Development,
Part 3b
A
bridge for the poor?
“Barking
dogs and building bridges” (downloadable from the link below)
is Lauren Royston’s subtle and patient demolition of the simplistic bourgeois
platitudes of Hernando de Soto.
De Soto is
a Peruvian and the author of a book called “The Mystery of Capital” published
in 2000. He subsequently visited South Africa. De Soto advocates globalised
capitalism, and claims to have found a way of incorporating the poorest of the
poor within a regulated, universal framework of property and economic practice.
Royston
does not take a heavy axe to de Soto but recognises that he had achieved a
remarkable propaganda success (by now, in 2012, largely forgotten) in a field
where academics like herself and the advocacy groups “Leap” and “Afra”, among
many others, had found themselves being ignored for years, and even decades.
Though they may have hated de Soto’s ideology, yet they were in some measure
happy that de Soto had secured wide publicity for the “extra-legal” (i.e.
outside the law) arrangements by which poor people are in practice obliged to manage
their lives.
Royston’s
scholarship takes us from Grahamstown, 1850, via the Glen Grey Act and parts of
KZN to Cosmo City, Phola Park and Thokoza, and to a firm understanding of the
enduring empirical condition of South Africa’s petty-bourgeois and peasant poor,
who are the main allies of the working class in the National Democratic
Revolution.
Who are our allies?
In terms of
this course on Development, this part’s several texts (and there is a fourth
one to come) are intended to open us to a much more detailed, and a much less
vague, understanding of our class allies.
The
petty-bourgeoisie and the peasants are not “progressive”. Unlike the
proletariat, they do not have a glorious future ahead of them. On the other
hand, they are not simply “Trojan horses” for the big bourgeoisie, but are
severely oppressed in the present system. The big bourgeoisie feeds off the
small bourgeoisie in many ways, as Rosa Luxemburg could see. Even so, the
petty-bourgeoisie and the peasantry share one great characteristic with the big
bourgeoisie: they seek private wealth and property. The picture contains
contradictions, and therefore requires careful study.
The
petty-bourgeoisie and the peasantry are the soil from which the big bourgeoisie
(the large-scale proprietors, the bankers, and the capitalist employers of
thousands) have sprung. They are also the soil from which the proletariat has
sprung, but in the case of the latter, only because of utter dispossession –
complete absence of productive property – enforced by the actions of the
predatory big bourgeoisie.
Looking at
these classes very specifically, and with evidence of their nature in front of
us, it becomes clear why, within the National Democratic Revolution, the
proletariat is allied with the peasantry and/or the petty-bourgeoisie. They
must be with us, and not with our opponents, against us.
Once again
it becomes clear that development is class struggle. What can happen, and what
does or does not happen, is determined by the competing class interests within
the overall political economy of the country, as Lauren Royston points out in
the attached text.
Image:
Cadastral overlay on a satellite image from an Internet site describing a
recent first-time property survey of Bhutan, the world’s last remaining feudal
state. Presumably this survey was done so as to assist the encroachment of
banking and capitalistic property relations in that country.
- The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Barking dogs,
building bridges, Lauren Royston.
- To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.
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