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.
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 10th 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.
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.
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.
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’.
Source: www.newerapolitics.org |
References
ANC. 1957. Does the Freedom Charter mean Socialism? [Online].
African National Congress. Available: http://anc.org.za/show.php?id=2604 [Accessed 1 May 2014].
DEMOCRACIA REAL YA! 2011. Manifesto [Online]. Madrid: 15M Encuentro Estatal por una
Democracia Real YA! Available: http://www.democraciarealya.es/manifiesto-comun/manifesto-english/ [Accessed 1 May 2014].
HAVEL, V. 1978. The
power of the powerless [Online]. Czechoslovakia Available: http://mrdivis.yolasite.com/resources/Vaclav%20Havel's%20Power%20of%20the%20Powerless.pdf [Accessed 1 May 2014].
MAKHAYA, T. 2014. The
path to riches is paved with crony capitalism [Online]. Daily Maverick.
Available: http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2014-03-23-the-path-to-riches-is-paved-with-crony-capitalism/#.U2UUsPmSx8E [Accessed 1 May 2013].
MARCOS, S. 1997. The
fourth world war has begun [Online]. Paris: Le Monde Diplomatique English
Edition. Available: http://mondediplo.com/1997/09/marcos [Accessed 1 May 2014].
SACP. 1998. Our Marxism [Online]. Johannesburg:
South African Communist Party. Available: http://www.sacp.org.za/10thcongress/marxism.pdf [Accessed 1 May 2014].