Rolling Back the Right Wing. (I)

“Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” — almost the only bit of Gramsci which anyone remembers.

“Positional warfare” — remembering this bit of Gramsci marks you as a potential activist.

This is a necessary thing if civilisation is to survive, let alone remain comfortable. There are some people who think it would be an improvement if we went back to hunter-gatherer conditions. Perhaps they are right. If they are wrong, however, then we have to check the growth of a reactionary movement which seems unstoppable, and which also seems to grow only more powerful and more right-wing with every passing year.

How can we do this?

There are certain solutions which seem not to work at all well. One is to hope that a party which pretends to be left-wing will save us once we bring it to power. The trouble is that the pretense is very often quite extreme at first, so that such parties claim leftist opinions, and incorporate leftist people, but actually are not led by leftists. Hence there is a big disjuncture between what the party’s membership wants, and what the party’s intellectuals say ought to be done, and what the party actually does.

The most obvious example would be the British Labour Party in the 1940s and the 1960s and 1970s. Another obvious party would be the French Socialist Party in the 1970s and early 1980s. Less crassly obvious, but still, perhaps, an example of this, is the African National Congress in South Africa. Such parties, led by conservatives who employ rhetoric to conceal their actual political positions, but who also are often interested in shifting rightwards, are not likely to bring any kind of millennium. On the contrary, they tend to discredit their most principled supporters as well as themselves.

Another doomed solution is to rely on tiny parties which claim to be principled although their leaders are not. Supposedly, because these parties are tiny they can afford to be principled, although because they are out of power, this theory is not likely to be tested in any way. Of course, the further theory is that by supporting these parties one will gradually grow them into behemoths which will be able to challenge the major parties at the elections. The trouble is that the more these parties grow, the more likely they are to become fissiparous and split. Sometimes they split even without growing. If they successfully grow, they usually betray their principles. Big surprise.

Alternatively, the parties choose not to grow because to grow entails compromising principles. In extreme cases, as with the Anti-Privatisation Forum in South Africa, this generates reluctance to take part in elections at all (historically also true of many Cape Trotskyists, such as the New Unity Movement). Tiny parties which have an extremely narrow membership base and a narrow, restrictive political perspective are problematic. (On the other hand, almost every party was a tiny party once.)

What this means is that simple trust in a powerful party gets us nowhere. Touching faith in a principled party also gets us nowhere. We need a party which is powerful enough to do something, and principled enough for what it does to be remotely socialist. This is not at all utopian. In history, there have been many social democratic parties and even socialist parties which have fulfilled these criteria to a greater or lesser extent. The trouble is only that the right is so powerful, and the forces of corruption and co-option so ubiquitous, and the left so crushed by its long tradition of perennial defeat, that conditions are worse for the left than they have been since large-scale electoral politics began in the early nineteenth century.

The temptation — the practice — is to simply withdraw. You tell yourself that you don’t need to be a member of a party, and soon you are telling yourself that you don’t need to vote. Then you tell yourself that there is no need to feel guilty about this because voting is a sham and all politicians are corrupt. “Don’t vote — the government will get in” sums up this approach, but this approach is often made a lot more attractive by the fact that someone who does not vote because he recognises that none of the existing parties are up to his exacting standards is someone who is effectively saying that he is better than anyone in those parties, and also, better than anyone who foolishly votes.

That way lies complete surrender to the right.

We need to take a liberal, radical or social democratic party, or rather a party which purports to be these things but is not, and press it to move leftwards instead of rightwards. We also need to persuade a large number of people to support a party which is well to the left of the other, more powerful party, so as to have the alternative that if the large but less committedly leftist party wobbles or backslides, there is someone who can take them on from the left and threaten them with serious electoral problems. Without both of these two things (no doubt other factors are also important, but surely these two things are very important) it will be very difficult to succeed.

Of course, sometimes circumstances get so bad that the electorate decides that they need a change. Sometimes the Right ends up behaving so badly, as in Britain in the early 1960s or the mid-1990s, or the United States today, that the electorate wakes up to realise that things are pretty tough and decides to go elsewhere. Alternatively, sometimes the Left gets a charismatic leader who sweeps them to the polls, as happened at, at, at — well, anyway, perhaps it might happen. The point is that you cannot wait for these things, and also, if you wait for these things, you are not changing your party and hence you are waiting for someone you don’t particularly like, to get in. As for the charismatic leader, apart from possibly Tony Benn, it’s hard to think of one who could be trusted. (In South Africa, Chris Hani would probably not have been as left-wing as the spin-doctors who exploit his name pretend.)

So what’s needed are parties which can be relied on to do the right thing. How to manage that? There’s a fine line, obviously, between saying that you have to be principled, and becoming so enamoured of your party’s policies that you fail to notice that the public don’t support them, and consequently you lose the next election. Another huge problem is that if the Left, or what passes for it, takes over a faux-Left party to the extent of imposing a vaguely Leftist agenda on it, that is liable to alienate a big chunk of the party’s organisation.

McGovern, the last liberal to run for President of the USA, would probably have lost anyway, but it didn’t help that his party’s national machinery were working against him. Most of the powerful figures in the British Labour Party were opposed to the party’s expressed policy in 1983 and were therefore glad to ensure that the party lost the election. In both cases, party members engineered calamitous defeat so as to regain control. (Greg Palast has discovered some similar points about the American Democratic Party in the 2004 election, where local Democratic wheeler-dealers often preferred Republicans to win so that unsympathetic politicians could be unseated.)

Perhaps it’s worth considering the different levels of party organisation. At the top you have a substantial handful of leaders (in small parties they can be counted on the fingers of one hand), most of whom got there because they wanted to be there. These are professional politicians, often from a kind of caste from which such politicians emerge, with a great deal in common, therefore, with the professional politicians of the other side. In the case of large parties, such people need to be Superglued to the party’s constitution and manifesto, and permitted to speak only when elected representatives of the party’s National Conference are watching. In practice, these days, such people run the party, rewrite constitution and manifesto whenever they choose, and orchestrate National Conference to ensure that their friends and relations are the representatives.

Below them are the party bureaucrats and elected officials. Again, in theory, such people are supposed to serve the party’s interests; they manage membership, they help flesh out policy in consultation with elected bodies, they organise events and manage things like funding drives and polling campaigns. Therefore they are supposed to be responsible to the party, which in practice should mean, the party’s mass membership if not its broader support base. In practice, however, since the mass membership has allowed the leadership to take charge of the running of the party, party bureaucrats and elected officials tend to be obedient to the will of those leaders. (In some of the more advanced parties, the terrible burden of deciding on who will be the party’s candidate is taken out of the hands of constituency party organisation or conferences, and handled directly by the leadership — except in the United States, where it is handled by neither, but is organised more or less directly by corporations.)

Below them, and actually treated as the lowest of the low, are the party’s volunteer workers. In a tiny party these make up the overwhelming majority. In a large party they are still the majority, but are caught between a sizeable bureaucracy and a large passive membership. (In small parties there are usually few passive members; membership and volunteer work are more or less synonymous. Obviously this cuts down on membership.) No left-wing party can survive long without a mass of volunteer workers. If a party outsources things like envelope-stuffing and phone-calling and membership drives to private companies, which parties often do these days, then it obviously needs a hell of a lot of money.

Membership usually has more time than money to donate, so you can more easily acquire envelope-stuffers than cash with which to hire envelope-stuffers. Hence, a party which pays people to do such things is a party which is getting money from other sources than its membership, which usually means a party in bed with big business. Volunteer workers are also usually ignored except when they are working — so they are tremendously experienced and motivated and the business of the party is to make as little use of that experience, and to discourage that motivation, as much as possible. (This is even the case with small parties, because the leadership of such parties is invariably paranoid about their positions, not being really competent to hold them, and thus terrified that activists will overthrow them.)

Then there’s the membership. In a big party they are supposed to give without receiving. Seldom is anybody interested in asking them why they joined the party, what they expect from it, or what the party can do for them. Sometimes they are allowed to join in a raffle with a large cheap cup with a picture of the Leader emblazoned on it as the prize. Sometimes they are allowed to discuss policy so long as it is absolutely certain that they have no power to change it. They are also allowed to vote, at branch or constituency level, for the policies and representatives that the leaders have chosen. They may sometimes vote against, but if they do, their votes are ignored. It is immensely frustrating to be an active member of a big left-wing party; it is tempting to become a volunteer worker and then fall back into active membership out of embitterment, then fall into passive membership and then leave the party. Bad experiences in parties sometimes lead people to change parties, and sometimes even to move rightwards. Bad experiences, sadly, are standard practice.

Being a member, though, is in some ways better than being a voter. You hold your nose and vote for a party you despise, with a leader you detest, because the alternative seems to be worse. A few weeks later you turn on the TV and discover the detestable leader in earnest consultation with the worse alternative, after which the worse alternative proves to have become party policy. You can’t be arsed to go to Party conference, because they’re a gang of sick shitheads, but you write a cross letter to Party headquarters, which goes straight into the circular file. You go to a party (not a political party) and someone asks you why the hell you vote for such a bunch of obvious hypocritical losers who are only out for number one, and what can you answer? “Because it is there”, is probably the best answer. Alternatively you kick him in the shins and get banned for life by the hostess.

The Creator is starting to become slightly miserable. This was supposed to be an optimistic piece. Instead, even the will is getting pessimistic. However, there will be room to discuss remedies later.

Is This House Falling?

We are betrayed by what is false within. (George Meredith, bless his little cotton socks.)

 

So the Creator was sitting next to a tremendously clever chap, intellectual, something of a leftie, long-standing ANC hanger-on, and this chap just back from the UK where he now abides mentioned Boris Johnson.

Boris who? said the Creator innocently, and the Creator’s guts were nearly garters.

Boris Johnson, the new Mayor of London.

It seems that you just neglect the planet in favour of more celestial duties for a week or so, and there goes the neighbourhood. The Creator had no idea that Satan had ensnared the people of the Wen, although when you look at their grey sick onanistic faces in the Tube you can guess they would probably vote Tory if they had a chance. How the hell did nuLabour manage to lose? That means they’re going to lose the next General Election, no doubt about it.

Well, said the clever chap, Boris Johnson is a very brilliant man, an astute politician. He used to edit the Spectator, the most influential and, frankly, the most intelligent political magazine in the United Kingdom.

All right, perhaps this is true. The Creator knows the Spectator as the sick-bucket into which wannabe fascists like R W Johnson (no relative of Boris except in ideology), Mark Steyn and Rian Malan spew their bile-curdled poison. But that, alas, doesn’t mean that it isn’t more intelligent than other political magazines. For they are really, really, really dumb.

And, said the clever chap, you know the Tories are much better than Labour. Labour are so far right they’re practically fascist. No, the Tories are a much better choice than Labour. Not that I vote for them. I vote Liberal Democrat. They aren’t going to get in, of course. Ha, ha.

Well, at least by this small sample we know what British lefties think. No, actually if you look in John Pilger’s Freedom Next Time and glance carefully at the bit on Afghanistan you can get a similar perspective. Pilger went into the Pentagon and spoke to the psychopathic Israeli agent, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, only to discover that Feith had a Pentagon minder to make sure that Feith didn’t (as he always does) run off at the mouth and give away any dangerous truth. This minder broke up the meeting and wanted to know if Pilger was a dangerous radical. Was he now, or had he ever been, a member of the British Labour Party?

No, said Pilger, Labour are the conservative party now.

OK, let’s leave aside the Creator’s dinner companion and the movie-maker from kangaroo-land. Let’s ask what a nuLabour defeat means. France is under the Sarkomic thumb of big business. Italy has been franchised to Berlusconi’s monopoly without a squeak of protest. Germania has her own little corporate angel, the Merkel who is Thatchering the newly-privatised roof of the state. When Britain becomes a Cameron low-land, that means that the only remotely leftie or even historically once-leftie power in Western Europe is Spain, and that’s not exactly a big or stable prospect. In the last three years the Right has swept across Neue Europa like the Nazis, only more destructively.

Of course you can look across the Atlantic and see signs of hope, indeed HOPE, shout it from the rooftops, comrades, we’re free at last, unless that bitch Hillary spoils everything. Don’t believe da hype, dudes. You have a choice between a reactionary business-besotted Republican primed for repression at home and aggression abroad, but who says you should vote for her because she has a vulva, and then you have John McCain, who’s essentially the same but also batshit crazy, and then you have Barack Obama, who is a slightly more conservative and considerably less sexy variant of William Jefferson Clinton. In short, the best that Americans have to hope for, the big left-wing promise of the planet at the moment, is a sharp lurch to the right from the 1990s, which might possibly be a baby step to the left from Dubya’s Greater North American Reich.

The Creator speaks for the overwhelming majority of sane people of the planet in saying, in response to this, “oh, shit”.

What the hell happened?

Both Pilger and the clever munching chap have a point. You look at nuLabour and you instantly feel gorge at the back of your throat. Almost everything they stand for seems to fling down and dance on almost everything that even Harold Wilson held sacred — and until Blair took over it was assumed that Wilson held nothing at all sacred, but now we know that compared with Blair, Wilson was the reincarnation of Keir Hardie. Throw the bastards out!

Er, but then you have to throw somebody in, don’t you? So you look around, and obviously the teeny-tiny leftie parties aren’t going to win (and since you know they’ve never held power you can’t tell how they would respond to getting it — probably they’d sell out, that’s what politicians do, not so?). So you vote for the Tories, because at least they’re a safe pair of hands. And then, Homer Simpson sits back in his armchair munching a Tory-flavoured doughnut, going “Mmmmm — Tories.”

Much the same seems to have happened elsewhere in Western Europe. The Left were tremendously cross with the Social Democrats in Germany because they were, er, too chummy with the Americans and too nice to big business. So instead everybody voted for the Christian Democrats. You know where you stand with the Christian Democrats — they are in the pockets of the Americans and of big business. Mmmm — Christian Democrats. And the Sarcoma came in, in France, because the Socialists were no longer socialist, they were just really a bunch of capitalists who were bound to sell out, weren’t they? Sarkozy’s a corporate CEO, so he represents a real alternative to the socialists. Besides, he’s pledged to revitalising France by cutting wages, lengthening hours and cutting back on social services. Mmmm — neoliberalism. Berlusconi, well, we know about him, don’t we? He isn’t in jail because he passed laws saying retrospectively that his brand of fraud wasn’t a crime. He’s no longer directly aligned with the Fascists, just with the Liga Nord, who aren’t Fascists, they just want to put subhumans in camps and give the Master Race its just rights while keeping all the money for themselves. Mmmm — il Duce ha sempre ragio.

What this means is something more than just a change of party leadership. It’s part of a general political trend; the social-democratic parties turn to milktoast, then turn to the right, and this so pisses off the voters that they stay home, while the right-wing parties turn ultra-right, but since the same people who own them also own the media, voters don’t mind this so much, so when the votes are counted, the ultra-right gets in. And then the right-wing, formerly social-democratic, parties sit down and think, and say “Guess what! The parties to the right of us won the election! Know something — I bet if we moved even further right, we would pick up some votes!”. And so the cycle begins again. It’s been happening quite steadily, though with increasing velocity and momentum, since the 1970s.

And, of course, the same thing has happened in South Africa. “Boy, that Mbeki, he’s a crook, I read it in the papers! And he’s a neoliberal! I know — why don’t we kick him out and put a crooked neoliberal in his place! Rah, rah, rah!” At least in South Africa the neoliberals masked themselves as Communists and trade unionists, so the voters have a bit of an excuse. South African voters, it would appear, are more sophisticated than Western Europeans or North Americans, and you have to work a bit harder to fool them. But, given enough money and willingness to tell big fat lies, the effect is the same.

But is there any alternative to this? TINA, the Lady’s not for Turnering? (©Thatchbumf 1981).

Yes, there is. What can you do when the principal left-wing or nominally left-wing or liberal party abandons its principles and embraces conservatism? The smart thing to do would be not to permit it to happen in the first place. These things have happened very largely because the overwhelming majority of members of these parties, who did not want their parties to move rightward, failed to act against small minorities who saw profit in the right. The majority were bamboozled, were outmanoeuvred, and were too ashamed, lazy or foolish to acknowledge this or to respond to it. As a result, instead of trying to take their parties back, they decided instead to back the party in its new right-wing guise in the hope that it would win at the next election, after which, of course, they could take it back.

But they never did, and so the party stayed right, and indeed moved further right using the customary excuses of a party in power, and then came the next election and the rightists in the saddle announced that, regrettably, in order to win the next election they would have to move further to the right, and so they did, and the majority who didn’t want this shrugged their shoulders and said, in effect, “Anything, so long as we won the election”, postponing the Great Uprising for another year, and then forever.

And the process was repeated until the party lost the election.

Firstly, those in the party can take it back. They have the numbers. They have the right ideas. All they lack is the will. Oh, and the money. Despite his obvious weakness, and the rigging of some of the provincial elections, Mbeki got two-fifths of the votes at Polokwane; a tenth more and the neoliberals would not have taken over the ANC. A bit more organising, a bit more suss, and someone other than Mbeki willing to stand in his place as the counter-Zuma, and it would have been all right. In most of the left-wing parties of Western Europe, the left just huddle like sick puppies watching the right run the show.

The right’s might, in social-democratic parties, is based on cardboard tanks and broomstick rifles; whenever they’re seriously challenged they collapse. This is why their leadership of social-democratic parties is always disastrous; they never have the guts, or the support, to take on anyone who has the slightest authority or power. Look at the Great Labour Battle Against Militant in the 1980s as an example; the full might of the Party coming down on the heads of a few score people who were, or had once been, supporters of a literal interpretation of the fourth clause printed on the back of their Labour membership cards. This Battle was supposed to reverse the disastrous defeat in 1983, hooray! Strangely, expelling a few dozen principled leftists failed to win them the 1987 election, so they cast about and, with immense difficulty, found a handful more principled leftists to expel.

And then, of course, they went in with confidence to the 1992 election, and lost.

Of course, the fallback option is to found another party. The Creator is not completely averse to this. At the moment it may be the only realistic option for South African politics. But, on the other hand, note that small left-wing parties did remarkably badly in the recent Italian elections. Small left-wing parties have proved depressingly easy to co-opt in Germany and thus go down with the losing side. As for small left-wing parties in Britain, they are truly microscopic animalcules which have the surprising ability to divide by binary fission without being able to grow.

Maybe, instead, someone ought to try campaigning to turn the left-wing parties to the left. It might be amusing. At least, it would make a change.

Watching Things Fall Apart.

In some ways contemporary politics is something like a disaster movie. The bulk of it is very boring. However, at some point you are guaranteed to see something destroyed by hideous violence. In a disaster movie it is usually cinematic artistic integrity which gets destroyed in this way. In contemporary politics, every other kind of integrity gets it in the back of the neck.

The recent press revelations (as presented by the public-relations teams who drafted the articles) about the Pikoli hearings and the Khampepe Commission are an excellent case in point.

When President Mbeki handed the question of the Scorpions over to Judge Khampepe, his real agenda was “Throw me a bone, somebody!”. At that time the media were running Zuma propaganda in unison, calling for the destruction of the Scorpions, South Africa’s only effective anti-organised crime unit. The media were doing this because big business, which backs Zuma and owns the media, are essentially an organised crime syndicate and did not fancy having Scorpions on their backs. The problem was that the Scorpions are generally popular because they act against organised criminals, and popular in the white community because they sometimes arrest black politicians.

Hence the press treated the story with care, explaining that the problem with the Scorpions was that Mbeki was using them for his own evil political ends. Mention Mbeki and the white community instantly acts like Count Dracula is indahouse, so that smeared the Scorpions effectively to be going on with. Mbeki realised that he needed someone who could not be so easily smeared to stand up for the Scorpions, and thus called on a female black judge. Anyone who attacked her without cause would be in danger of alienating just about everybody.

Judge Khampepe presented her report to Mbeki after a long time, and Mbeki did nothing. The press set up a huge squawk, conducted by Zuma’s gang, that Khampepe’s confidential report had recommended that the Scorpions be disbanded, and that this was obviously why the evil Mbeki was trying to protect the Scorpions by suppressing the report. Mbeki and Khampepe said nothing.

However, times have changed. What has actually changed is that Zuma now controls Parliament and some key posts in the Cabinet. He controls the ANC NEC, which has obediently demanded the disbanding of the Scorpions. He has, assisted by his corporate backers, had legislation passed which provides for the elimination of the Scorpions as an independent entity; they will be brought under the police force, a much more subservient organisation. All of this has been done against the wishes of President Mbeki, who, as the press never ceases to gloat, has been marginalised.

Now that this has been done, the problem is that the public doesn’t want the Scorpions destroyed. This problem is easily solved; the destruction of the Scorpions is being blamed on Mbeki. The long press campaign against the Scorpions, Zuma and Co.’s machinations, and of course all the propaganda about how the Scorpions were Mbeki’s private praetorian guard, have been forgotten in favour of denouncing Mbeki for attacking the Scorpions. Needless to say, part of this campaign entails declaring that the Khampepe report recommended that the Scorpions be retained, and attacking the evil Mbeki for trying to destroy the Scorpions by suppressing the report.

You might, if you were not South African, think that the Creator is making this stuff up. How could anybody, even in the most diseased public culture, get away with such shit? How could any journalist or editor, no matter how corrupt, try, or even want, to get away with such shit? It is a sign of how bad the situation has become that nobody has even admitted noticing the stench of the elephant-sized heap of droppings in our public sphere.

However, Mbeki did have a remedy this time. The government decided to give in to the demands of the DA (the white voice of big business in Parliament, as the ANC is now the black voice of big business in Parliament) and release the Khampepe Commission’s report. Needless to say, the press declared once it was released that it proved everything they had been saying against Mbeki. The press would have said that even of the Khampepe report had proved to be a Yiddish translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

What the Khampepe report revealed was that Khampepe was a pussyfooting coward. The report did not stand up for the Scorpions — it denounced them savagely for not being sufficiently nice to the police and to the Ministry of Safety and Security. Virtually the only thing which it said in their favour was that their existence was not unconstitutional (you can say the same thing about a serial killer, of course). It was obvious that Mbeki had sat on the report because it was worthless, although it provided some grist to the Zuma rumour mills.

This is a classic example of the problem which Mbeki has faced in the last few years. He is surrounded either by traitors who stab him in the back whenever they get an opportunity, or by gutless people who promise to back him and then sidle away when the chips are down. It is possibly his own fault for promoting them, but perhaps it is also a product of the gutless culture of the ANC after the disappearance of the anti-apartheid struggle, and the self-aggrandizing culture which has arisen in the shadow of neoliberalism and BEE. However, blaming it on Mbeki doesn’t make it go away, especially because Mbeki did not create it — the most one can say is that he didn’t act against it forthrightly enough, and how could he in the absence of any reliable support?

Meanwhile, the Scorpions were also in the news around the Ginwala Commission. Frene Ginwala, ex-Speaker of Parliament (not to be confused with the current Speaker Baleka Mbete, the Zuma toady with the fake driving license) was appointed by Mbeki to look into the behaviour of Vusi Pikoli, former head of the Scorpions who was sacked for misconduct. Because the Scorpions are an independent body, Mbeki is required to set up such a commission. What was the issue?

Some may recall that Pikoli was sacked during the investigation into Commissioner of Police Selebi. The press naturally claimed that Mbeki sacked Pikoli to defend Selebi. However, since Selebi was almost immediately sacked and charged with corruption following that investigation, this argument could only stand up if you were as incapable of logical thought as South African newspaper readers are. The real question was why Mbeki sacked Pikoli and whether he was justified in doing it. Naturally the press is saying that the reason was to protect Selebi and that he was not justified; they would be saying that even if it have been proved that Pikoli was a Klingon agent responsible for a string of rape-murders which Selebi was trying to have investigated.

So, looking beyond the press, what has come out? Interesting stuff. It turns out that Pikoli was acting in much the way that the Zuma clique pretend that his predecessor, Bulelani Ngcuka, was acting. That is, he was trying to nail Selebi, come hell or high water. Instead of waiting for the actual investigation to proceed — interviewing people, going through files, comparing statements and compiling evidence — he was charging around, trying to get search warrants for all kinds of police premises which had nothing to do with the charges against Selebi (Selebi was not likely to have left evidence that he took bribes from organised criminals lying around in the local charge office). It appeared that Pikoli was simply trying to stir things up and destabilise things. Finally, without having any hard evidence against Selebi at all, he showed up at Mbeki’s office triumphantly waving a warrant of arrest against Selebi which he’d got from a tame judge.

By any sane standard (not something associated with our press, alas), this is grand-scale misconduct. You don’t do random trolls in search of evidence unless you already have some kind of case. The Scorpions only hit Zuma’s private premises, for instance, when they already had a strong case against him (and that got them into legal trouble). Since Khampepe had complained about the bad vibes between Justice (which runs the Scorpions) and Safety and Security (which runs the police) it was a safe bet that Pikoli’s plans to further alienate the police by forcing them to submit to search-warrants did not sit well with the Presidency.

But to arrest Selebi without any hard evidence against him was catastrophic behaviour that would probably have torpedoed the actual case which Pikoli’s team were preparing. Any lawyer would have blown Pikoli out of the water, and that would have driven a huge nail into the coffin that Zuma’s team were getting ready for the Scorpions — for a big part of their case was that the Scorpions were irresponsible. Meanwhile, Scorpion investigator Billy Nel’s gang were working with the murderer, drug dealer and money launderer Glenn Agliotti, promising him immunity from prosecution if he were prepared to claim that Selebi had accepted bribes from him. That might not be true, and it might not stand up — but it is a case that Selebi had to answer, and it is the reason why Selebi is no longer Commissioner of Police. Pikoli must have known that this was in the pipeline — why did he try to pre-empt it, especially if he really wanted to nail Selebi?

Presumably Pikoli was not really interested in nailing Selebi. What he was interested in, most probably, was embarrassing the government and promoting conflict between the Scorpions and the police. Selebi had already been effectively smeared, whether or not he was actually charged. However, it’s not clear that anyone within the ANC really disliked Selebi (though Selebi clearly has very influential opponents outside the ANC, especially in the white business community). However, Selebi was associated with Mbeki, and an attack on Selebi would disrupt whatever Mbeki was doing. Particularly, all this was happening in the run-up to Polokwane, and it kept Selebi, Mbeki and Pikoli in the news and provided a hook for various smear attacks on Mbeki which promoted the position of Zuma’s clique.

There is another possibility which looks more and more plausible. It seems likely that Pikoli is yet another Zuma mole in the South African spook community, like Billy Masetlha. This being the case, it is quite plausible that his agenda was to destroy the Scorpions, or to discredit them so that they could more easily be destroyed. In this perspective, his agenda was not to wreck Selebi’s career, but to save him, by prematurely charging him and thus making it seem that the Scorpions were biassed against him (making future charges less likely to hold up in court) — and provide more ammo for Zuma and company in their campaign against the Scorpions.

Conspiracy theory? Of course, dummy. This is a conspiracy. We know it exists. All we can do is theorise about how deeply it goes. We can’t do anything to stop it. Let’s scrunch back in the uncomfortable seats and munch our stale, greasy popcorn.

A Brief Response to Dr. Patrick Bond. (And then, no more.)

rds, and the Creator shall smite Dr. Bond with even worse haemhorrhoids than he currently possesses. The Creator is happy to debate with anyone who is genuinely interested in debating. Since Dr. Bond is concerned to deny everything negative which is said about his work, including much that is self-evidently true, there is not much purpose in debating with Dr. Bond.

However, some clarification is in order and for this post the Creator will stop being polite.

Dr. Bond apparently spends a substantial portion of his day searching the Web for “patrick bond”. This suggests either egomania or a level of insecurity requiring therapeutic aid. When he, the Director of the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and author of numerous books, Web articles and newspaper articles, found that a virtually traffic-free weblog twitted him for using fake statistics to fool John Pilger, he launched into a pompous rebuke and, receiving no apology, repeated this with an extended dishonest rebuttal, the kind of thing which arouses howls of “Get your own blog, asshole!” on better-attended weblogs. This is pathetic.

More to the point, it hides the fact that Dr. Bond did make up statistics.

Dr. Bond falsified statistics for water and electricity cut-offs, first in Elite Transition and then in subsequent research and in publicity material thereafter. This was exposed by the editor of the Mail and Guardian, Ferrial Haffajee, in that organ around 2003 if memory serves. Dr. Bond never refuted the exposure because he could not. Dr. Bond’s claims referred to millions of households and there are only a few millions of households in South Africa. A brief night drive through rural areas, or through black townships, witnessing the lights on, proved that Dr. Bond was lying; Ms. Haffajee’s revelation was only the icing on the cake.

Dr. Bond does not only falsify statistics. He writes pieces for webzines on a regular basis, and in a recent Counterpunch article, the Creator discovered (simply by using Google) one quotation from a government official which had been edited to change its meaning, another “quotation” which appeared to have no valid source, and another which had been uttered by someone different (and much less important) from the person to whom Dr. Bond attributed it. This kind of behaviour would not be tolerated at an undergraduate level.

Why does Dr. Bond lie?

Because it suits his propaganda standpoint, but also because he can. Dr. Bond operates in a cossetted academic environment. He does not submit his material to peer-reviewed journals — why should he, when he edits a well-funded journal and can be assured of being published in prominent webzines like Counterpunch and ZNET? His falsification — academic fraud, as it would be termed if anyone else did such things — has not kept him off the editorial board of Alternation; his externally funded CCS brings money in to his UKZN, which is all that institution cares about.

Dr. Bond can also lie because he is not addressing informed people. His primary audience is liberal white South Africans who never venture beyond the suburbs and loathe the African National Congress, and radical foreigners who trade on neoliberal catastrophe and, with no understanding of South Africa’s actual struggle, loathe the ANC for selling out their own fantasies of what it ought to have done. (Dr. Bond is one of those foreigners, and thus he speaks to them with more than ordinary authority.) His message also matches the message desired by white South African big business; he attacks the government and rich blacks, rather than the plutocracy and rich whites, and this is why his lies are forgiven — Haffajee hired Dr. Bond to complete her newspaper’s smear job on the iconoclastic writer Ronald Suresh Roberts. (Dr. Bond told a lot of lies in that smear, too.)

Well, as the Creator said earlier — is it really so bad to tell lies? Doesn’t the government do that all the time? Yes, which is why leftists should not do it. “Tell no lies, claim no easy victories” is a good watchword, not only a signifier for Amilcar Cabral. It is dangerous to take one’s lies too seriously. Poor Trevor Ngwane of the late and unlamented Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee swallowed Bond’s propaganda until he seems to have lost contact with reality, began making up the membership of his own organisation (in New Left Review), and suffered catastrophic embarrassment when he tried to stand for election in Soweto. Perhaps that could be a warning not to engage with reality!

Lying is not necessary. A solid perspective should be built on the truth. Electricity cuts and water cuts need no exaggeration; even if only ten thousand people have their water cut off it is ten thousand too many. But (as with HIV/AIDS) it is easier to pursue the problem if the numbers are smaller. The larger the problem, the less responsibility one feels for clearing it up, and the greater the temptation to abandon hope. Then, if you are convinced by false or decontextualised quotations that your opponent is insane or irredeemably evil, you will see no hope in engaging with them (which legitimizes any subsequent lies you tell about them). Dr. Bond’s covert message is that the Left cannot win.

Slovenliness, lack of scholarliness and lack of intellectual honesty are only part of Dr. Bond’s story. Dr. Bond (as the Creator has observed) cannot perform valid political analysis because of his disastrously distorted viewpoint. Originally he could not see that his “solutions” would have disastrous consequences. More recently he refrains from offering “solutions”, and hence his (very often mendacious and misleading) criticism can serve the interests of any powerful force challenging the present structure — which at the moment means the plutocratic right wing. Nothing that he has written in the last decade provides grounds for altering this opinion.

The targets whom Dr. Bond has chosen to assault happen to be the same people who are hated by actual South African plutocrats and neoliberals. The media which give Dr. Bond a hearing are controlled by these plutocrats and neoliberals. Received middle-class white wisdom endorses Dr. Bond; he is surfing an artificial wave generated by neoliberalism’s machinery. Hence, in a sense, Dr. Bond is “objectively pro-neoliberalism”, to use Orwell’s phrase which was misused by Christopher Hitchens to justify Bush’s War on Terror. It is dangerous to use the methods and the media of the people whom you are supposedly opposing. Dr. Bond claims to be anti-capitalist, but his real target happens to be the Mbeki wing of the ANC, which was the only powerful force in South Africa today with the slightest chance of hampering the activities of capitalists. Thus in the name of leftism, Dr. Bond is tearing down the prospects of social democracy. (No doubt because he lives in KwaZulu-Natal and is a coward, Dr. Bond has offered no significant criticism of Zuma or his plutocratic, neoliberal cabal.)

This is not all. Here the Creator feels a little uncertain. The following seems a little like a smear, and yet in view of Dr. Bond’s behaviour it should be aired. There is an organisation called Global Research. They have a website; Google it if you will and search for a person named Michael Barker. He has been wandering the maze of Western corporate and government support for the Zimbabwean opposition. He discovered that Dr. Bond had recently worked closely with a man named Kapuya, who was a Reagan-Fascell Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy — a front-organisation for the U.S. government’s meddling in Third World affairs. Dr. Bond had taken money, said Barker, for that work with Kapuya from George Soros’ Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, a conservative organisation (funded by international currency speculation of the kind which Dr. Bond pretends to oppose) also linked with Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, the Afrikaner conservative and fan of the apartheid military. Barker identified other problems, such as a member of Dr. Bond’s advisory board who was linked with Action-Aid International, apparently a British government front-organisation.

One may, of course, say that Dr. Bond is entitled to work with such people. On the other hand, it is intriguing to see someone who pretends to such purity and integrity (although practising so little of what he pretends) lining up with right-wing foreign agents without a murmur of self-criticism. Is it possible that Dr Bond is knowingly taking the Western neoliberal shilling? Who funds his lavish lifestyle, anyway?

In short, there is no reason to debate with Dr. Bond; he is not himself interested in debate, as his rejection of valid criticism demonstrates. There is, however, good reason to expose him to the truthful scrutiny which he fears. If anyone learns to read his work with a critical eye instead of believing everything he says as gospel truth (as people like Pilger, Roy and Ali do), the Creator’s purpose in mentioning him will be justified. Since the Creator has discovered all that need be known about Dr. Bond, pardon the Creator for not wishing to mention him again for a long time.

Teach Your Children Ill.

South Africa’s public services are rubbish. Almost everybody agrees on that. The providers of public services are happy to tell you that this is the case. So are their administrators, and their political bosses, and their political opponents, and the press. They all agree that the public services are a load of rubbish, and that this situation is someone else’s fault. As a result everybody is happy.

Except, of course, the recipients of the public services.

Possibly the public services are not quite as rubbishy as is insisted-on. Possibly everybody involved in the services finds it convenient to say such things. In other words, maybe things aren’t quite so bad. In South Africa, oddly enough, anybody who claims that things might not be as bad as they are painted — who suggests that maybe the HIV figures aren’t as bad as UNAIDS claims, or that the crime statistics aren’t as bad as the DA desires — is treated as a kind of traitor to the cause and hounded out of polite society. Thus it is rather difficult to get at the facts.

The Creator knows a little bit about education, so that might be a good place to start. Education is possibly the best place to start because without good education it is difficult to resolve any of the other problems. What are the problems with education?

The pre-1994 South African system of school education was fairly authoritarian in structure. It was based on the notion that information was more important than process, and that relevance to life-experience was largely irrelevant. Pupils were jumped through ever-higher and ever-narrower hoops, and “streamed” through nominally different levels of education in the same year. Supposedly this meant that more intellectually adept pupils received a higher grade of education, but usually it meant that more affluent pupils received it, since they had more opportunity to make use of the world around them. Teachers were sometimes competent, sometimes not.

Of course, this reflected conditions in the best schools available. In the 1970s the massification of black education generated a vast number of schools with hardly any competent teachers, a problem solved by hiring loads of unqualified, demotivated and incompetent people. This was compounded by a general lack of facilities, even in urban areas; in rural areas, pupils were lucky to have classrooms with roofs, let alone desks. In the urban areas, the problem was worsened when people of school-going age became the spearheads of the anti-apartheid resistance; like their counterparts in the Western universities in the 1960s, they considered closing the educational system a vital form of protest, and therefore did so.

The government responded with violence and repression, sometimes even in rural areas when the youth there began flexing their political muscles. One side-effect of this was the total demoralization of teachers, who were viewed as sell-outs when they wanted to teach and as goof-offs if they endorsed the boycotts. It didn’t help that the government decided that sending school inspectors into such areas was too dangerous (since such inspectors were rightly seen as the political commissars of Bantu Education) and therefore for a long period the schools were not only out of control because of pupil resistance, they were unsupervised by anybody.

This bred a claim that a “lost generation” was growing up. It’s far from clear that this was the case — while pupils passing through schools in the 1980s were not learning much that was on the curriculum, they were certainly picking up a kind of education which gave them a lot of adaptive skill. However, what was happening was that the education system itself was disintegrating.

Then came 1994 and, as we know, everything changed, all the problems were solved and the Rainbow Nation was born. What was obviously needed was to recognise what the problems were and how to solve them, and the problems were partly administrative, partly morale-related, and partly skills-based. The average impoverished school had weak leadership, dispirited teachers who were not properly qualified to do their job even when they cared about it, pupils who viewed school as an embarrassing waste of time, and facilities which were generally worthless — if they weren’t worthless when the school was built, they were swiftly plundered or trashed.

What was needed, oddly enough, was discipline. (Imagine the Creator in leather with a horsewhip. No, on second thoughts, please don’t.) External discipline and self-discipline; willingness to mutually struggle to reconstruct the school system, backed by punishment for those who failed to do this, which would require a solid knowledge of what was going on.

What actually happened, however, was that in the 1992-4 negotiations process, the white parties pressed for education, like other services, to be devolved to the provinces instead of staying at national level. The original plan was that the country would be split up into rich white and poor black provinces; that didn’t quite happen, but the effects were to divide rich Western Cape and Gauteng from poor everybody else.

Besides, since central administration of the schooling system seemed to have failed, central government found it convenient to scrap it. Instead schooling administration was handed over to the provincial governments which had never done anything quite like that before; in the homelands the system of schooling had been a bleak joke in most cases, while in former white areas hardly any competent administrator had any experience of the problems of black schooling. This meant that while the central system cheerfully cast off all responsibility for school administration, the provincial governments had ironclad excuses for any failures. A worse recipe for administration could hardly have been found.

To compound this, the new Minister for Education was an academic intellectual who decided, quite rightly, that the big problem was the authoritarian curriculum. He therefore cast about for a less authoritarian curriculum. (In fact in most areas the curriculum wasn’t being pursued meaningfully, authoritarian or not, but the Ministry didn’t seem to know this.) Unfortunately, this plan to democratise the curriculum conflicted with another plan to retool education for economic growth — essentially, education which would serve the interests of business, though nobody admitted that this was the plan. The eventual compromise was imitating the “outcomes-based” education system which had spread across the Anglophone educational systems of the world like necrotising fasciitis and had much the same impact.

Theoretically, “outcomes-based” education seemed sensible. You set down what you expected a given educational process to do, you developed educational procedures towards those goals, and you taught with those goals in mind, afterwards assessing to see that they had been met. It sounds perfect. However, as it was implemented, the goals were nebulous and yet fixed, based on criteria which almost nobody understood, developed by educational administrators in Pretoria with business concerns in mind. Assessing these outcomes involved huge bureaucratic processes which theoretically would have swamped teachers if they had been willing to perform the process, while the practice of teaching was largely unexamined. Even competent teachers in well-equipped schools found themselves unable to say exactly what this new system required them to do in order to attain outcomes which they were not permitted to set themselves.

This has bred a new authoritarian system, far more openly hostile to effective education than before, in which central administrators have vastly more right to interfere with what the teachers were doing. (Whereas in the past “educational experts” could only meddle during the visits of inspectors to schools, nowadays the meddling is ongoing, and schools are supposed to constantly issue reports and connive at their own bureaucratised oppression.) Fortunately, the administrators are often lazy, inept and frivolous. Ironically, the more effectively the system operated, the more harm was done. Thus the system damaged functioning educational structures.

There were other problems. GEAR entailed the need to freeze spending, despite the obvious need to build and staff more schools. As a result, the Department of Education decided to get rid of teachers — but since they could not legally be fired, they had to be encouraged to leave. Of course, the ones most likely to leave voluntarily were the ones most skilled and thus capable of getting jobs elsewhere. This “brightsizing” was potentially devastating, especially in the most functioning state schools.

Another brilliant cost-cutting idea pursued by the next Minister was to reduce costs by getting rid of teachers’ training colleges, which were often dysfunctional institutions. There had been a shortage of teachers even before the brightsizing, and now the number of teachers coming into the system was dramatically cut; virtually the only institutions producing teachers by the turn of the millennium were universities and the technical colleges which were rebranded as universities. Teacher production plummeted and class sizes soared. (For a period the Department of Education even stopped its traditional support for teacher training without providing a replacement system, so for a while nobody was encouraged to become a teacher.)

Looking back on all this, the wonder is that South Africa has an educational system at all. Some of the problems have been gradually mended; potential teachers are getting bursaries again, the universities have expanded their teaching programmes (though this is itself problematic because the emphasis is necessarily on quantity rather than quality, and the new teaching programmes may not be as effective as the old ones were). On the other hand, since the products of the schools are increasingly inept at almost any subject, partly because of the nebulosity of the curriculum and partly because of the collapse of effective administration, so the products of universities (themselves savaged by budget cuts and amok bureaucratisation) may be less effective than they were.

Nobody, of course, is checking this, possibly for fear of what they might find.

Most observers would agree with portions of the above analysis, though some would say that there are many pockets where people have been able to transcend the destructive effects of government policy. Also, some of these policies are not destructive in themselves, but in the ham-handed, exploitative and partisan way they have been implemented, and with competent leadership the system can be made to work. (Unfortunately South Africa has been cursed with a series of inept Ministers of Education.)

However, the system is definitely failing at the moment as a result of implementing the new policies. This leads to people like Jonathan Jansen essentially arguing for a return to pre-1994 policies. This is not only exploitative, it amounts to a rejection of egalitarianism (since the old system disproportionately benefited people in Jansen’s position). Hence this kind of response does not have a useful effect; it simply affirms a laager mentality among the already-paranoid hacks of the Department of Education.

There is, however, a hint that not all the problems exist within the government. For instance, according to an SABC bulletin, in Alexandra township, the Department of Education recently discovered a school where teachers were allegedly failing to show up, showing up drunk, or feeling up female pupils. Twenty of the teachers were suspended. Well, we couldn’t have that, so the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union brought all the teachers in Alexandra out on strike, apparently in a massive show of support for irresponsibility, alcoholism and sexual harassment.

To be fair, SADTU did not say “Up with raping scholars while we’re drunk!”. Instead, a spokesman (emphasis on the “man”) said that he did not think that the Department of Education could prove its case against the teachers concerned. Hence, in SADTU’s opinion, it was better that the case should not go ahead in the first place. Why look into the possibility that the educational system is a cloak for corruption and incompetence? Why not let sleeping rabid dogs lie?

If such an attitude is widespread among our teachers, perhaps it is not so surprising that the educational department has trouble getting the system to work.

On Reading Propaganda (II).

In a sense all right-wing and neoliberal propaganda in South Africa derives from overseas. Many conservatives in South Africa owe intellectual and moral allegiance to foreign conservatives. Those whose ideas were formed indigenously, mostly through racism or through domestic plutocracy, are aware that they can only succeed in their goal of oppressing or cheating the South African working-class majority with foreign assistance, and therefore accommodate their ideas to foreigners. However, this does not mean that all the propaganda one reads is foreign-oriented. The most effective South African propaganda is attuned to the power-shift in society; it is unwise to simply denounce the working class as one can do in the United States. Instead, in South Africa, one must pretend to endorse the change in society, while offering a proposal for reforming it which (naturally) implies the reversal of everything which has happened since the 1980s. (This is rather like the attitude which American politicians hold towards Social Security.)

In this light we turn to Mark Gevisser. He was a journalist working for the Mail and Guardian, supposedly left-wing but actually right-wing, writing “profiles” of politicians — hatchet-jobs on people whom the management disliked, arse-licking for people whom the management approved. In brief, a propagandist, though perhaps less dishonest or talentless than most. He withdrew from that newspaper for several years (it would be nice to think that this was because that newspaper had become so atrociously dishonest) and spent almost a decade researching a biography of Thabo Mbeki.

Suddenly the book was produced in terrific haste. It appeared late in 2007, and was enormously hyped by almost everybody. The newspapers printed screeds of extracts from it — and all of these extracts happened to be ones which contained none of Gevisser’s actual research, but were simply repetitions of the usual journalistic lies told about Mbeki; that he was an AIDS denialist, that he was secretly backing Mugabe, that he was a vicious totalitarian, and so on. Presumably Gevisser had cut a deal; provided that he inserted appropriate material to hang a pre-Polokwane propaganda campaign on, he would receive excellent and uncritical promotion for his book. If this is true, and it seems the most likely explanation for the situation, then Gevisser serves his political bias and his personal profit more than he serves the truth. (Nothing remarkable there, no doubt.)

Turn again to Gevisser’s article “The people will uproot African tyranny”. Interesting title — interesting claim. Is it true? One could say, overconfident. Also, who are “the people”, and who defines what “African tyranny” is?

Gevisser kicks off by saying that Thabo Mbeki likes to claim that Western hostility to Zimbabwe is all about ill-treatment of whites, and that there are many other African countries where conditions are worse but Western hostility is trivial or absent. Gevisser says that Mbeki is wrong, because black people also suffer in Zimbabwe, since there is high inflation there. While Gevisser’s original statement is partly wrong (Mbeki doesn’t talk about the issue much any more) it is evident that there are indeed many other African countries where the West countenances worse atrocities than Zimbabwean, so Mbeki was telling the truth and Gevisser wrong to criticise him. When Gevisser singles out high inflation as the big crime in Zimbabwe; apart from the question which the Creator has asked as to whether this inflation is directly caused by ZANU (PF), inflation is something which particularly affects rich people; apparently, Gevisser’s deepest concern is not for poor Zimbabweans, but for rich ones. This seems related to his desire to let the West off the hook regarding their real motives in Zimbabwe.

According to Gevisser. Western concern about Zimbabwe resembles the anti-apartheid struggle; it is a moral campaign against tyranny and in support of a “vibrant new coalition”, the MDC. In practice, the campaign against Zimbabwe is an official campaign, led by governments. Vast amounts of Western state money were poured into the MDC’s election campaigns and international propaganda operations. The West offers immense bribes for Zimbabweans if they vote MDC. Nothing like that happened in the anti-apartheid struggle, where Western countries sided with apartheid (and, for that matter, with Smith’s dictatorship in Rhodesia) as much as they dared. There is no grassroots anti-Mugabe campaign in the way that there was a vast grassroots anti-apartheid campaign. Why should there be, when the government is doing all the work anyway?

Gevisser also compares this campaign with Zambia, where a similar campaign, the Movement for Multiparty Democracy, also supported by Western governments, overthrew the Kaunda government, sold off the national infrastructure to foreigners, and plunged Zambia into chaos and misery as the new tyrant Frederick Chiluba plundered the state. Not a good comparison, but doubtless Gevisser hopes his audience has forgotten this; doubtless also, the MMD provides an excellent blueprint for international neoliberals to plunder Zimbabwe, which is presumably the agenda which Gevisser endorses.

He then gives a more or less accurate account of the current predicament. The Zimbabwean government refuses to acknowledge that it has lost the Presidential election. This is even worse behaviour than the behaviour of the Republican Party when they stole the 2000 Presidential election in the United States. The Zimbabwean government must be persuaded not to pursue such a course. However, it is not, by African standards, a crisis. Angola hasn’t had an election for sixteen years. Rwanda and Equatorial Guinea have never had free elections. Rigged elections are routine across much of Africa. It is proper to protest against Zimbabwe’s misconduct, but it is not proper to pretend, as Gevisser does, that this is something extraordinary, or to be astounded, as Gevisser is, that the People of Zimbabwe have not Risen Up. Why should they? What, really, is in it for them, and why shouldn’t they follow The Who in “Don’t Get Fooled Again”?

There is nothing in the street that looks any different to me,

And the slogans are all replaced by and by,

The Party On The Left is now the Party On The Right,

And the beards have all grown longer overnight.

Come and meet the New Boss,

He’s the same as the Old Boss.

One thing which Gevisser reluctantly admits is that a lot of Zimbabweans support Mugabe. He concludes that they must be mad or brainwashed; there is just no way in Gevisser’s mind that anybody could honestly have any doubts about the sleazy foreign-backed opposition party. When that sleazy party calls strikes which fail, and demonstrations to which people don’t show up, Gevisser explains that this must be because of intimidation. Why are Zimbabweans so easily intimidated when South Africans were not? Why, says Gevisser in effect, are Zimbabweans such fools and cowards that they will not automatically do what the West wants them to do? Why are they not fighting, as they did against Smith, whom Gevisser suggests was no worse than Mugabe? Obviously, this is because Gevisser’s attempt to compare the squabble in Zimbabwe and the actual struggle in South Africa or Rhodesia is a load of nonsense, but Gevisser cannot see how completely he has undermined his own case.

Reading propaganda not only shows where the ruling class’s lies are headed, but also shows how promoting ruling class lies eventually poisons the mind.

Gevisser’s conclusion, however, is true. There is obviously a need for negotiation. This is what the South African government has been saying since the 2000 election, after which the South African government, under the auspices of Thabo Mbeki, first floated the idea of a government of national unity, an idea which Gevisser ascribes to the leader of the MDC Morgan Tsvangirai. The Southern African Development Community agrees and, for some time, has supported Mbeki’s proposals for negotiations. The difficulty is simply to get the two sides to sit down and agree on a formula, for there is vast and well-justified mutual mistrust. However, with the MDC holding control of Parliament it seems clear that ZANU (PF) is in a weaker position, politically, than ever before, so there is a lot of promise that the Zimbabwean crisis may be brought to an end.

This does not sit well with everything which Gevisser has said up to this point. If ZANU (PF) are not evil incarnate, but a bad government which can be removed by negotiations, then the issue is not a struggle, but something like the negotiations which ended apartheid. Again, it is then not a titanic crisis, but a resolvable impasse (which is what the South African government has claimed all along, and what Gevisser and the rest of the press here and abroad have denied).

In order to gain something from this failure, Gevisser explains that Thabo Mbeki must not be allowed to have anything to do with this. This is because he is utterly discredited by his support for Mugabe. Gevisser provides no evidence for this (none exists — Gevisser a few sentences later claims that Mbeki supports someone else) and of course virtually nobody actually believes it. But it has to be pretended; this is why Morgan Tsvangirai has repudiated Mbeki. Actually, it appears that Mbeki is too honest a broker; Tsvangirai either does not trust Mbeki to negotiate in bad faith, or more probably, Tsvangirai’s Western backers do not trust Tsvangirai to succeed in any honest negotiations process. Therefore, Gevisser insists, for real negotiations we must look elsewhere.

The person Gevisser (and Tsvangirai) favours is the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban-ki Moon. He is the former Korean Foreign Minister whom the Americans installed as their toady at the UN, because their previous toady, Kofi Annan, had proved insufficiently subservient over American aggression in Iraq. Undoubtedly a glove-puppet of the U.S. right-wing would be a useful mediator if one wants the Western side to win, but the UN is so despised throughout Africa that it is hard to see anyone being fooled by this.

Since things aren’t likely to happen his way, Gevisser simply repeats that Mbeki is discredited. That is not likely to be the way for Zimbabwe to succeed, of course; even Gevisser admits that Mbeki is the best-qualified mediator. Most probably, however, Gevisser does not want Mbeki to emerge from the Zimbabwean impasse with any credit. This is the gist of his book, and this has been the gist of what the South African media has been saying in general.

For Zimbabwe, however useful it might be for Western capitalism, increasingly in need of funds, to plunder, is no longer the real prize. The real prize is South Africa, and the real tool is Zuma’s cabal of cronies. Zuma is the man who has passed the true test (by going and bowing the knee to Gordon Brown) and who can be trusted to do to South Africa what Tsvangirai is going to do to Zimbabwe, and what Chiluba did to Zambia. This is what Gevisser’s article is really about.

Amazing what you read in the papers these days, isn’t it?

On Reading Propaganda. (I)

The Creator often complains that most of what we read or hear via the media is propaganda. Usually this is dull-witted repetition of received ideas and authorised vocabulary meant to discourage thought and debate. However, where propaganda is presented to prevent people from development new ones, or to head off a real danger that people might start thinking, it may be usefully read. Using simple interpretive techniques and fact-checking on these tracts, one may see what the goal of the propaganda is and thus, very probably, what the ruling class want the rest of us to think.

The danger of doing this is that one becomes obsessed with the wrongness of the propaganda. If one says “The New York Times does not truly reflect conditions in Iraq!”, or “The SABC does not faithfully expose mismanagement in the Johannesburg Water!” and stops there, one is not achieving much. It is not really odd that the ruling class’s propaganda organs falsify reality. What is interesting is how they do this, and what reality they want us to adapt ourselves to.

If any South Africans read this they may not be familiar with Mr. Christopher Hitchens, a former left-winger who became increasingly hostile to the left because of its universalism and its support for human rights; he joined the right-wing forces attacking Clinton’s Presidency (writing an extremely mendacious book called No One Left To Lie To) and subsequently became an important apologist for the Bush administration.

Christopher Hitchens was familiar with the jargon and methodology of the left and thus could couch reactionary and imperialist propaganda in a form which could undermine liberals and left-wingers. (He often writes for the ostensibly liberal New York Times.) Both in the United States and in Britain, the extreme right depends heavily on former leftists for its ideologues. These “neo-conservatives” are so called because they have recently discovered conservatism, and because the ideology which they represent is a return to an extreme conservatism which in its radicalism approaches soft Fascism.

Hitchens begins his article in the Sunday Times with a burst of praise for the South African unionists who refused to offload the Zimbabwean ammunition at Durban harbour. The Creator does not know whether the Zimbabwean government wanted to import ammunition to oppress its own people, to enhance its self-defense capacity, or simply to replace time-expired material. It is, however, obvious that if the Zimbabwean government has such trouble funding and acquiring a paltry military cargo, then its mismanagement of the country is endangering either internal or external security, so it should accept the verdict of the recent elections and hand over power either to a transitional authority or directly to the opposition. So much is clear, and yet what a strange spin Hitchens puts on it!

He says that this event reaffirms his faith in socialism. It is a moot point whether these unionists, or the Zimbabwean unionists whose rights they support, are actually socialists. Perhaps Hitchens’ definition of socialism is “workers doing things that I like”. Significantly, the COSATU campaigns against the iron dictatorship in Swaziland, where (unlike Zimbabwe) no union activity is permitted, have not received Hitchens’ praise, here or elsewhere. Perhaps Hitchens has not heard of these.

But he must have heard that Western workers, some of them unionised and politically conscious, have loaded weaponry, both in his adopted United States and his birthplace Britain, bound for vicious totalitarian states for use against the populace — Colombia, Israel, Haiti, Turkey, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, to cite a few. If he is impressed by the contrast between the principled stand of the South Africans, he does not mention the craven submission of the Britons and Americans. Probably he is not so impressed, for Hitchens supports oppression in all of those countries and applauds when more weapons are profitably shipped there to help full the bloodbaths. (To be fair, in Britain or the United States, workers taking such actions would be fired, whereas in South Africa workers have rights.)

Hitchens’ attitude towards socialism is extremely odd. He claims that socialism began when Marx organised a boycott of Confederate cotton. Hitchens must have heard of the Communist Manifesto, written twelve years before the American Civil War began and directed not in support of American big business, but in revolt against capitalism and its tools. So he is lying about the origins of Marxian socialism, and also lying about a boycott of Confederate cotton during the American civil war.

During that war the North blockaded the South and prevented the export of cotton to Britain. Britain had violently destabilised the Egyptian government to prevent them from farming cotton and thus gaining something of the status enjoyed by Saudi Arabia today. Britain preferred cotton produced by whites through black slave labour in the United States. This vicious policy proved disastrous when North American cotton was cut off, causing much unemployment and hardship in Britain.

However, the Western European oligarchy saw the United States as a threat to their imperialist designs in the Caribbean, and also because of its democracy, which they feared as a bad example. Britain and France plotted to provoke a “humanitarian intervention” to end the war and keep the United States permanently split, and thus weak. Marx and the dismissed cotton workers responded by saying that, despite the fact that the blockade made them suffer, they believed that it was in their interest to have a strong and democratic United States on the other side of the Atlantic, and not in their interest to promote European armed aggression. This did not mean that they liked Northern capitalism, but they disliked both Southern slavery, and their own oligarchy’s fondness for Southern slavery.

Hitchens is thus appropriating socialism for the purposes of American political mythology. In official doctrine, in the war, North good, South bad. Therefore the socialists were supposedly doing a good thing by boycotting Southern cotton, and only much later (in 1917) did they start doing things which did not serve American political goals, and therefore had to be destroyed. As with the workers, socialists are all right so long as they do what the American elite want.

Perhaps the headline PROPAGANDIST FOR AMERICAN RIGHT WING PROPAGANDISES FOR AMERICAN RIGHT WING would not sell many newspapers, but it is important not to allow this steady hum of bullshit (as P J O’Rourke called it) to become the natural background noise of the mind.

Later, Hitchens misrepresents the Zimbabwean war of liberation and its aftermath, noting that the victor in that war was Chinese-supported and hence backed the PAC and therefore did not actively support the ANC in the struggle for South African liberation. This is partly true; it is hardly unique, since every country in Southern Africa betrayed the ANC at some stage in the liberation war. More to the point, Zimbabwe proved that indigenous white oligarchies could be defeated, and the Zimbabwean government saved the Mozambican government from South African aggression, battling RENAMO in the Beira Corridor. So, political partisanship aside, South Africans had reason to be grateful for the stand taken by ZANU (PF). One may say that such gratitude can be taken too far, and that perhaps it has been, although the Creator does not think there is any evidence for this.

However, Hitchens follows this a fascinating and curious question: in the light of this, “knowing what they knew about his primitive politics and even more primitive methods, why did the leaders of the ANC continue to tolerate Mugabe”?

Firstly, “primitive politics” means in this case leftism, which gives us a further idea of where Hitchens stands. While Mugabe’sZANU overthrew the white racist state, ZAPU sat out the struggle building up a conventional army in Zambia through which it hoped to seize power after liberation. When ZAPU mutinied against ZANU’s justified victory in the first election, Mugabe and ZANU crushed it, despite the support ZAPU enjoyed from the white racist state which was destabilising Zimbabwe by funding guerrillas and sending troops to destroy the Zimbabwean Air Force. These are things which Hitchens leaves out, because if he left them in, even the mass-murdering activities of the Fifth Brigade in Matabeleland become comprehensible (though inexcusible).

If this is “primitive”, recall how Britain treated the foreign-backed rebellions of James in Ireland in the 17th century, and Charles in Scotland in the 18th century. For that matter, how the United States treated its “Indians” when they rebelled against its rule (when they were lucky enough to survive conquest in the first place). The treatment was universal butchery followed by tyranny — a model for the slaughter-festivals organised by America abroad, from the Philippines onward. This gives one a hint of how relatively “primitive” the milder brutalities of Mugabe appear in reality, as opposed to Hitchens’ propaganda. Granted, Hitchens has called for Henry Kissinger to be treated as a war criminal, but he makes no such call for similar treatment for Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz et al.

In Hitchens’ terms, the leaders of weak countries — are “tolerated”. Such “toleration” should be withdrawn if those leaders do not offer powerful countries uncritical support — including backing the wrong parties at the wrong times. Withdrawal of such tolerance is means one has the right to do whatever seems convenient to overthrow a foreign government doing you no harm and install another government which is more to your liking. Hitchens is arguing in favour of this — although it may be that he is in favour of it happening only when the United States approves and will benefit. The United States has done this in a very large number of countries, sometimes via puppet proxies.

Failure to do this, even though it may cost tens of thousands of lives and ruin the quality of life for the people supposedly “liberated”, is defined, by Hitchens, as “cowardice”. It is, in contrast, brave to sit in Washington and wreck small countries at no cost to yourself, using mercenaries wherever convenient. Hitchens is here establishing a moral brief for unquestioned world domination by a power without responsibility. It is interesting to see the Nazi reality breaking through the faux-socialist rhetoric.

But fakery there must be, like marzipan icing covering a cake baked with powdered arsenic instead of flour. For instance, he concludes (after a welter of nonsense about Mugabe’s alleged insanity and sadism, based on no evidence whatsoever) that Mugabe’s motivation must be envy of Mandela’s adulation.

Mandela was admired among Southern African blacks for his refusal to compromise with apartheid. While he did permit some compromises in the run-up to the elections, but in the main he continued to be respected. Meanwhile, white South Africans were persuaded by their white government that negotiations (which they previously opposed) were justified because of Mandela’s obedience — supposedly, he was at heart a “good kaffir”, unlike Chris Hani or Thabo Mbeki. This was taken up internationally by propagandists wishing to promote the lie that the West had backed the liberation of South Africa. The international adulation for Mandela was used for this purpose — “because we say nice things about Mandela, this shows that we have always admired the struggle he led”.

Hitchens here deploys this lie to depict Mugabe as the counter-Mandela, the man who will not do what we tell him to. Tacitly, he is also using it against Mbeki, who fails to do what we tell him to do on Zimbabwe. In consequence, Hitchens defines the actions of South African trade unions, which happen to be what the West wants, as in the best traditions of the anti-apartheid struggle — that is, the Western fantasy of what that struggle was. Now, it seems, South Africa is emerging from the dark days of disobedience, and returning to obedience to Western white authority — in the best traditions of (the Western fantasy of) Nelson Mandela!

The frightening thing about Hitchens is not that he is a liar or a hypocrite; the frightening thing is that the forces which he represents seem to be winning.

Supposing South African Socialism? (III)

One area in which the Creator and Patrick Bond agree entirely, is in doubting the value of capitalism as a tool with which to develop South Africa.

In the past, it was assumed by many, including Marx, that capitalism was an immensely productive force for creating marketable manufactures. The seemingly unstoppable, continuous, radical transformation of life in the developed part of the world between the late eighteenth century and the late twentieth century was a tribute to this. South Africa’s development between the mid-nineteenth century and the 1970s was a part of this capitalist transformation.

However, South Africa’s transformation, like that in countries such as Brazil, was distorted. Governments passed laws to ensure that the benefits of capitalist development would be enjoyed by only a few whites, while the duties of capitalist development — backbreaking labour — were passed on to the black majority. As a result, capitalist development in South Africa was limited, by restraint on the market for goods. Instead of rising up and demanding a free market, however, South African capitalists appeared content with a tightly-regulated capitalism which, while slowing the rate of growth, ensured that the fruits of growth were shared by a few extremely rich people.

Hence, while capitalism may provide rapid economic growth, it certainly does not guarantee it (which is the lie at the heart of neoliberalism). Where capitalism generates rapid growth — most conspicuously in east Asia — it does so under tight regulation. In those places, where regulation relaxed, the growth was destabilised — as in the “Asian crisis”, nominally of 1997-1999, but actually still persisting.

Capitalist development is here defined as the development of goods, manufacturing and services potentially of direct benefit to most people. The manufacture of diamond-encrusted shoelaces might be profitable, but it does not fit into this category. A major trouble with capitalism worldwide appears to be a tendency towards this direction, in the form of financialisation.

Financialisation means that capitalists find more profitable to invest in companies which manipulate money, or trade in the value of goods which they do not make or sell — such as banks, insurance, medical aid, commodities exchanges and property agencies — than in companies which make or sell things. Over twice as much money is traded on the Johannesburg Securities Exchange in a year, as the value of South Africa’s gross domestic product, and this disparity is increasing. The big earners are the money manipulators. This promotes the unproductive use of capital, which generates the most personal profit. This then increases inequality.

Greater concentration of wealth is itself dangerously unproductive. A millionaire will arguably spend more on manufactured goods than a person with only ten thousand rand a year, contributing more as an individual to the growth of the economy (though not as much as would be contributed by a hundred people with ten thousand a year). A billionaire, however, will only spend a small amount more than the millionaire; certainly nowhere near a thousand times more. The rest of the money is invested, probably in unproductive financial activity. Hence billionaires are proportionately vastly less economically useful than millionaires, and every billionaire eats up a thousand potential millionaires. Crudely, the richer you are, the less actually productive, past a certain point. Unfortunately capitalism requires that you get richer without limit regardless of merit.

Socialism seems a more logical alternative; a democratic state, decentralised so far as possible, yet regulating the economic activities of everyone in the state to ensure that nobody is excessively rich, nobody is excessively poor, and everybody labours for the benefit of all. It doesn’t sound difficult. Unfortunately it is extremely difficult because almost everybody, in our present cultural context, asks themselves “What am I getting out of it that he or she isn’t?”. Greed and selfishness, being universal, will torpedo socialism unless they are overridden and ultimately eliminated altogether in favour of altruism. This is not impossible, but wherever socialism has failed, these have been the sources of the problem (along with cruelty and paranoia, of course).

Imagine that these problems can be solved; that somehow the public of South Africa were gradually persuaded that in the end the “Prisoner’s Dilemma”, that famous philosophical game, is true, and that the most positive results are achieved through mutual cooperation. Imagine that somehow South Africa were allowed to pursue this path without foreign interference, destabilisation or invasion. Finally, imagine that this happened in 1960 (which could not have been — even had the apartheid state been crushed, meaningful socialism would not have arisen in South Africa under the conditions of the 1960s). How might South Africa have developed?

The place to start would have been very much where the “Asian Tigers” were starting at that time; ensuring that capitalism was fully regulated by the state, with tight controls over credit. Temporarily, at least, capitalists could have been bought off by opening up the suppressed african market to commercial penetration, which in the 1960s would have led to a spurt of economic growth far greater than what actually took place in that decade of rapid South African development. This would have provided money for a modest expansion of spending on the poor, but as part of an explicit longer-term plan to do them more good later. This would be illustrated, in part by improved access to health-care, but chiefly by greatly expanded education. Unlike the expansion of education which happened under apartheid in the 1960s, socialist education would not be the narrow technical education permitted in the Asian authoritarian states, but would have been a critical education to promote citizens to participate fully in the work of the nation, encouraging citizens to challenge the state’s errors in the name of patriotism, but accepting their own sacrifices in the name of a genuinely better future.

While this was happening, the state would gradually have taken over major industries. It would have been relatively easy to take over mines and large manufactures, and not much more difficult to gradually absorb or compel banks into a national credit structure. The more powerful the state became in the economy, the easier it would be to grow.

However, taking over a corporation runs the risk of being captured by its goals. The object of taking over a mine would not simply be to garner its profits; the object would be to make working in the mine more bearable, while at the same time making the production of the mine serve the interests of the nation. The government could not be so generous to the mineworkers that the mine started losing money (if this happened to all nationalised industries, the national economy would stall) nor try to make as much money out of the mine as possible (as with British nationalised industries, this would be little better than if the mine had remained in capitalist hands). Likewise, if the structure of the corporation remained the same, with unaccountable directors and senior managers earning vast amounts, then the advantages of socialising it would be insignificant. There would have to be proper planning, democratisation, and a small but growing meaningful degree of worker participation.

By the end of the 1960s, however, this would probably have been resolved, and a budgetary surplus would be available in time for a massive investment in other areas. The SASOL oil-from-coal programme would have been needed to respond to the oil price rise. There was an urgent need to develop housing in the growing cities. Meanwhile there would have had to be considerable development in the former homeland areas — widespread and effective development, in communications, transport and other infrastructure, to make it more bearable to stay in these areas, especially where there was support for rural agriculture.

Both subsistence and commercial agriculture would have to be brought under national control. The logical structure would be the marketing and credit structures already existing under apartheid. However, the object would be to gradually socialise private commercial farms (so that the farmers became managers rather than owners, obliged to follow the government’s lead but also benefiting from technical assistance and advice). Meanwhile, subsistence farms in rural areas were mostly already communal; with considerable capital assistance it would have been relatively easy to turn these into state farms, accommodating traditional leadership and methods, but facilitated by the government and gradually producing materials for the market.

Another important urban project would have been providing public transport, both between centres (upgrading heavy rail) and within centres (light rail, perhaps sometimes underground in centres like Bloemfontein and Pretoria). This would have improved urban conditions and would have been a vital addition to the growth of housing in the urban areas. Meanwhile, there would have been the need to improve access to water, both by building dams and by building water recycling systems, first in major centres and then in all centres, along the lines of what was actually done in Windhoek.

By the early 1980s, after twenty years of progress towards socialism, there would probably have been concrete effects on the psychology of society. The spirit of cooperation, planning and mutual aid would have been promoted and, with a government open to criticism and responsive to requests, and which provided everyone with the information they needed about events, a spirit of trust would have evolved. No doubt future planning for this period would have focussed on a further move away from fossil fuels, with a growth both of nuclear energy (very likely in the pre-Chernobyl period, partly because even democratic socialist governments are fond of large central projects) and of renewables.

However, the socialist society would have been particularly affected by the unexpected; the appearance of HIV/AIDS. Part of the problem which AIDS represented in the actual 1980s was caused by the irresponsibility of individuals and of the government. Individuals refusing to accept that their own actions were placing their futures at risk — or not caring, because the culture promoted a contempt for not only the lives of others, but even of oneself. Governments refused to take action, and where they did, they gained little cooperation because almost nobody trusted them. (In South Africa this was exascerbated by the government’s vague hope that AIDS would wipe out the blacks.)

In a democratically socialist society this could have been different. The culture of responsibility for the individual, and caring for others, would have encouraged individuals to acknowledge their status for the sake of their potential sexual partners. The state would have done what it could for HIV-positive people, but would also have promoted universal HIV testing and penalised failure to seek help. Those whose behaviour served to secretly spread the disease would have faced civil actions from those whose lives they damaged. Obviously, once the first antiretrovirals were developed, the government would have made these available to all, regardless of capitalist greed. Under such conditions, possibly by the end of the decade the disease would have been brought under control, and would not have posed the grave threat to social stability that it does now, affecting far fewer people and harming them less. Indeed, the disease would have provided an opportunity to promote non-sexism along with non-racism, which was only partly grasped by the South African government in the real world.

In which case, from the 1990s, South Africa, with its reduced disease and crime burden, full employment and rapid, sustainable, widely-shared economic growth, could have pursued an agenda of further reducing its output of carbon dioxide and methane, of recycling manufactured material to a great extent, and of promoting an informed and cooperative society which could serve as a model for the twenty-first century.

We did almost none of that, of course. But there is no reason why we cannot make a start now.

Master Class with Gordon and Jacob.

(The scene is the top floor of nos. 10-11 Downing St, now converted into the office of the former Chancellor of the Exchequer. It is an immense space, chill and gloomy as the former Chancellor himself, floored with tiles of artificial Carrera marble. The ceiling bears an unfinished fresco depicting the victories of NuLabour in Pristina, Kabul and Basra, with space left to depict victory over the Enemy Within. In a corner of the otherwise unfurnished space is Gordon Brown’s titanic desk made of cheap tropical hardwood, cluttered with bric-a-brac and gobbledygook. On the wall behind the desk is a gigantic gilded emblem of NuLabour’s symbol, a fat bundle of straw — symbolising the straw men mobilised to justify their policies — wrapped around the handle of a mighty sink plunger symbolising the need to clear away obstructions in the pipe of progress such as dole scroungers, asylum seekers and Islamofascists of every stripe. Below the emblem is a full-length mirror. Brown himself sits at the desk on Kaiser Wilhelm’s old saddle-chair, wearing the uniform of Her Majesty’s Death-to-other-people’s-Head Hussars, but has wearily flung aside the cast-polystyrene pickelhaube. His head is with difficulty fitted into his hands.The door opens, revealing the specially tiny padded-walled lift which the previous occupant of this room inhabited for the last months of his career in Downing Street. Emerging from the lift is Dr. Jacob Zuma, President-for-life of the ANC and Father of his People, or at least of a spectacular number of them one way or another. He wears a cheap knock-off of a black Armani suit and golfing shoes, on which, perceiving the polished nature of the marble, he ecstatically slides until he fetches up with a crash against Brown’s desk, knocking Brown’s semen-encrusted inflatable Ayn Rand doll flying.

ZUMA (cheerily): Molo, uMnumzana.

BROWN (wearily): Away with ye, man. I am developing policies and must not be disturbed, lest the very fabric of our beloved nation-state be unravelled by those who would seek to undermine and deride us. Wait a minute — this isn’t the Zambibwe meeting, is it?

ZUMA: I suppose so. At least, that’s what Kgalema said it was.

BROWN: Who? Never mind. Sit down. Oh, sorry, there’s no chair. Military Intelligence say furniture is a key security threat, you see.

ZUMA: I am so happy to be here! I am prepared to stand forever in the presence of my Lord! (Rests an ample buttock on the corner of the desk, which, being British-built, creaks alarmingly.)

BROWN: Attaboy. (He fumbles on the desk till he discovers a large pair of cheap sunglasses, which he dons and his face at once becomes an immobile, beaming mask, and reads from a sheet of fax.) Orright, Morg baby, here’s the score. Don’s crowd want the power plants — they’re willing to pay every one of you a hundred. Larry and them want the railways — they’re offering seventy-five. Stephen says he can take the Beitbridge and Bulawayo roads — you have to build the toll plazas and you get ten for that. BAe want a look at your Chinese fighters, apparently in case there’s any stuff the Yanks haven’t given our boffins. And British Airways want Zimbabwe Airways out of operation in a month or you all get your legs broken. Kapish?

ZUMA: I think you have the wrong man, boss. (Idly, he examines a golden pen lying on the desk, and pockets it.)

BROWN: You’re not Morgan Change-the-Guy? (Takes off sunglasses, peers.) No, you’re not. Who the hell are you? How did you get in here?

ZUMA: The name is Jacob. Jacob and sons. And Baas amaMilibandi said I could come in.

BROWN: Oh, God, I forgot. You’re our man in South Africa. (Long pause.) So, um, how are things at home?

ZUMA: Very fine. (Long pause.)

BROWN: Um, did you have a nice trip?

ZUMA: Very nice. (Long pause.)

BROWN: Look, could you please go and sit somewhere else until this is all over?

ZUMA: All right, master. Baas amaMilibandi gave me my statement to read on the steps. I go to memorise it. (He skates away across the floor and, as he skates in circles, begins to read in a dreamy but loud voice.) “The appalling, atrocious humani — tarian crisis . . . The horrendous, horrific totali — tarian dicta — torship. . . The grotesque, gross vio — lation of basic human rights . . . The inept, incoherent mis — management of a once productive economy . . . The cowardly, corrupt refusal of the broader community to take manda — tory action . . . “

BROWN (bursting to his feet): Stop it! Stop it, you — you tinpot Third World bully-boy! I won’t have you criticising Her Majesty’s government in those offensive terms! We have laws in this country, you know!

ZUMA: Sorry, boss. Just reading my speech.

BROWN (falling back): Of course. Of course. I’m — sensitive today. (His head falls on the desk with an echoing sound. Zuma skates closer.) You would not believe what I have to put up with! Denigration! Disinformation! Downright lies! Smear campaigns! God, it’s awful! And if we didn’t control all the newspapers and the BBC, some of these things might even get out into the public eye, and Heaven knows what would happen to my personal popularity index!

ZUMA: Is that good?

BROWN: Absolutely fabulous. Holding steady at eighteen percent approval. As the New Statesman will point out next week, that makes me the most popular Prime Minister named Gordon Brown since records started being kept. No mean feat, you know.

ZUMA: Ninety-eight percent of South Africans want me to be President of South Africa now. One hundred and one percent do not want me to go on trial. e-TV proved this with computers –

BROWN: I don’t want to hear any more bad news! Especially I don’t want to hear any sentence with the word “trial” in it! (A Dalek rolls out of the lift bearing a tray with two tumblers, one glass containing 25-year-old Laphroaig, one plastic containing Yakisuki Caramel-and-Ethanol Imperial Salute. Owing to a programming error it rolls up to Zuma, who takes the Laphroaig. Brown swills back the Yakisuki at a single gulp, chokes, drops the glass.)

ZUMA: Are we finished yet?

BROWN: No! No! I have not yet begun to fight! Northern is the Rock on which I shall build my church, and if I must spend every pound in every working-class pocket in Britain, I will defend the rights of bankers! Why, the City is founded upon the unassailable strength of the pound, and if it were to tremble, what would happen? We’d end up having to spend filthy foreign money covered in silly pictures of people who can’t even speak English! Only a step from there and the gypsies and the pickaninnies would be dancing around my front door pushing excrement through the letterbox! That cannot be tolerated! Sooner than that, I would have to increase the term of detention without trial again! In fact, I might just do that anyway, on principle!

ZUMA: I meant, are we finished talking yet?

BROWN: Well, frankly, I hope so. I’m tired listening to you rabbiting on endlessly about your problems and troubles, your horrible diseases and your poverty and your homelessness and your overpopulation — don’t you people in the Third World ever think to wear condoms? (Zuma blushes invisibly.) It’s about bloody time you started thinking about others instead of yourselves. What about us in Britain? Do you have any idea how much trouble people like me have getting home through the traffic on the average afternoon, in constant danger of having the chauffeur say something impolite? How I long for the day when we will have executive jump-jet pads on every major building in the Square Mile! But what do you know or care about that, you who lounge in your huts in the sun swilling corn beer! What do you know about stress, about high blood pressure, about the gruelling struggle against global terrorism which I must fight night and day without rest or pause or privilege!

ZUMA: I am so sorry.

BROWN: Speaking of which, does your country want any arms? There’s be something in it for you, if you do. And you never know when you won’t need a Challenger tank or a Warrior troop carrier or an Interrogator mobile torture chamber.

ZUMA: That would be nice. Cash only, please. I have had trouble with bank drafts.

BROWN (cheering up): Of course! Always a pleasure to help. Between ourselves, we are going to sell all three things to Zambibwe when everything’s sorted out there, so if I were you, I’d start buying early, before they come over the border and start stealing your women.

ZUMA: We are in agreement. Just like in the press statement. (He looks over Brown’s desk, but he has already stuffed almost everything portable and shiny into the bulging inner pockets of his ill-fitting jacket.)

BROWN: Then bugger off. I need to be alone with my thoughts. They need a lot of room, believe me. (Zuma skates to the door of the padded lift, which opens; a Dalek comes out carrying a tray of caviar and cucumber sandwiches, which Zuma appropriates, stuffing two into his mouth as he steps into the lift. The bewildered Dalek begins to roll about in circles, emitting a hum of overload. Brown meanwhile stands up, slips his right hand into his coat at the third button, thumb on the outside, and glares at himself in the mirror.) Alone again. Always alone. We statesmen have a high and lonely destiny. But, praise be, I have resolved the hideous human rights crisis of Southern Africa. If George doesn’t mind, that is. Thank God for British ingenuity.

(The Dalek explodes.)

The Word of the Bond.

Wrap you in his arms, tell you that you’ve been a good boy,

Rekindle all those dreams that took you a lifetime to destroy,

Reach deep into the hole, heal your shrinking soul,

But there won’t be a single thing-a that you can do . . .

He’s a god, he’s a ghost, he’s a man, he’s a cool dude,

They’re whispering his name through this disappearing land,

But hidden in his coat is a red right hand.

– Nick Cave, “Red Right Hand”.

 

After studying Commanding Heights and Community Control, the natural assumption must be that Patrick Bond can’t possibly have anything valid to say about South African political economy. His misreading of reality led him to prescribe absurd quack remedies for the country, which fortunately were never adopted. His misreading seems to have changed little, if at all.

Yet that doesn’t make Bond a worthless commentator. Noam Chomsky is an anarchist, a political posture which seems strikingly unrealistic, however much he might reminisce about what the Catalan anarchists might have accomplished if they hadn’t been squashed in 1937. (They would certainly have been squashed in 1939, when Barcelona surrendered to the Falangists.) But Chomsky is worth reading because he provides vast amounts of information and is an extremely acute and ho