Development,
Part 1
Urban from Rural
This is the
first main post of our CU-Africa series on Development, which is to run over
ten weeks in the first quarter of 2012.
By
serialising the material in this way, we are able to synchronise our reading,
the better to assist dialogue around these texts. These postings are also arranged
to conveniently serve a pre-planned schedule
of weekly study-circle discussions. This year we will continue to attach the
reading texts, but now in PDF and formatted for printing as booklets (A4
folding to A5). The entire CU set of twelve courses, including this one, are
available for download via the link that is given below, and will continue to be
given at the bottom of each post from now on.
To begin
this course, we note that:
- The National Democratic Revolution (NDR)
is a class alliance. It is a unity-in-action for the extension of
democracy to the outer limits of the nation and to all conceivable mass
constituencies. It is the pre-requisite for further political progress
thereafter.
- Kwame Nkrumah wrote: “Seek ye first the political kingdom and all else shall be
added unto you”.
- The substance of people’s political
concerns is of a material kind; but development is human
Engels
With these
preliminaries in mind we begin our series on Development with the first of two instalments
touching on the work of Frederick Engels.
The main
one, downloadable, is Engels’ own book “Condition
of the Working Class in England” (the next instalment in this part will
be an article from a critic of Engels’, Mike Davis).
To continue
the course, these will be followed by some modern writings on urban/rural
problems. Then we will go to some of Lenin’s writings, including some from the
period of the New Economic Policy (NEP) adopted after the Russian Bolshevik Revolution.
After that, the series will proceed to the question of Industrial Development
and of large-scale national planning.
It would be
hard to exaggerate the historical importance of Engels’ work on “the condition
of the English working class”. It is the founding work of town-planning, yet it
was written by an office clerk in his twenties who had no university education.
Chance had taken him to Manchester, a place so far ahead of its time in those
days that the phrase “Manchester
Capitalism” was coined to describe its uniqueness, as well as its universal
significance.
The CU
suggests that comrades page through the attached chapter, though it is long,
and read as much of it as is comfortable for them.
Not only
did Engels objectify the great industrial towns in literature, systematically,
and for the first time. But also, his work laid the empirical and experiential
basis, before Engels had fully teamed up with Karl Marx in September 1844, of
the conception of the working class as the gravedigger of capitalism and as the
leading class in all of humanity and in all of human history. This was at a
time when the proletariat was in the most miserable circumstances, as Engels
describes. Yet he saw the historic position that they occupied.
The “Industrial Revolution”
For
context: It is said that in terms of the technology applied in the daily life
of the masses, the condition of Western Europe by the middle of the Eighteenth
Century (i.e. the 1700s) had hardly reached the level of the far more urban
Roman Empire that had fallen more than 1200 years earlier, after which Europe
sunk into rural-based feudalism, a condition which survived in some parts right
up to the 20th century.
The first
three centuries of bourgeois power in Britain had been taken up with cruel
overseas adventures. Among them were the Atlantic slave trade, the slave
plantations, the competitive trade in the commodities produced there, and the
consequent wars. In this period the banking, insurance, shipping and financial
services, that were later to serve capitalism, became highly developed.
The
Industrial Revolution of the late Eighteenth Century marked the turn away from
slavery and towards capitalist wage-slavery, coinciding with the development of
the coal-fired steam power that allowed factories (“mills”) to escape from
remote sources of water power and to coagulate in urban density.
Manchester
Manchester
was the first of these great industrial cities. Engels arrived there from
Germany at the age of 19 in 1839, when Manchester was reaching an
urban-industrial maturity that was unique in the world. And Engels saw it for
what it was.
Johannesburg was
established in Engels’ lifetime, not so very many years after he wrote his
description of the then-new “Great Towns” of Britain. Like Manchester,
Johannesburg had its productive districts, its more polite commercial,
commodity and financial markets, its separate dormitory slums for workers, and
its nice suburbs for the bourgeoisie and their hangers-on. Johannesburg is
close to the Manchester model.
There are
people still alive in Johannesburg today whose grandparents were
among the city’s founding inhabitants. It is not difficult to comprehend that
only a few generations separate us from the time when overall social conditions
had not yet surpassed those of Ancient Rome.
It is not
too much to claim, in relation to this work of Engels, that this is where the
concept of modernity begins. In this literature modern urbanism takes shape as
an idea.
The picture
above is of McConnel & Company’s Mills, Manchester, in about 1820, the
year of Frederick Engels’ birth, and also the year of the arrival of the “1820
Settlers” in the Eastern Cape.
- The above serves
to introduce the original reading-text - Engels’ 1845 “Condition of
the Working Class in England”, Chapter 2, The Great Towns
- To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.
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