** *****Communist University* ** *The Communist University Debates:* ** ** *Peasants and Petty-Bourgeois in the NDR* **
**/What is the place of these classes in South African history, and in today's NDR?/
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* *_Date_**:*22 June 2011 (Wednesday)
* *_Time_**:*17h00 (to 18h30)
* *_Venue_**:*The Boardroom, NUMSA Head Office, 153 Bree Street
(entrance in Gerald Sekoto Street)
* *_Topic_**:*The Peasants' Revolt, Govan Mbeki
* *_Course_**: The National Democratic Revolution
<http://domza.blogspot.com/p/development-ndr.html>***
*_Preparatory Summary_**:*
What place did the peasants have in the formation of the NDR, and what
place do they have in it today?
The petty-bourgeoisie is the urban equivalent of the peasantry. Who are they? What place to they hold in the political economy of South Africa today?
In Joe Slovo's "The SA Working Class and the NDR" Slovo wrote: "*By rejecting class alliances and going it alone, the working class would in fact be surrendering the leadership of the national struggle to the upper and middle strata*".
/So:/ *_Who are our allies_**?*The whole theory of the National Democratic Revolution relies upon the formation of a common front between the working proletariat and other classes. But we cannot just generalize about this. There must be specific classes that we are talking about, existing in South Africa, now. Some of them are our allies, while others are the ones we are allied against.
The Hammer and the Sickle of the SACP's emblem emblem represent an alliance of workers and peasants. Does the South African peasantry still exist, or has it been completely destroyed? Some of the historic stresses of the SA peasantry, in a time when there was no doubt about its existence, are described in our main text, from Govan Mbeki's "*Peasants' Revolt <http://domza.blogspot.com/2011/05/peasants-revolt.html>*". The other two texts are on the *Chiefs <http://domza.blogspot.com/2011/05/citizen-and-subject.html>* and on the *Petty Bourgeoisie <http://domza.blogspot.com/2011/05/petty-bourgeoisie-and-poujadism.html>*.
The Chiefs still exist. The chiefs have gained a new lease of life since 1994, as if they were allies. But Mahmood Mamdani regarded the chiefs or "traditional" (i.e. unelected) leaders as the principal allies of the Imperialists all over Africa, but especially in South Africa. We are not allied to the chiefs; we are opposed to them, and to their allies, the Imperialists (monopoly finance capital).
All peasants are naturally akin to the bourgeoisie. The peasants are the stock from which the bourgeoisie everywhere naturally grew.
The proletariat is also descended from the peasantry, but is no longer similar to it. It takes a trauma of dispossession to turn a peasant into a proletarian, and the threat of starvation to make the proletarian work.
_*The poor*_But the peasantry becomes an urban petty-bourgeois without compulsion, other than the circumstances of re-location to the town. Urban petty-bourgeois are peasants who have not yet been completely dispossessed, and who retain their peasant habit of accumulation. Most of them are poor. They are the poor whom we refer to in our phrase "workers and the poor". They are distinct from workers, but they are our allies.
In the following live sessions we are going to proceed to the *1969 Morogoro"Strategy and Tactics" <http://domza.blogspot.com/2011/06/strategy-and-tactics.html>* and then to the 1988 "*SA Working Class and the NDR <http://domza.blogspot.com/2011/06/sa-working-class-and-ndr.html>*". Before we proceed to those, it is desirable that we have a strong idea of which classes we will be allied to.
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