrous waste.

Morris also says: “Entrepreneurial individuals are opportunity-driven, not resource-driven.” This may be the truest of the many true things that Morris noticed about entrepreneurs.

Business is driven by the customer. It is not true, as Jean-Baptiste Say used to believe, that supply creates its own demand. The entrepreneur’s job is to identify demand, where demand means people wanting goods or services, and ready and willing to pay for them promptly and at a price that will ensure a profit to the entrepreneur.

Most co-ops in South Africa are set up in what Lenin referred to as the “Asiatic manner”, expecting to produce first and sell later. Whereas, as Lenin pointed out, to be a good co-operator one must be what he called a “cultured trader”. Above all this means securing the demand before you make (or buy) and supply. The entrepreneur is a trader, and a cultured trader.

A great deal follows from that, and these are the considerations that define the world around the co-operatives, small and medium sized businesses that Dr Blade Nzimande referred to. Most of these considerations are obscured or downright lied-about in capitalist literature. Morris’s short article is a rare example of relative candour in the business press, which makes it very well worth reading.

The market is crucial, but contrary to what the bourgeois ideologues keep on saying, the market is not free or open. It is we, the opponents of monopoly capitalism, who are the true “free-marketeers”. Small businesses, including co-ops, to survive, must have access to markets that are not dominated by predatory monopolistic market manipulators; and if they are selling to the state, they must be paid on time and in full. These conditions hardly exist in South Africa, which has historically been monopolistic in the extreme, and whose government, on the other hand, is a notoriously slow payer.

The Chinese delegation that visited South Africa in 2009 told us that the Chinese peasants are guaranteed a market by the state, at the same price that private buyers are prepared to pay.

South Africa will also have to pay attention to the question of the market for peasant, petty-bourgeois, and co-operative production, as well as to the subjective, exhortative, educational contribution, which is so clear in Lenin’s approach and which he explicitly recommends.

Even if it may not always be a matter of the state setting up co-ops, yet the mass social development of peasants and petty-bourgeois is always going to be a matter of educating, organising, and mobilising. Paradoxically, for this reason, the petty-bourgeoisie needs the communists.

Illustration: “Entrepreneur” means one who “holds together”, as the ring in the picture holds together the chains. Most especially, the business entrepreneur holds together demand and supply.

Please download and read this short document:

Dismissing Myths and Misunderstandings of Entrepreneurship, Morris (1170 words)

Further reading:

Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx (8317 words)

On Co-operation, Lenin (2611 words)