Quarter tank: Making our ‘X’: Thinking back to look forward

Our current conjuncture in South Africa as we mark twenty years of democracy and prepare for a crucial election marks the confluence of many stories – both local and global. These require careful examination if we are to try and make sense of the confusing and conflicted social space which we occupy today which spins like tumble drier full of soiled garments which no amount of political detergent has been able to clean. The stains originate with numerous arms, mining and business share deals, dubious presidential and ministerial dealings, Marikana, Nkandla – a chronology of events and actions indicative of an increasingly entrenched culture of impunity and greed.

Source: southerncourier.co.za

We face an election characterised by a leadership and party credibility vacuum which is symptomatic of something much broader – a fundamental uncertainty about the relationship between our past, the present and potential futures. Our ‘X’ on the ballot paper (or our decision to spoil our vote) is a reflection of how we read the past, interpret the present and project its intersection with the future.

South Africans of my generation who first found our political voices on the Left in the 1970’s look back over our shoulders to re-evaluate our pasts. One of the long contested debates was the relationship between the national liberation struggle and the nature of the future political and economic system. Following the publication of the Freedom Charter in 1955 there were debates about its socialist character. The ANC published an article entitled Does the Freedom Charter mean Socialism? which addressed concerns the document “might commit the national movements to a socialist aim”(ANC, 1957).

Source: South African History Archive

The piece concluded that “whatever one`s views might be as to the desirability of establishing a socialist system in South Africa, the immediate aim of the liberatory movement is not, and cannot be the establishment of socialism”. This was consistent with the ‘two stage thesis’ which posited national liberation as the preeminent goal and prerequisite for any subsequent socialist transition. In practice however the visions of the future that sustained many on the Left in the 1980’s and early 1990’s remained closely bound up with some variation of a socialist future.

Source: South African History Archive

Those of us who had pursued the socialist imaginary have had to confront the inevitability of disappointment and the realisation that the thing we had sought and struggled for had never really existed other than in the grotesquely aberrant forms practised in the Soviet bloc and China. The deep distortions and falsifications in those post totalitarian bureaucracies claiming to be socialist were minutely and memorably chronicled by Czech dissident (and later President) Vaclav Havel.

The system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future.

(Havel, 1978: n.p)

His critique demonstrated so clearly how we had long confused symbol and rhetoric with reality and had turned our faces away from the perversions enacted in its name. It reveals how South Africans of different political persuasions have a long history of schizophrenically juggling political narratives. Our national liberation struggle was always shadowed by the geopolitics of the Cold War and opposition to “an imperialist world system” played out in the struggles in China, Korea, Cuba, Vietnam and closer to home in Mozambique and Angola. MK operatives were trained in the Soviet Union, the GDR and other Eastern bloc countries. These countries and their liberation movements were our allies and these alliances meant that we kept our silences, either wilfully or in professed ignorance airbrushing Stalinist brutality and its reprise in the Eastern bloc regimes of Honneker, Ceausescu, Hoxha, Kádár and others and their combined apparatuses of repression which were virtually indistinguishable from those of the apartheid state. As late as 1998 a piece reflecting on ‘Our Marxism’ prepared for the 10^th Congress of the South African Communist Party observed that:

More seriously we need to note that our own fundamentally correct solidarity with the Soviet Union often lacked a serious balance and nuance. We failed to appreciate until very late the horrendous levels of criminal abuse that occurred during the Stalin years, and we failed to be critical of the bureaucratic distortions in the post Stalin period. We also failed to appreciate until very late in the day, the levels of internal crisis in the former Soviet Union and Soviet bloc.

(SACP, 1998: 55)

This ‘lack of nuance’ meant that we turned a blind eye to “Stalinist deliberate killing…on a scale surpassed only by war” resulting in the deaths on an estimated 20 million people in the Stalinist period alone (Glover, 2000: 237). It also meant that we misunderstood what propelled the flowering of dissent which challenged totalitarian bureaucracies across the Eastern bloc, precipitating glasnost, perestroika, and the dismantling of the Soviet Union. This wave which swept on across Eastern Europe precipitating symbolic fall of the Berlin Wall 1989 continued around the world. It failed to break in China where the state ruthlessly crushed student democracy activists in Tiananmen Square, although it finally made it to South Africa a little later under very different circumstances resulting in the release of political prisoners and the advent of free political activity.

What we were totally unprepared for was how the collapse of socialism would end the Cold War but would immediately initiate a new conflict as the backwash of this democratisation wave quickly accelerated into a global riptide which in its elevation of ‘the market’ as a new deity swept us up “into a new master narrative of integrated global capitalism” where “the ineluctable dynamic of global economic competition and integration has become the illusion of the age” - a toxic economic orthodoxy which “guarantees neither equality nor prosperity” (Judt, 2010: 191-192). This has seen the erosion of public health, welfare, education and pensions in Western social democracies. It has fuelled the emergence of contextually mediated strains of ‘klepto-capitalism’ transmitted from the global North to the South and East which allows well placed bureaucrats and politically connected business figures to privatise and appropriate national assets. This is the new terrain of struggle which the Zapatistas have characterised as the “fourth world war”.

This is what the new order means - unification of the world into one single market. States are simply enterprises with managers in the guise of governments, and the new regional alliances bear more of a resemblance to shopping malls than political federations. The unification produced by neoliberalism is economic: in the giant planetary hypermarket it is only commodities that circulate freely, not people.

(Marcos, 1997: n.p)

In South Africa what was left of the socialist agenda was diverted into the progressive expansion of programmes of social protection to provide some security for the poor but new variations of old crony capitalism emerged as a key driver of the democratic transition. This has been shaped by a variety of mechanisms resulting in the admission of a small predatory elite into the national and global economic club and which has grafted “rampant tenderpreneurship” onto the dysfunctional structures inherited from the apartheid economy which itself was “built on corruption, cronyism and exclusion” (Makhaya, 2014). This also reflects how the new task of the actors at the helm of the Nation State are increasingly “to protect the interests of the market’s mega enterprises and above all to control and police the redundant” (Berger, 2001: 212).

This has contributed to the mounting disillusion of many South Africans with the whole political class. But this is not a reflection of our well known predilection for South African exceptionalism – it is a global phenomenon. In Spain, to take just one example, the manifesto of the indignados – ‘the outraged’ in the aftermath of recent national economic bailout and stringent welfare and benefit cuts expresses similar sentiments to those articulated by many here in the run up to the 2014 elections.

Some of us consider ourselves progressive, others conservative. Some of us are believers, some not. Some of us have clearly defined ideologies, others are apolitical, but we are all concerned and angry about the political, economic, and social outlook which we see around us: corruption among politicians, businessmen, bankers, leaving us helpless, without a voice… Lust for power and its accumulation in only a few create inequality, tension and injustice, which leads to violence, which we reject. The obsolete and unnatural economic model fuels the social machinery in a growing spiral that consumes itself by enriching a few and sends into poverty the rest.

(Democracia Real YA!, 2011)

Source: Polis blog - a collaborative blog about cities around the world

In both domains there is a dearth of credible political representatives and the mounting risk of violence that is a marker of frustration rather than an engine of change. The indignados called for “an ethical revolution”. This ethical revolution is urgently required in South Africa but on its own it will not be enough. We need to combine retrospective analysis with a rigorous assessment of where we find ourselves now in order to project an attainable alternative local and global future. While that is a task for the next five years, for now we remain with the dilemma of who to entrust to do the least harm with the endorsement of our ‘X’.