Development Is Ours

Development Is Ours

Introduction to 10-part Course: “Development, Rural and Urban”

Some Relevant Quotations:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Marx/Engels, Communist Manifesto, 1848

Communism = Soviet Power + Electrification

V I Lenin, 1921

What we want is to combine in our process of inquiry the action of the forms of thought with a criticism of them. The forms of thought must be studied in their essential nature and complete development: they are at once the object of research and the action of that object. This is Dialectic, instead of being brought to bear upon the categories from without, it is immanent in their own action.

G W F Hegel, Shorter Logic (1830)

“When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master, that’s all.”

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, 1871

Development

“Development”, like many other powerful words, including Freedom and Democracy, had a meaning in revolutionary philosophy long before it had a vulgar bourgeois economists’ meaning.

Part of the purpose of our studies is therefore always and deliberately to reclaim the political language that our revolutionary predecessors pioneered and left us, and to take it back from the bourgeois demagogues who constantly try to steal it.

Development is the interior unfolding of a unitary phenomenon or system, propelled by the struggle of opposites within it. Development is the product of dialectics. It is dialectics in motion. It is the essence of change. This revolutionary meaning of the word “development” is the only one that has a clear definition and an intentional purpose.

The vulgar economists’ definition of the word “development” is a vague gesture in the direction of more infrastructure, lowering the cost of doing business, a higher GDP, and other such “indicators” or presumed generally-beneficial goods expediently selected to suit the occasion. In the US slang, it is “motherhood and apple pie”.

On the grander occasions, the brandished indicators may be an internationally-endorsed set of arbitrary “development goals”, which, though globally celebrated, nevertheless fail to rise above the ad hoc and the eclectic, because they continue to evade the dialectical meaning of “development”.

The obfuscation of the word “development” is deliberate. This is because in human society, development is class struggle, with winners and losers. There is no such thing as “win-win” class struggle. There is no such thing as a “tide that lifts all the boats”. Some of the boats are tied to the bottom.

Bourgeois economists, and Imperialism generally, although they have manifestly failed worldwide to employ people and to provide for them adequately, are obliged to pretend that there can be such a thing as generally-beneficial development that does not challenge the capitalist system. Hence they have stolen our word and hidden its meaning, in an attempt to deceive us. We must take it back.

This course

This new course is called Development, Rural and Urban, and it will be in ten parts. We will try to look at development historically, philosophically, and topically.

Our course begins just two days after the SACP Conference of the Commissars (15-18 July 2010) that deliberated on Local Government, including questions of Local Economic Development (LED) and of democracy. The latter includes re-organisation of the SACP into Voting District (VD) branches, which is already under way.

Some of the material from this course (as prepared for the Communist University) was given as reading material for the conference, and some of the conference’s products (papers and speeches) will likewise be fed back into this latest iteration of the course. As of this moment, the papers and speeches are not yet published electronically.

This is going to be the fourth course rolled out during 2010 on the SADTU Political Education Blog and Forum. The others have been Basics, National Democratic Revolution, and Lenin’s “The State and Revolution”. The first text will be posted tomorrow. See below for the status of all the courses. Picture above: GOELRO Plan, by Filonov.

Previous main Communist University posts:
Channel [members]	Course Archive	Weeks	Last Posted
SADTU Pol Ed [438]	Development, Rural and Urban	1/10	18 July 2010
CU Africa [230]	Marx’s Capital, Volumes 1, 2 & 3	6/33	13 July 2010
CU [2905]	Philosophy and Religion	5/10	15 July 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
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