National Democratic Revolution, Part 7b
The Petty Bourgeoisie and Poujadism
Last in this section on class
alliance, which has looked at peasants and traditional leaders as well as at bourgeois
and proletarians, we now consider the petty-bourgeoisie, a large class in South
Africa, and one that includes a high proportion of the very poor. The hawkers
and the “survivors” are members of this class, as much as the small shopkeepers
and small business people (the so-called “SMMEs”).
The petty bourgeoisie are the
urban equivalent of the peasant class. They share with the peasantry the
peculiar characteristic of being what Karl Marx called (in the “18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”)
a “sack of potatoes”. Such a class has minimal internal linkages. It exists as
an aggregate, and not as an organism. In chemical terms, it is a mixture, and
not a compound.
This is in contrast with the
working proletariat, which is a socialised, or in other words, interdependent
class. For this among other reasons, the working class is a more advanced
class, capable of giving leadership to the peasantry and to the
petty-bourgeoisie.
In his address at Joe Slovo’s graveside
on the 15th anniversary of Slovo’s death, 6 January 2010, the
current General Secretary of the SACP Cde Dr Blade Nzimande said, concerning
the leadership the working-class party must give:
“We must also
recruit amongst small businesses, who continue to be suffocated by monopoly
capital in general, the capitalist malls built in the townships that are
killing their small businesses, and the ‘tenderpreneurs’ who continue to enrich
themselves often through corrupt tenders at the expense of honest small
entrepreneurs who do not have political connections in the state. We must
strengthen small entrepreneurs and defeat ‘tenderpreneurs’! We need to support
skills development for co-operatives, small and micro enterprises. We need to
deepen our struggle for the transformation of our financial sector to benefit
the workers and the poor, including co-operatives and small and micro
businesses.
“As we have
done over the past 16 years and before, we need to engage and seek to influence
the terms and conditions under which a new black section of the bourgeoisie
emerges and grow. We need to fight for truly broad based empowerment and seek
to direct investment into the productive sectors of our economy that is
creating jobs. We need to continuously expose and challenge self-enrichment of
a few and fight the emergence of a highly dependent compradorial bourgeoisie!
In this struggle we must also seek to expose opportunistic use of the language
and demands of the working class in order to hide the accumulation agenda of a
compradorial bourgeoisie. This is the meaning of Slovo’s life, struggles and
observations today!”
The above-quoted speech was
all the more valuable for the fact that the Marxist literature devoted to the
petty bourgeoisie in our time is pitifully small, worldwide. We now go
to a recollection of France in the 1950s (but written later) for an
account of the phenomenon of “Poujadism”. This was a petty-bourgeois uprising
that allied itself, in its beginning and at local level, with the communists,
until it degenerated towards near-fascism. See above for a picture of Pierre
Poujade (1920-2003), the leader of this movement.
In their relations with the
intermediate classes, history shows that the communists must proceed with great
care, and must not lose focus. But it also shows that these classes are real,
and can potentially have a self-conscious and beneficial development, especially
if aided by the always-better-organised working class. But if petty-bourgeois
populism gets out of hand, which it can do, then the distance between it and
fascism can be covered in a short time.
Foster’s account is written
from a somewhat sectarian point of view. It disparages the efforts of the
French communist party, but it does not say that the vanguard party should not
give leadership to the petty bourgeoisie. On the contrary, Foster confirms this
necessity. All he can manage to say against the communists is that if the
Trotskyists had been in charge they would have done better. This is a hollow
claim.
More on the nature and the
problems of the petty bourgeoisie can be found in Engels’ (e.g. “The Housing Question”), Rosa
Luxemburg’s (e.g. “Reform or
Revolution?”), and Lenin’s (e.g. “The Tax in Kind”)
writings.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: The case-history of Poujadisme, Foster.
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