Reconsidering the Elite Transition Model.

Theorists such as Patrick Bond and Dale McKinley have identified the transition from apartheid to non-racial democracy in South Africa as an “elite transition” (Bond’s words). That is, power was handed over from one elite to another elite without reference to the broad mass of the people. Bond and McKinley, and to a great extent others who share their Trotskyite politics and funding (such as Dennis Brutus and Ashwin Desai), feel that this makes the whole process tainted, and that it needs to be started essentially from scratch. To put it bluntly, they believe that the liberation of South Africa was a mistake, because it was done wrongly, and by the wrong people.

There is undeniably a degree of truth to this. Before 1990, South Africa was ruled by a political elite who drew their authority from the white minority, and an economic elite who composed the great bourgeoisie class of the white minority. After 1994, South Africa was ruled by a political elite who drew their authority from the black majority, and an economic elite who composed the great bourgeoisie class, and which was predominantly drawn from the white minority, though with a small proportion of blacks among them. Presented like this, it does not seem a very great change.

On the other hand, it is difficult to think of a change of government which does not, by these standards, entail an elite transition. France in 1792? Russia in 1917? China in 1949? Cambodia in 1975? Nicaragua in 1979? All cases where an elite collapsed, was thrown out, or surrendered, and handed power to another elite. Seen in this light, South Africa’s “elite transition” becomes simply the norm for either revolution or evolution. It is thus slightly odd that Bond, McKinley and their followers are so strongly opposed to it. After all, few would claim that those transitions led to no real changes in their societies!

However, implicit in the “elite transition” model is another claim; that there was an alternative to the elite transition. Hence, in South Africa between 1989 and 1994, it would have been possible to have a transition which was not elite; a transition to a different kind of society. Bond and McKinley believe, broadly, in socialism and indeed in communism, so presumably they believe that this objective could have been attained at this time, and that this was obvious to see at the time. The contention of the “elite transition” model is that the forces seeking to overthrow the apartheid state deliberately rejected this possibility and betrayed the people of South Africa in order to hold power in their own hands — or else, perhaps (this is strongly suggested by Bond) to become willing servants of a nefarious capitalist class.

This is a powerful accusation. It lies at the root of the attacks on the post-apartheid South African governments made by the international Left. It forms a basis for a broad-based attack on the ANC which is widely endorsed by the capitalist oligarchy in South Africa, whose media devote a good deal of time to accusing the ANC of corruption and of wallowing in wealth while others starve. (Naturally this only applies to ANC members, predominantly black ones; the business press devotes little time to pointing out the enormous wealth of white capitalists as opposed to the unemployed or underemployed black majority.) Hence we are in danger of forgetting that the accusation, upon which so much is based, still deserves to be studied. Is it altogether true?

It is probably shallow and simplistic to point out that refusal to participate in the transition was not a credible political option. If the ANC had not returned when it was unbanned, the UDF would probably not have been able to sustain itself alone. Other, more opportunistic parties would have taken the opportunity to put themselves forward as potential negotiating partners for the apartheid state, and judging by subsequent events they would have been corrupt and subservient partners.

Meanwhile, if the ANC had returned but had refused to negotiate, it would have been in a similarly difficult position. The terms of return of the leadership were confusing at first; the apartheid secret police and military wanted to arrest a number of the leaders and their position had to be protected through negotiations. Without this, the ANC would have faced the humiliation of not being able to protect its members. This happened anyway with the Operation Vula disaster, but that was at least a manageable disaster, for by then the ANC was in a stronger position than at the start of the process. While it could not protect its members, it could at least demand that they be released, point out that it was already negotiating, and thus turn the debate around from one concerning the ANC’s weakness into one concerning the apartheid state’s brutality.

So it had to negotiate. Having to negotiate, it had to give up the armed struggle. There was no moral or political basis in pursuing the armed struggle, which was purely a propaganda activity, in parallel with the political struggle. The armed struggle contributed nothing except publicity stunts. It was not going to overthrow the state. However, while it existed it was a standing challenge to the ANC’s bona fides as a negotiating partner. (Meanwhile the Inkatha movement’s armed struggle was not a problem for it, since it was not involved in the negotiations, and the PAC’s armed struggle was not a problem for it since it was secretly in alliance with the apartheid government.)

But in that case, how could the ANC’s eventual decision to negotiate a democratic election be seen as a betrayal of the people?

The issue is, surely, the terms under which the decision took place. The problem which people like Bond raise, and which is echoed by people like John Pilger and Naomi Klein, is that the ANC failed to demand that South Africa be a socialist state. It failed to insist that before the elections happened, the whites should be stripped of their wealth and the capitalists be deprived of the commanding heights of the economy. There are other, trivial, complaints made by others, but this is the gist of the problem. Is this a realistic criticism? Was this a possible accomplishment in the negotiations in mid-1993 which followed the murder of Chris Hani?

The ANC commanded the support of a large membership. However, this membership was not in itself committed to socialism, nor to revolutionary struggle. It was respectful of the Communist Party because the Communist Party had fought for liberation during the darkest days of apartheid, and because the apartheid state hated the Communist Party. Nevertheless, the ANC’s membership was, if anything, doubtful about socialism; it was dominated by petit-bourgeois and tribal-traditionalist attitudes, and saturated with fundamentalist Christianity. Adopting vigorous anti-capitalist measures would have weakened its support base — no doubt not crucially in itself, but significantly.

On the other side, however, the NP had enormous advantages over the ANC. It had armed forces which the ANC did not possess. It had powerful forces to its right which were in hidden alliance with it — the “Freedom Alliance” — and which it could use as bargaining-chips. It also enjoyed the support of the masters of the South African economy. Its electoral support-base was substantial; it enjoyed majority support among whites, and could plausibly hope for majority support among indians and coloureds (as the puppet parties which it had set up in those communities disintegrated) and possibly hope for some african support, particularly in homeland bureaucracies. Most importantly, perhaps, it commanded the support of the international community. The purported distaste for the apartheid regime expressed by Western governments through nominal sanctions had vanished; De Klerk was a welcomed guest everywhere, and sanctions had been lifted even though apartheid remained in force.

It might be asked why De Klerk had engaged in negotiations at all. The reason was that in 1988-9 South Africa was in a crisis which plainly stemmed from the conflict between government and ANC. The government had been growing weaker and the ANC stronger, and it seemed sensible to begin negotiations while he could still negotiate from a position of strength.

This had not greatly changed by 1993; the economy was weak and weakening. Large parts of the country were in a chaotic condition, largely because of government homeland and internal destabilization policies. The simple act of lifting the ban on organisations and negotiating with them (albeit in bad faith) had not actually solved any problems. De Klerk, rightly, had no faith in the support of his new friends in the West. Restoring the ban on the ANC and rejecting the ideal of democracy would merely return the country to the crisis conditions of five years earlier — or possibly even worse conditions. Hence De Klerk and the NP could see advantages in making a further, even more radical change — to begin negotiations in (relatively) good faith about the introduction of democracy.

This, however, was a genuinely drastic issue. It entailed the likelihood that the NP would lose political power and the ANC gain it. This was completely anathema to two generations of whites who had been taught that the ANC were absolute evil, that africans broke everything they touched, and that white leadership was essential for South African progress. It was also perceived as the final betrayal of the military and police forces who had fought bloodily for three decades to prevent anything like this from happening in South Africa. The NP had split in 1983 over the comparatively trivial issue of granting a token vote to the coloured and indian minorities; what would happen if the real vote were granted to the black majority? De Klerk was not an absolute dictator; he had to persuade his party and his constituency, and all needed reassurance. They also needed to be panicked into the notion that if this were not done, something worse would be likely to follow.

If they were not panicked, De Klerk might be overthrown, in which case South Africa would probably fall into the hands of right-wing politicians and generals who were already active in the “Freedom Front”. These were the unimaginative “securocrats” who had overseen Botha’s State of Emergency with mass detention, political murder, and the mechanical “hearts and minds” tactics of the U.S. model of National Security State. It was only five years earlier that they had lost power, and they wanted it back.

What if the ANC/SACP/COSATU had presented the NP with a non-negotiable demand that the draft Constitution for South Africa had to have socialism in its Bill of Rights, that the NP had to assist in nationalising all the major industries and companies and expropriating all the largest private properties in the country before an election could be held, in order to redistribute this wealth to the african majority? The answer is very simple; the NP would have rejected this and the ANC could have done nothing to press its demand. All that the ANC could do would have been feeble public protests (along the lines of the trivial but much-publicised protests after Chris Hani’s murder) and, perhaps, have blocked the holding of elections.

In this case, however, the ANC would certainly have begun losing significant support. While many black South Africans were not averse to socialism, they would certainly have been angry that this socialist mirage was being used to keep them from the franchise. As the ANC’s support began to drift away, the Inkatha movement, overtly anti-socialist and being used as a death-squad by the apartheid state, would probably have been the chief beneficiary.

The process would then have been a stalemated race between several factors. On one hand, De Klerk’s support-base would have waned as he proved unable to even deliver the potential nightmare of a democratic election. On the other hand, the pro-socialist camp within the ANC would have lost support as it intransigently refused to accept democracy. Meanwhile, anti-ANC forces in the wider community would be gaining strength, and anti-De Klerk forces in the white community would also be gaining strength. In the mean time, the South African economy was starting to crumble as the cost of debt servicing soared. (The ANC’s endorsement of revolutionary socialism would certainly have sent capital flying abroad and the rand and the stock exchange would have tumbled, exaggerating the problems.)

The most likely consequence of this would have been, ultimately, that the white right would have cut the Gordian knot and got rid of De Klerk, seeing him as the main obstacle to progress, and taken a harder line with the ANC; after which, the pro-socialist camp within the ANC would probably have been forced out and a more right-wing element brought in. Some time in the mid-1990s the two right-wing forces would have negotiated a democratic settlement.

However, this would have come to pass several years after it did in reality, and in conditions considerably less favourable for the ANC than they were in 1994. In all probability the ANC would have won the election with a less than decisive majority which would have weakened its position to bring about post-election change. The whole mood of the country would have been soured. And, of course, ten thousand or so more people would have died in the Inkatha bloodbath, and the economy would have been appallingly weak. It’s an odious prospect which this anticipates, but a realistic one.

The alternative — a negotiation to socialism — could only have been possible if the ANC had been in a strong position in 1993. Instead, it was in a weak position. The whole transition was a kind of confidence trick in which the ANC had to coax the apartheid state into surrendering. It worked very well.

Another Weary, Turgid, Foul Election Rigmarole.

They are having a Presidential election in the United States. You may have heard. Why do they bother even going through the motions? Why does anyone even bother showing up?

The record of the past twenty years is discouraging. In 1988 the choice was between a feeble cipher with a pretty but alcoholic wife, and a scion of the American nobility named Bush; the aristocrat won, and proceeded to get his country into two murderous aggressive wars. (His internal policy was, however, no more repressive than that of his predecessor.) In 1992 Bush was challenged by a manifestly dishonest philanderer who was also a scion of the American nobility named Clinton; the philanderer won, and massively intensified internal repression, especially political repression — although the economy grew, and although the poor gained no benefit they told themselves it was all right.

In 1996 Clinton was challenged by an opponent named Dole who junked all his principles to become acceptable to the right wing, and who had a reputation for psychological instability; Dole lost, whereupon Clinton junked all his principles, adopted more right-wing policies, and got the country into some more wars (one of which, the proxy war in the Congo, killed about three million people). In 2000, Clinton’s Vice-President ran, a corporate gasbag and scion of the American nobility named Gore.

Gore was distinguished for having had a book ghostwritten for him about how everyone had to do their utmost to save the environment, after which he became the second most powerful politician in the world and did bugger-all to save the environment, so everyone knew what principles he had. He was running against a scion of the American nobility named Bush — playboy son of the ‘88 winner — who was a recovering drug and alcohol addict who had never held a proper job and, like Gore, was a front-man for big oil companies. As a result the election was a dead-heat, although Gore’s party threw the contest (probably anticipating a bad recession, which indeed materialised) allowing Bush to take over.

Bush started some more wars, eventually killing almost as many people as Clinton had, and also introduced some even more repressive laws. Detention without trial had been on the statute books for half a century, but Bush made it respectable. Political assassination had been made nominally illegal in the 1970s, but Bush restored it to favour and also gave it his full support, taking personal responsibility for the murders, which he obviously enjoyed.

Since the country appeared to be on the road to a very dangerous future (Bush was even flirting with starting wars with nuclear powers) it seemed vital to get rid of him, so in 2004 the opposition put forward a man married to a scion of the American nobility (the relevant family was the Heinz dynasty, though the man was called Kerry), a flabby-looking figure who had helped found the Vietnam Veterans Against The War, but now abandoned all those principles to run on the basis that he had fought in that war, which retrospectively became a Good Thing. Kerry was also distinguished by having been so stupid that he had tried to investigate the Bank of Credit and Commerce International without apparently realising that it was a CIA front for funding international terrorism. So he lost — although some observers claim that he won; it was close enough that, as in the previous election, fraud could well have played a part.

What conclusions can we draw from this sorry history? One is that there was extraordinary continuity between the two allegedly opposed parties over the twenty years of Bush-Clinton-Bush. Aggression abroad and repression at home, together with ever-growing social inequality and endless gifts to the rich — that’s basically about it. Everybody hates trade unions and foreigners. Everybody loves outsourcing jobs overseas. There are differences in ways people behave and sometimes in the ways they express themselves, but these are mostly cosmetic.

Another is an extraordinary dependence on a few families. Clinton bears the same name as a nineteenth-century Vice-President. Gore was a long-standing political family. The Bushes come from a huge corporate family. Now, in 2008, there is admittedly some oddity; a black man named Obama, which doesn’t sound like a scion, running against a woman — the wife of a Clinton, as Kerry was the huzband of a Heinz. (Neither of them has any real policy, however.) And McCain and Huckabee and Romney, who were the Republican alternatives (and whose policies are rather disturbing; Huckabee and Romney are religious fundamentalists of extreme stamp; McCain has been distinguished from the rest by his opposition to routinely torturing captives, although he has abandoned these radical principles), are also outsiders in a sense; so this is the first time in a long, long while that one of the Imperial Families is not going to be running things. It really is a bit like the Roman Republic; it’s rare that a “new man” gets ahead of a patrician.

All this seems to suggest that American politics is a whole lot less democratic than it looks. Which, no doubt, helps explain all that continuity, and the well-founded arguments that America is really a one-party state. It is, however, worth asking how in the world all this is justified to the American people, who are solemnly and incessantly assured that they live in freedom in the greatest state in the universe. Why can’t they see through the facade, and if they do, why don’t they drag all those offensive leaky sacks of dysentery they call politicians down the Washington Mall by the ears?

Let’s consider the way in which Presidential candidates are chosen, for it is quite weird. Firstly, although candidates have to belong to either the Republican or Democratic parties to have any hope of winning, neither of these parties is a party in the conventional sense of the word — an organisation dedicated to a particular, coherent, political ideology and constituency, like the Conservative Party in Britain, the Communist Party in Russia or the Democratic Party in South Africa. Instead, these parties are amorphous entities for channelling funding and the opinions of their functionaries.

Both parties extent across disturbingly broad ideological spectra, although one can usually say that the Republicans are to the right of the Democrats (but there is a lot of political cross-dressing). The parties have no real leaders; they have chairs, but the chairs are not ever likely to seek political power. Structures are decentralised and disunified. At state level the parties may have constitutions (Texas has a famously fascistic Republican constitution) but this has no wider meaning (if it has a meaning at all — the constitutions are usually ignored).

So how do they choose their Presidential candidates? Not from the leadership of the Parties, because there is no such leadership which swings any political weight. Instead, at state level people have their names put on the ballot, on the basis of relatively small support-bases. Once this is done, there is a state-level poll, the “primary” to determine which of the people on the list will gain delegates for the eventual Party conference.

Think about how that works in practice. In theory, anybody could be on the ballot, so it sounds democratic. However, the people turning out to vote are registered Party members, and usually only a small number of them in comparison to the state’s electorate. As a result, the Party has a lot of potential control over who votes for who. It’s rare that a complete maverick squeaks past; in most states, only the approved candidates get anywhere.

And who are the approved candidates? The ones who have plenty of support in campaigns. Which means, the ones who have money to make and buy media advertisements and produce other publicity material and travel around a lot. This requires an enormous amount of money which has to be raised individually by the candidate. As a result, the candidates have to sell themselves to people who have that money, before they can begin to sell themselves to their electorates. In other words, the ruling class gets to pre-approve the candidacies. That’s pretty outrageous, but nobody in the United States seems to notice.

Then, of course, the candidates in each primary are pursuing essentially the same policies — of course, because they are in the same party. They may have real problems with their party’s policies, they may want to change them — but they can’t criticise the party, as that would potentially alienate voters. So in primary campaigns it is almost inevitable that issues are discarded. Instead, what matters is the presentation of the candidate.

This also means that the candidate’s image has to be clean. This is difficult, because every politician is a crook to some extent. Hence every candidate needs an enormous legal fund for self-defense, or at least stalling or covering up. The candidate also has to have a powerful research agency digging up dirt on potential competitors — not necessarily to use, but to hold as a deterrent against the competitors revealing dirt against them. Of course, talk radio and trash TV can be used to spread lies about candidates, lies which are invariably retailed by the established media. (Sometimes, embarrassingly, the lies turn out to be true.) If you don’t have plenty of money you have no defense against smearing.

Public relations trumps everything else — which is also splendid for the ruling class because it again means that the one hiring the best (or most expensive) public relations agency has the best prospect of winning, another capitalist hurdle against non-affluent candidates appearing. But all this means that for a large part of the campaigning season, nothing of any substance gets said — instead, the candidates blather about nebulosities like “Change!” [in what, not stated] or “Experience!” [with what, not stated] or “Straight Talk!” [about what, not stated]. It seems like a deliberate effort to humiliate the American people by emphasising just how appalling the American political system has become.

And this is how the finalist is chosen. By the end of the process there is usually an anointed leader who comes to the Party Convention with enough delegates to win fairly easily. Occasionally it takes longer. Sometimes someone thinks he has everything sewn up and then the other potential candidates combine against him. But mainly, on the basis of nonsensical rhetoric, dishonest public relations and under the almost total control of big business and party machines, a leader is chosen who will contest the national election. And then, of course, the bullshit really starts, in endeavouring to anoint some shallow, subservient sleazebag with the simultaneous mantles of Washington and Lincoln.

Is it any wonder that such a leader is invariably someone you wouldn’t want to be trapped in a lift with? Fortunately, at least during the campaigning period you don’t have any danger of that; the Secret Service, the Presidential bodyguards, make sure that nobody gets into a lift with any potential candidate. But after the campaign season is over, most of those candidates go back defeated into their normal lives.

What lives, in the name of Ahura Mazda, what lives can such hideous excrescences possibly lead?

Supposing South African socialism? (I)

It appears likely (though the Creator would be happy to be wrong in this) that there is now no actually existing political organisation devoted to promoting socialism in South Africa. Let’s pretend that we agree that this is a bad thing. How could one possibly be set up?

The usual South African way for setting up a political party is for some very large organisation to fill a grain silo with hundred-rand notes and hand this over to some definitely dishonest political hack, for the purpose of temporarily fooling the public into supporting him or her. This was, more or less, what happened with the African Christian Democratic Party, the United Democratic Movement and the Independent Democrats. Note that the very names of the parties stink of corruption and desperation. They are marketing tools, not political signboards.

Obviously, a real Socialist Party will not be in any danger of any large organisation giving it money. No large organisations exist in South Africa with any sympathy to socialism. On the other hand, a real Socialist Party will be in big danger of being given money to pretend to be socialist; for the purpose of drawing left-wing support away from the ANC and thus giving more power to right-wing parties whose agendas large organisations actually support. This must be avoided at all costs. Hence it will be inadvisable to start, as other politicians with less to lose do, by going around big businesses with a hat held out and a signboard, MANSION, DRUG HABIT AND POLITICAL PARTY LOGO TO SUPPORT.

There is also a problem with going around the left asking for volunteers. A few years ago that might have seemed like a good idea, but today there are plainly problems. For one thing, many of the leftist political parties and organisations appear to be irredeemably corrupt and therefore a lot of their membership must be corrupt too.

Specifically, what seems to have happened is that in many of these parties the older active membership is devoted to the existence of the party rather than to the values and ideology which the party was set up to serve. Therefore, when the party abandons that ideology and they must choose, they unhesitatingly choose the party. Meanwhile, the newer members have often joined, the way one joins any other secret society, in pursuit of money, power and status; access to corporate information and bribes. These people often sound very impressive — they have learned their jargon parrot-fashion and can deliver it in style — but have absolutely no commitment to any cause, least of all the truth.

It would be dangerous to say that no member of a current “left” party could ever be trusted in a genuine socialist party, but it is probably true that such people should be viewed with deep suspicion.

So this means that a Socialist Party would have to start from scratch with no money worth mentioning. That is a tall order. How could it be accomplished?

If it were possible to gather together a hundred leftist activists, preferably experienced, junior in their organisations, and disillusioned, it would probably be possible to begin something. The object would be to assemble some idea of how much left-wing support could be obtained anywhere, and how it could be made use of in practice. Then it would be possible to try to draw on that support and obtain some membership for the proposed party.

A lot of those activists would probably be academics. In consequence, a portion of that membership — initially, perhaps as much as half of it — would probably be drawn from universities, mainly students. This would be a dangerous temptation. Students are passionate and have, relatively, a lot of free time. For this reason, however, they unbalance an organisation, making it appear both more radical and more energetic than it actually is. (Also students tend to be short-term thinkers, and a Socialist Party would have to be in the game for the very long haul indeed.)

Therefore, the organisations set up on campuses would have to be very tightly-structured to maintain discipline. Discipline within a Socialist Party would have to be very carefully monitored; any public indiscipline could damage the party’s image, any private indiscipline could lead to conflict and splits. However, with care, the campus activists could be used predominantly off-campus, for door-to-door work.

The object of this would be to establish a party presence in areas known to be sympathetic to leftist views; to find people interested in socialism and unsympathetic with the leadership and style of the present “left” parties. Therefore the methods would have to be careful and non-confrontational. There would be no denunciation of other parties, apart from observing that they were not doing their jobs as well as a potential Socialist Party would do so. Meanwhile, expense would have to be pared to a bare minimum; one would spread cheap fliers, go door-to-door assessing sympathies and obtaining possible recruits, and gradually move from there to house-meetings at which members might be recruited.

This would be tricky. Most parties are unhappy about other parties moving in on their turf. This is another reason why it would be inadvisable to be too confrontational. It would be bad for the party if recruiters were intimidated or even assaulted. On the other hand, many of the biggest parties have almost given up on left-wing recruiting and therefore it might be possible to get at least a small membership in place without any fracas erupting — and once the membership was there it would be possible for it to protect itself.

One advantage and disadvantage of an initial dependence on students is that many, probably most, of the students would come from bourgeois areas. Socialism is not necessarily unattractive to the bourgeoisie, at least in theory, and recruitment in these areas would certainly be possible. However, bourgeois socialists often tend to skew their ideology drastically towards overly theorised and highly authoritarian structures which would not be healthy for the organisation of a Socialist Party. Therefore it would be vital for recruiters to get out into working-class areas.

Suppose that this worked. Suppose that the party established a membership of a thousand people, with plenty of potential for growth. It would then be possible to set up the party as a more formalised structure. Until this point it would have been a temporary structure, running largely on donations from the self-appointed leadership and enthusiasm from the rank and file. However, the experience of setting up the membership would undoubtedly have shown who were the strong, and who the weak, figures in the party. Thus it would be possible to hold a national congress to approve the Socialist Party’s constitution and rules of governance and to elect national and provincial leaders.

The party would be largely supported by membership fees. The old SACP rules that one had to pay a certain proportion of one’s income into the Party coffers were sensible ones; thus some money could be obtained. Expenditure would have to be kept as low as possible; you would probably have an unpaid Executive in order to have money to pay organisers and clerical staff, and these organisers and clerical staff would have to have a lot of volunteer support. The bulk of the money would go towards hiring and equipping a few offices and providing stationery and costs for a few public meetings. (You gotta have banners, of course.) It might well be possible that some relatively wealthy enthusiasts could chip in more money, but initially, with only a thousand members, administrative support would be strictly limited.

You might ask how it is that other leftist organisations manage to accomplish so much more? The answer is outside funding; the SACP is largely funded by COSATU, while many of the Trotskyite groupings enjoy foreign funding (and some pretend to be academic research bodies, tapping into another source of external funding). This is unsustainable practice in keeping with the general opportunism of these organisations’ current leaders.

But again, if membership could be made to grow reasonably fast, it’s not impossible to hope for ten thousand members. That would actually put the Socialist Party up there with the SACP in terms of real membership. The Socialist Party would not be vanguardist — that is, it would not be a tight-knit elite of whom total sacrifice was expected — but would rather be more democratic and flexible. It could be easy to make it attractive; many members need only be expected to sacrifice a couple of evenings a week and a modest amount of money. (If 10 000 members coughed up an average of R50 a month, that would probably see the party through, financially.) At this point the Socialist Party could also try to expand a little into small towns in poorer provinces such as Limpopo, North-West and Eastern Cape; the danger of remaining an urban party would be as great as remaining a bourgeois party. Let’s not overvalue the proletariat!

Now, what would the Socialist Party do with ten thousand active members? Let’s say that a thousand of those are activists who devote a lot of their time to building the Party, honing its organisation or its ideology, and so on. Some of these are ensuring that the Party’s records are continually up to date and that every possible opportunity is taken to respond effectively to events, whether real or media-generated. Nine thousand are prepared to devote a lot of their time at least over a short period to helping the Party win an election. For this is the object of the exercise: to get somewhere in a national election.

In a national election, there are, say, 12 million voters. The object would be to get 600 000 of those to vote for the Socialist Party. If 10 000 members each visited 1 000 potential voters over a month (and that’s less than 40 visits a day, per member, although members would probably canvass in pairs or even larger numbers — still, it’s not impossible) as many people would have been covered as were likely to vote. It’s very likely that, assuming the canvassers were well prepared and well briefed (and also, of course, well-disciplined and well-supported), a lot of possible voters would be found. Half a million? Possibly. In a time of intense work like this, however, it might also be possible to boost membership at least temporarily and make canvassing even more effective. (A special category of temporary, or candidate, member might be established for this purpose.) As a result the election could serve for long-term recruitment as well as for violent bursts of canvassing which leave the member exhausted at the end of it.

But, perhaps, happy. Because South Africa has proportional representation, there is no deposit to be lost; there is no capitalist plot against parties of the poor. Hence the Socialist Party would be restrained in its success only by the extent and energy of its membership, and the validity of its message. (Assume for the moment that it has a good message.) There is, thus, no real reason why it should be impossible, even without the support of the media and against the hostility of every other political party (although some of the right-wing parties might give it a soft time, hoping that it would draw votes away from the ANC, and the ANC is decreasingly a grassroots organisation) to get half a million votes. About 5% of the electorate. Enough for a number of MPs and Members of Provincial Legislatures. Enough to get the party’s voice across, and to get the party access to state funding so that in the next election it would do better. Unless the party split, or was co-opted, or corrupted, or any of a dozen other problems — if it could negotiate the dangers arising from success, there would be a real left-wing alternative on the South African political scene again.

But this is a pipe-dream, isn’t it?

Oh Joy, Another Crisis of Capitalism!

The Dow Jones averages of the New York Stock Exchange dipped well below 12 000 yesterday. This means they have fallen nearly 2 000 points since their last high, which is a fall of about 16%. This is a fairly significant fall, and it is being accompanied by (actually, driven by) a crisis of credit; namely, that many Americans can no longer afford to pay the interest on their debts, and many lending agencies are having difficulty finding the capital to meet their own obligations, so are making debt terms stringent, which ratchets up the problems for debtors. Since Americans are more in debt now than ever in history, and since the whole country is gigantically in debt via its enormous trade deficit, this looks like being quite a serious recession.

This is also very much a crisis of capitalism. In a planned economy (or even in a regulated economy, such as the United States had from the 1940s to the early 1970s) it would be possible to prevent people from getting into excessive debt in the first place — both individuals and lending agencies. It would also be possible to transfer money between sectors of the economy to resolve problems, instead of using crude and inefficient methods like interest rates (which in America are now lower than the inflation rate; banks are basically paying people to borrow money, an interesting light on the kind of profits they are making since if they were simply dependent on their usury charges they would all go broke). So this is happening because of capitalism, and it is not being sorted out because of capitalism (in both cases, because of that capitalism of a special type known as neoliberalism).

But should supporters of socialism really be dancing in the streets over this?

The trouble is that supporters of socialism have grown used to welcoming crises of capitalism. Indeed, we have grown used to anticipating such crises even when they do not exist, a practice which makes left-wing economists seem like very bad prophets. It’s worthwhile asking why we do this, and whether we ought to.

Crises of capitalism certainly serve to show that capitalism is not a perfect utopian system. In this sense their existence provides a valuable counterweight to capitalist propaganda. However, it is not actually necessary to wait until the stock exchange crashes before noticing that there is something wrong with capitalism. One has only to go to the slums and the depressed areas in any Western country and compare and contrast with the affluent areas, to recognise a problem. The vital statistics tell the same story of the harm caused by economic inequality. What is more, if one goes to the poor world, to which the Western countries have outsourced most of their greatest poverty, one can easily see that capitalism is a catastrophe; one need only drive down the N2 in Cape Town, past the airport, to recognise the problems of capitalism. We don’t actually need crises to know this.

What happens in a crisis is that the ruling class becomes vaguely worried and looks about for answers. Sometimes they look to leftists for answers (or, at least, for the appearance of doing something useful which can be disavowed later if it doesn’t work, or becomes unpopular with the elite). The notion that capitalism has problems becomes part of public debate, because the ruling class permits it, in order to let off some steam building up in the working class and middle class. But supporters of socialism should not be under the illusion that this means that a crisis of capitalism is bringing them power. All that this change in the discourse means, is that leftists are being invited to take part in the shadow-play that is capitalist political discussion; in short, leftists are being asked to help cover up the crisis of capitalism until such time as normalcy is established and the leftists can be thrown overboard. The gratitude which many leftists feel for this invitation helps show how desperate and how opportunistic many leftists really are.

Of course, Marx hinted that capitalism’s recurrent crises would grow in scope and stature until eventually the system became unmanageable. What he did not foresee, understandably, was that capitalists would establish a system of state capitalism, regulating the system wherever it was absolutely necessary and freeing it wherever it was possible to do so. This does not mean that Marx was altogether wrong — the crises do recur, and sometimes they are humdingers, but the system has become a great deal more resilient than Marx would have anticipated (and Marx had nothing but respect for the power of capitalism). Lenin and Trotsky thought that the First World War was the sign of a final crisis of capitalism which would bring world revolution, but they were wrong — although their ideas stuck around until 1929. Even many capitalists thought that the Great Depression proved Lenin and Trotsky right, but these capitalists were as wrong as Lenin and Trotsky had been. The system survived.

The notion has somehow got into the memestream that capitalist crises are good for the left. This is distinctly questionable. In 1929-39, admittedly, a liberal party with Keynesian inclinations took power in the United States, and since the Americans practically dictate the debate on all topics, this creates the illusion that capitalist crises are good for the left. The same period, however, saw the collapse of the Labour Party in Britain and the installation of the Conservatives for — eventually — fourteen years; in France a Leftist party came in in 1936 only to be chucked out two years later. We all know what wonders the Great Depression did for the Left in Germany and Austria, not to mention Japan (where the rise of quasi-fascist militarism was closely tied to the economic depression.

More recently, the great revolution of the 1973 economic crisis was the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile; the great revolution of the 1978 economic crisis was the overthrow of the Shah of Iran and his replacement by a theocracy. (Admittedly the latter crisis also saw the Sandinistas installed in Nicaragua, but that was a trivial event outside its political impact in the United States.) That economic crisis also saw conservative governments in power virtually everywhere in the West. The 1991-2 economic crisis returned the Tories to power in Britain; the 2000 economic crisis saw George W Bush installed in America. No, capitalist crises do not seem particularly good for the left.

Indeed, insofar as we can see any orthodox political parties as left-wing, the reverse often seems to be true. The last two major waves of British Labour victories have happened during times of economic success, for instance. However, it is probably true to say that there is no genuinely left-wing political party functioning in Western societies, and few enough outside Western societies. In South Africa, for instance, if you wish to repudiate the ANC and turn radically leftward, you can choose the Democratic Alliance (neoliberal corporate front with a strong lick of white racism), the Independent Democrats (ditto), the Inkatha Freedom Party (ditto, plus Zulu nationalism as well), the Freedom Front Plus (white racism with a strong lick of neoliberal corporatism) — and, er, that’s about it. The representation of genuinely left-wing parties amounts to a handful of municipal councillors. (Much the same is true in Britain, come to think of it.) In short, if another 1929 arrives, there is no socialist political party in a position to take what advantage they can of it.

Why is this so? Well, surely, one reason is that the capitalists do not appreciate the existence of an alternative to their system and have done their best to crush it. The state capitalism of the USSR, which at least called itself socialism, was gradually squeezed out of existence (with a good deal of help from the corruption and incompetence of the state capitalists themselves, who ironically eventually came up with a 1929-style crisis of state capitalism). The state capitalism of the PRC still exists, but almost nobody talks about it (least of all leftists, who often seem to treat China rather the way that pre-1972 American capitalists used to treat it). [A peripheral note on typographical errors; the Creator spelled "treat" as "trweat", which if consistently applied would make this weblog seem as if dwafted by Lord Peter Wimsey. But that would be wather to weveal the Cweator's owwigins, would it not? Haw-haw.]

Anyway, back to the predicament. Propaganda, right-wing entryism, corporate bribery and good old-fashioned repression have thrown socialism onto the rubbish-heap of history as of now. The fact that socialism is alive and could surely get off the rubbish-heap if it wanted to, is obviously the case, but strangely enough many socialists seem quite happy to lie there like inverted beetles, waving their limbs and making feeble squeaking noises. This, again, is because of a misinterpretation of the nature of capitalist crises:

What was said by Marx, boys, what did he porpend?

Waiting for the end, boys, waiting for the end.

This parody of Auden is not really a parody at all when applied to some contemporary leftists who are simply waiting, patiently, for the end of capitalism so that they can get on with building the socialist New Jerusalem. It provides a perfect excuse for sitting around and doing nothing. We must wait for the imperatives of History. It is rather like assuming that the ways of God are mysterious and therefore we can’t blame the Big Guy Up There if the infidels happen to slaughter a few hundred thousand/million/billion of Our Side. In the end it will all turn out right — because someone we never met wrote about it in a Holy Book we never read.

Now, this is flabby balderdash. No crisis of capitalism is ever going to be great enough to bring down the state which is geared towards serving the interests of capitalism. On the contrary, the crisis of capitalism merely makes the propaganda of the ideological apparatus more intense and makes the repressive apparatus more attractive to the guardians of the system. Nor is it possible to get rid of the bad guys by simply pointing to a few million unemployed and saying “See! Your system doesn’t work!”. The system works just fine for the bad guys and they are perfectly happy with it.

If the system is to be overthrown, it might be easier to overthrow it during a capitalist crisis. But that would only be true if, during the period when capitalism is at its most rampant (which is often when it is at its most self-confident and most tolerant of dissent) the socialists had built a structure strong enough to take advantage of it. This doesn’t happen by itself. It only happens if socialists know what they are doing and are able to say, even at the apparently best times of capitalism, that they have a way which is still better — which is, of course, true. But few socialists seem to waste time trying to demonstrate this, or to show exactly how true it is. Which is one reason why our New Jerusalem continues to recede before us like a mirage in the desert of reason.

The Merchants of Death and the Bodyguard of Lies

So much hogwash has been generated over the 1990s South African arms deal that you could probably float our submarines in it and have enough depth to practice crash-diving.

First, what was the problem? Why did we need arms? For that you have to go back to the apartheid era (sadly, this is a kind of mantra for anyone trying to understand current South Africa).

The apartheid state gradually militarised itself as everybody started hating it and some people started doing something practical about that hate.

In the twenty years following the 1957 Defense Act which legitimised conscription (before that the South African military had been a voluntary thing, and during the Boer War many sons of the veld nipped home to see how the harvest was doing and missed the battles), South Africa’s military expanded by — whoo, a whole great big lot. Basically it changed from a couple of battalions of squaddies with Lee-Enfields and Marmon-Herrington armoured cars into a couple of divisions of troepies with R-1s and Eland armoured cars. This doesn’t mean a hell of a lot if you don’t know a battalion from a division, but trust the Creator, it was a big change. Spending went up a hundredfold or in that order, at least measured in South Africa’s rapidly-inflating rands.

But some things didn’t change much. Back in the 1950s, when South Africa was part of the British Empire and the British Empire was part of the American Empire, someone in Washington discovered South Africa on a map and suggested that we be used to guard the Cape Sea Route. Someone in London suggested that money could be made out of this, and so South Africa was sold three Leander-class frigates with which to do the guarding. We had a navy! All the admirals were very excited.

The Leander was an anti-submarine frigate, but a rather primitive one. It had obsolete guns in front, an obsolete depth-charge thrower at the back, and an ineffective little helicopter in between. However, it looked very beautiful, the Navy proudly named the ships the President class, and all went well until during an exercise, a Navy warship failed to indicate a turn and cut President Kruger, the Navy flagship, in half. With only two ships, it was impossible to guarantee one on patrol all the time, so the survivors were mothballed and eventually scrapped.

Much more useful and practical were the Daphne -class submarines which South Africa bought from France after the British and American arms boycott took effect. At the same time, South Africa bought a few squadrons of Mirage III fighters, and later, some more advanced Mirage F1 fighters.

The trouble, though, was that after the mandatory arms boycott, even France wasn’t prepared to sell South Africa weapons, except a little under the counter (as when France sold South Africa kits to make her Alouette helicopters into gunships). By this time the South African military was focussed almost entirely on ground forces, especially after the dismal defeat in Angola in 1976 showed just how poorly equipped and trained the SADF really was. (That was why the term of conscription was increased from one year to two.) So South Africa bought Israeli warships instead, the Reshef missile boat under the name of Minister, and eventually bought some Kfir fighters under the name of Cheetah. All this was unsatisfactory. The Reshefs were bad seakeepers and no real replacement for the frigates. The Cheetahs were downgraded copies of the obsolete Mirage III. When it came to the crunch at Cuito Cuanavale in 1987, the SAAF lost a Mirage to anti-aircraft missiles in the first week of fighting and thereafter refused to offer supersonic ground support. Then the Cubans brought in MiG-23s — no great shakes as fighters, but enough to chase the SAAF clean out of Angola.

So at the end of the 1980s, the Navy and Air Force were grumpy. They had been starved of proper equipment because it was too expensive and difficult to obtain under the boycott, but also because, boy, did Botha love his Army. In theory the SADF could put half a million troops in the field. But this gigantic land animal had no birds or fish accompanying it, and as it turned out, the South Africans were kicked right out of Namibia and the Navy and Air Force suggested, snottily, that maybe the Army might need a little help. The frigates were gone, the submarines and jet fighters were crumbling in their hangars with age — some replacements were needed. The only problem was, how to justify this by finding an enemy? The SADF, smelling a money shortage after De Klerk decided to end conscription, declared for the Indian peril, suggesting that the sinister Hindus were about to come over and make us all talk Gujerati. It didn’t seem very plausible.

But then De Klerk himself was turfed out and made way for the Madiba. The new SANDF, which had the same old admirals and generals, plus a few new ones who thought they would look very fine on the quarter-decks of ships or taking the salute at a fly-past of jets, dusted off its plans and presented them to the new Cabinet.

There were several reasons for implementing the plans. Nobody took the notion of an external threat very seriously; India and China were focussed on their own development and political problems, while America at that time was taking over the world economically via the WTO and didn’t seem to need firepower. On the other hand, a few submarines made sense; if anybody did try to attack South Africa they were the best possible deterrent short of nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, sizeable surface ships were good for showing the flag around Africa; if you want to perform gunboat diplomacy, as South Africa discovered during the Congo crisis, it helps to have an actual gunboat. Finally, if South Africa was to do anything serious militarily anywhere in Africa it needed to have air cover, so fighters made sense.

Meanwhile, a big purchase of long-desired weaponry was effectively a bribe to the military top brass to keep them sweet, which was important while Joe Modise was floundering around trying to integrate a dozen armed forces into one coherent whole. It was also significant in that it gave South Africa more military clout without giving the military any more capacity to challenge the government’s authority; nobody can sustain a coup with fighters and warships. So it made a lot of sense from a political as well as a military perspective.

There was a problem; it was expensive. It was expensive at a time when everybody agreed that the ANC ought to be making reconstruction and development a priority. Also, at a time when the ANC was starting to think that it should cut back on spending so as to balance the budget. Couldn’t it have waited? Probably it could. If it could have, not postponing it was a mistake. (Alternatively the ANC might have felt that, since the spending was a one-off expenditure, it might as well be got over with. The weapons were not going to get any cheaper.)

As a result the ANC walked into a firestorm of criticism, much of which was legitimate, all of which it ignored.

To reduce the criticism, the ANC negotiated with the British Government, something which is a very silly thing to do at most times, but especially over an arms deal (arms is one of the few things the Thatcher government didn’t privatise). What they negotiated was what were called “offsets”, meaning that the British would undertake to invest in South Africa in return for South Africa buying British weapons. The way it was packaged it sounded a good deal — too good to be true, and so it proved, for the offsets never materialised and the South Africans had to buy the weapons anyway. Also, the falling value of the rand in the late 1990s meant that the cost of the deal, which was costed in US dollars, was greater in rand terms than before (at one point it was double the original rand expenditure, though it ended up about 50% greater). This all led to more criticism.

But it should be pointed out that along with valid criticism — that the weapons were being given too high a priority relative to reconstruction and development or antiretrovirals for AIDS — came a lot of other criticism which was far less valid. There was a lot of hostility to the ANC buying weapons at all; various people declared in major newspapers that black people could not fly aeroplanes or sail ships, and therefore the whole affair was ridiculous. (The Mail and Guardian ran with that.) Others claimed that there was absolutely no reason for South Africa to have any weapons, for Africa was a peaceful place and if South Africa needed defense she could call on the United States.

It is possible that there were hidden motives for some of this hostility. South Africa was ostentatiously not buying its weapons from the United States; the warships came from Germany, basic training aircraft from Switzerland, advanced trainers from Britain and combat aircraft from Sweden; part of the military electronics also came from France. Possibly the United States felt insulted; possibly many pro-American South African commentators (and most South African right-wingers are pro-American) wanted to avenge this. In any case, the chorus of criticism grew.

It became stronger when it became apparent that, as with most arms deals, there was corruption involved. In most cases South African arms companies, mainly ones established at the time when the apartheid war machine was flourishing, did not get their contracts. It was understandable that these companies, led by people with no love for the post-apartheid government, should complain about corruption. It was also not odd that there might be some corruption, which follows arms deals as flies follow incontinent cows. However, ironically, the ANC had undertaken the arms deal out in the open, unlike the apartheid regime which had always hidden its arms trading in a cloak of secrecy, and therefore the ANC faced criticism which the apartheid state had never had to endure (some of the critics, like Terry Crawford-Browne, had at least been peripherally involved in anti-apartheid activities, but others were simply reactionary opportunists).

In any case, there were complaints, and various agencies investigated. (At this time government investigative agencies were in a state of chaos, many of them penetrated by organised crime or devoted to the careers of their bosses, and it was only a few years later that the Scorpions came to solve the mess.) It was obvious that there were problems, particularly related to one man involved in the deal, “Chippy” Shaik, who seemed to have undeclared business interests. However, the investigators also discovered an MP, Tony Yengeni, who had (against Parliamentary rules) failed to declare a donation which proved to be a R100 000 bribe towards a luxury vehicle. He had been a guerrilla commander in the 1980s and had served years in jail as a result; even worse, among the many others who proved to have done the same (mostly black businesspeople) was another guerrilla commander, Siphiwe Nyanda, who was actually the Chief of the SANDF. Nyanda quietly resigned, and most of the others cut deals with the state, but Yengeni stoutly and falsely declared his innocence, was found guilty on overwhelming evidence and sentenced to prison. The people who rallied around him could have almost created a Who’s Who of Sleaze in the ANC; virtually all of them ended up in the Zuma camp years later, like Baleka Mbete. (Eventually he spent a little over a month of his sentence in luxurious confinement.)

All this might seem rather impressive; not only had the ANC actually secured the investigation of its arms deal and found corruption, but it had taken fairly vigorous action. However, this was ignored by the white public and the press, because they were after bigger fish. They hoped to use the arms deal to bring down President Mbeki, and so they pressed for tougher action and spread wild and misleading stories about supposed corruption; another MP, Patricia de Lille, actually was briefly suspended from Parliament when her statements on the arms deal proved unfounded.

Meanwhile, the Scorpions persisted, and eventually found that “Chippy” had a brother, Schabir Shaik, a big businessman and former ANC Intelligence officer, who happened to be Deputy President Zuma’s financial adviser. It was speedily found that Zuma was living beyond his means and that huge sums had been paid into his bank account by Shaik — with more difficulty, the Scorpions discovered that a French arms company had also put Zuma on the payroll. Shaik was arrested and jailed on irrefutable evidence which essentially fingered Zuma as either a crook (if he knew he was receiving bribes) or too big an idiot to tie his own shoelaces (if, as he claimed, he did not know that the half-million-rand tranches of money appearing in his account were bribes).

But this was a huge disappointment to the media, who rather liked Zuma, and so the accusations against Mbeki went on. Since nobody could prove that Mbeki had actually taken any money himself, the accusers fell back on claiming that the ANC’s considerable wealth, which made it independent of business contributions (to the horror and hatred of business) must have come from corrupt transactions linked to the arms deal. There was no evidence for this, so it could not be investigated, but it remains an item of faith to this day. The fact that the arms deal, and the corruption which went with it, was better handled by South Africa than arms deals and related corruption have been handled by almost any other country in the world, simply passes the public by, since the propagandists do not want to discuss it.

But it should be discussed.

Why A Political Weblog, Anyway?

What is the function of a political weblog?

Blogging is, it is generally agreed, a symptom of our narcissistic and disrespectful culture. People who refuse to acknowledge the authority of better-informed people set up weblogs and fool even less well-informed people than themselves into believing that the blogger knows what s/he is talking about. The blogger is also orgasmic to overcome the impossible obstacle of lack of talent and energy, by getting the message out anyway, even if there is no message, even if what little there is, is not worth getting out. It is the triumph of mediocre amateurishness.

All right. Something to that. Something, for instance, to reflect the people who endlessly talk about themselves, several times a day, on the Web. (Unlike the Creator, who would never dream of doing this, surely? Surely?) More to the point there are plenty of people who seem wrapped up in their blogs, obsessed with the importance of their blogs, whoring for traffic, popping up in comments sections to announce that they have a blog, won’t somebody come and look at me? Anybody?

Embarrassing, not so?

Lindsey Lohan has a blog — need more be said on the subject?

Well, yes. What about political weblogs? Surely there we are dealing with something dramatically different. Politics is something out there, politics is an acknowledgement that there is more to adhere to than just the individual subject who will rot and decay (while the weblog lives on, possibly enduring beyond the last surviving human, somewhere in a solar-powered server in the dead sandy plain that was once the Guatemalan rain forest).

The purpose of a political weblog is, thus, to get the political message out. It presumes that there is a political contest somewhere, and the weblogger is engaging in the contest by expressing an opinion to all who might wish to read it on the Web. Hence the American concept of the “netroots”, the good old-fashioned webloggers who, sneering at the horrid patricians who go door to door and talk to people and shake hands and kiss babies, transform the whole nature of twenty-first century politics by electronically panhandling for credit-card contributions to their chosen candidates.

Besides, most political blogging is commentary. Where it isn’t commentary, it is campaigning for a person whom the blogger approves of. Thus, that person’s victory is, by extension, a victory for the blogger. So this is distinctly narcissistic; I like Barack Obama or George Galloway or Jacob Zuma and I am glad that he has won, and since I like him, his victory also reflects well on my judgement, so in praising him I am praising myself.

As to the commentary, it tends to be extremely showy and shallow. It is true that there are some webloggers who get down and try to find out what is going on — the Web contains most of the true muckraking journalists in the world, and by this the Creator does not mean Matt Drudge — and others who offer serious and thoughtful commentary. However, the bulk are cheap-shot artists. Sometimes, it has to be said, very very funny cheap-shot artists. However, at rock bottom, this kind of weblogging is essentially heh-indeedery.

What does this mean? Fundamentally, this has to do with the audience. People who read political weblogs want to leave comments. If they don’t have anything to say they will say something silly or irrelevant, like graffiti artists tagging a well, or dogs marking a lamp-post. They do this because they have an investment in the weblog; they expect the weblog to provide them something, and what they expect from it, fundamentally, is solidarity. The people who come to such a weblog are coming there to have their own opinions and prejudices reaffirmed by the kindly blogger.

This accounts for heh-indeedery. The term comes from a blogger, Glenn Reynolds, who called himself Instapundit, and who was fond of citing observations which he considered foolish. He would follow these observations, or suitably cropped extracts from them, with the words “Heh. Indeed.” In other words, “It is not necessary for me to criticise these comments, because you who are reading my weblog already know that they are wrong, and thus I need only make the appropriate phatic communication to elicit your endorsement of their wrongness without your needing to do or say anything intellectual.”

In short, the role of the press in contemporary politics is exemplified by heh-indeedery; the weblog is the perfect place for it.

But there are weblogs which do other things. For example, there is this one, a most excellent weblog in many important ways, which presents the opinions of a left-wing member of the Socialist Workers’ Party of Great Britain. He does his best to present interesting ideas, both his own and those of other people. Of course he feels obliged to provide pretty pictures and entertaining YouTube videos which a purist might deem somewhat populist, but the gist of the weblog is to provide information as well as an opinion which is somewhat uncommon. Sometimes there is a degree of “See! See the evil! Be enraged!”. But sometimes there is also “Lo, I tell you a mystery, I actually know what I am talking about, and I’ll tell you what it is.” Both seem to have a place on such a weblog. What is also interesting is that the comments often contain examples of both, in themselves. Thus some commenters feel the urge to spend many hundreds of words explaining how they agree or disagree with the blogger. Sometimes these comments are almost as interesting as the original posting.

Of course, membership of a party can be hampering. The SWP recently split with the RESPECT coalition and is feuding with the rest of the splitters (sigh, standard operational procedure in such cases) and so the blogger is often extremely tense with the opposition. Sometimes slightly paranoid (especially at the time of the split). On the other hand, for an ultra-leftist, this person is not bad.

Mark you, this one, which comes from the other side of the RESPECT split, while nowhere near as good in its posts as that one, has some extremely good debates, possibly because it is not so heavily moderated. The trouble is that an endless diet of posts about how horrible the regime ruling the world is, does not satisfy. One does want more; the possibility of hope, the possibility of challenge.

In the United States, although there remain some leftists of interest such as this person, whose weblog is remarkable for its wordy content which nevertheless manages to be readable, most political weblogs are more or less liberal. That does not necessarily mean they are boring — this one, for instance, which does a great deal of intellectual analysis of the extreme Right in the U.S. and how it poses a potentially fascist threat, is quite sprightly. However, at rock bottom the answer is, usually, simple; vote for the Democrats and all will be well.

Oddly enough, there are some disagreements. Many webloggers, like this one and this one, started out as completely uncritical Democrats who believed that all would be well once Bush was crucified and buried at a crossroads with a stake through his heart (a reasonable enough activity in the Creator’s perspective, but not guaranteed to bring good solutions, especially if not enough garlic is applied). However, they have become much more interesting over time and with the growing realization that Democratic politicians are evil sleazebag sellouts. Sometimes the latter one poses vaguely Socratic questions which open gigantic gulfs of radicalism beneath the unwary readers’ feet. The commenters, too, have tended to become more radical.

Then there are fun ones, like this one, who seems out to provoke — it seems easy to be provocative in the United States, all you need to do is get drunk, take drugs and have anal sex, or ascribe such activities to people in the White House. Behind all that seems to be a serious outrage about American conservative politics, but behind all that is a weary willingness to suppress outrage so long as a Democrat can get in. Sad, really.

And again, there is this one and this one and this one, all of whom are Creator-given gifts to a long slow day at the office with nothing much to do. All are rightly celebrated. And yet, although all have their occasional bursts of commentary and intellectual engagement, all are basically heh-indeed tracts. Look! Over there on the Web! A stupid right-winger! You didn’t see it? Let me dissect it for you! Mmmm, smells foul! Now let’s move on to the next one! It is frankly true that what they identify is awful, odious and horrific — rather like this crowd in Britain, who are the worst political weblog that the Creator has spent any amount of time in. (Never call the Creator a purist; look at the created universe for proof.) But at the same time all this promotes a kind of unison, a solidarity, which discourages analysis of one’s own side. (In several of these weblogs, the commenters are extraordinarily good; Herr Dokter Bimler is particularly impressive.)

There are informative political weblogs despite their liberal credentials (this one, started by a gentle, bright leftist cartoonist and now hosted in part by some really sharp and wacky analysts, is particularly good, and also offers links to some fairly savage artwork). On the other hand, while this one has its moments, it is overwhelmed by the horrific fact that people sometimes make jokes about fat people, as if the existence of evil on the planet gave its creator (another gentle cartoonist) the vapours. There are also a few good debating weblogs; this one, mostly British, is extraordinarily entertaining and then falls into tedium with a sickening thud. About two days a week is it glorious. This one, at the Guardian site, which isn’t really a weblog but is hosted by a newspaper, is interesting because the comments bring out some of the most stupid and dishonest people on the planet; it is reassuring that they are sitting at keyboards rather than cheating toddlers out of their lollipops or blowing up frogs with thunderflashes.

So one can get a lot of information out of political weblogs, and sometimes some really great writing (this one yields to none for sheer rhetorical power, despite the fact that its actual political ideology is spinach, and this one, similarly spinach-oriented, has the savage accuracy of a hatchet to the back of the skull).

The trouble with all such political weblogs is that they accomplish nothing in themselves. They can only assist the accomplishments of others. And too many people become obsessed with the Web as a place where battles can be fought (meaninglessly) and victories won (worthlessly) without reference to the real world. Hence the absurd troll phenomenon, wherein people struggle to disrupt the activities of enemies who exist only in virtual space.

But the only truly successful political weblog, the only one which lived its dreams, made its ideologies real and succeeded in converting multitudes, is this one. Anarchy and the end of the world and the destruction of the boring old Sun, the war with decency and honour everywhere and the destruction of authority by means of pies? The Creator is pleased with Fafnir, Giblets and the Medium Lobster.

A Modest Philippic; or, “I knew Arthur Silber, Senator, and let me tell you, you are no Arthur Silber”. “That remark was totally uncalled for.”

So, we are come to this, citizens. We have as a nation paid our debts and done our chores. We have the ships, we have the planes, we have the money too. What we do not have any more is the men, or the social system to serve them, or the moral values or political goals which might prevent our society from collapsing into ruin.

The President of the African National Congress, Jacob Zuma, heir-apparent to the Presidency of South Africa, was recently in Mauritius, making dubious statements to their highest court. He was doing this because he wants documents bearing his name to be kept secret from the South African authorities. This must mean that the documents incriminate him in some way. The press, which supported Zuma’s Presidential campaign, mildly mentions this but does not make a great fuss. Why make a fuss that the leader of the country’s ruling party is a criminal wriggling on a hook? It is, apparently, such fun to watch.

In his spare time, Zuma makes pronouncements. He recently announced that South Africa would probably need a more flexible labour market. (Meaning: the trade union laws must be changed so that rich people can more easily dismiss their workers and thus make greater profits and keep trade union activity under restraint.) This was the man supported by COSATU and the Communist Party, as opposed to Mbeki, who built the present labour market (with the assistance of Tito Mboweni, Labour Minister and now Governor of the Reserve Bank). COSATU grumbled a little, but only a little. When you have abandoned the substance of your principles it is foolish to make much of a fuss about losing the illusion of principles as well.

Willie Madisha, President of COSATU, was purged from his union federation on the grounds that he brought the union into disrepute by exposing the probable criminal conduct of the Secretary-General of the SACP. COSATU was formerly the most nearly democratic institution in the tricameral alliance, so the death of democracy there, displayed by this ridiculous act of executive fiat, is worth noting. Just in case the public hasn’t noticed this, however, it is rumoured that COSATU’s leadership is now casting about for excuses to purge other people who have shown insufficient subservience to that leadership. The press observes this with satisfaction, seeing the people against whom totalitarian methods are being used as being Mbeki loyalists.

Meanwhile, it seems that Billy Masetlha, the former head of the National Intelligence Agency is going to get off scott-free. The forged e-mails implicating Mbeki loyalists in a vast plot against Zuma which he distributed? Apparently nobody can prove he wrote them, and it is not considered illegal for the head of the NIA to distribute false information about government officials. (His using thugs to put the frighteners on Mbeki loyalists was so trivial a matter that he hasn’t even been charged for it.) It is also so trivial for a member of the ANC to spread smear information about the President and the leadership of the ANC that there is no question of a disciplinary hearing; such activities do not count as bringing the organisation into disrepute!

But wait — it turns out that sometimes it is a crime. It turns out that a right-wing Mail and Guardian journalist named Ivor Powell, working for the Scorpions, wrote a draft “browse” report for his superiors about Jacob Zuma and his possible links with foreign governments and internal dissidents. The report was leaked to COSATU, which handed paranoiac selections from it to the media. Now the full weight of the State is coming down on the Scorpions. It is absolutely appalling that anyone should be permitted to investigate a high official of the State! This abuse of authority must be punished!

In unrelated news, Zuma’s ANC has launched an investigation of its former President. An investigation which it does not have the authority to launch. But this does not count as abuse of authority.

What is the proper way to respond to all this? The Roman intellectual politician Cicero went to mediate between Caesar and Pompey during the first Roman Civil War; he first went to see Caesar and discovered that his allies were all corrupt men out for what they could take advantage of in the chaos caused by Caesar’s invasion of Italy; he called them the “army of the underworld”. He then went to see Pompey and discovered that his allies were all homicidal maniacs out to kill anyone who opposed them. He concluded that things did not look great for Rome.

It seems to me that we have a slightly similar situation here, except that we have only one side. The Mbeki camp has collapsed, having no prospect of success, and all its works lie in ruins. The replacement camp, however, has no intention of either restoring the ruins or replacing them with more suitable architecture. So what is it after?

Greed, it would appear. The Creator recently applied for a driver’s licence and was annoyed to think that the machinery used, and the cost of the licence itself, all serves to enrich Schabir Shaik, the criminal behind Zuma. The bulk of Zuma’s allies seem to hold themselves to this kind of moral standard; they want to get even richer than they are even quicker than they have, and nothing can be allowed to get in their way. All that was important was putting Zuma in place, and questions of morality, principle or tactical wisdom were insignificant in comparison. The chaos generated by the incompetence and self-obsession of Zuma and his clique would provide the opportunities.

But once Zuma was in place, the danger was that he might be threatened. So out come the homicidal maniacs, except that instead of killing men they want to kill institutions — the institutions of democracy, of judiciary, of national safety and security. These institutions must be torn down or swept aside so that every crook can be safe from prosecution, but also so that every innocent man who stands in the path of the crooks can be threatened with punishment — outside the judicial framework, if necessary. We stand on the threshold of an era of impunity for lawbreakers, coupled, inevitably, with an era of intimidation for all who try to uphold the law.

Well, not, of course, “all”. You will just have to keep your head down and pay no attention. Then you will be all right. Just read the newspapers — you can be sure that they will not tell you anything that embarrasses your faith in the rectitude of the new regime. (At the moment the newspapers are still free to criticise Zuma, and a few do, mildly — because Mbeki is protecting them. But Mbeki is going, going, gone, and the newspapers who ululate at his departure will soon be singing compulsory praise-hymns to Zuma or to whoever his nominated successor it.)

No, the future is like life under the late Nkrumah, or like life under a Nigerian military dictator. Perhaps not quite as bad as life under Abacha. But when the floor collapses under you, how can you tell, falling through the air, just how far you are going to fall?

Zimbabwe’s Ruination

Two recent reports over the South African Broadcasting Corporation. One report indicated that the unofficial rate of inflation in Zimbabwe may have reached an annualised rate of 100 000%. Another indicated that the dissident ZANU(PF) candidate standing against Mugabe in the forthcoming elections, former finance minister Simba Makoni, expressed his willingness to hand Mugabe over to the International Criminal Court at the Hague. Such things make one think.

How does one manage to get an inflation rate of 100 000% if one isn’t actually trying to do so? This is the unofficial rate, the rate governing what kind of paper you get when you change money on the street as opposed to at a bank. It’s ten times the last figure, which was given only a few months ago. What’s going on?

Inflation is the discrepancy between the amount of currency circulating and the actual value of production. So if I print a trillion rands and get them circulating, given that a trillion rands are intrinsically worth nothing (they are worth only what someone will give you in exchange for them — as paper they are only good for firelighters) then since there are only a few trillion rands around (probably less — the whole GDP is only about a trillion and a half) the value of the rand will drop because there is more currency around, in proportion to the goods to be exchanged.

Does this mean that someone in Zimbabwe is this year printing a thousand times as much money as there is value to provide for it? It seems difficult to believe. The problem is that Zimbabwean currency cannot be officially exchanged for any other currency. Show up at your local bank with a wheelbarrow laden with Zimbabwean million-dollar certificates and they will kick you down the steps.

It is possible to buy foreign currency with Zimbabwean currency inside Zimbabwe. You can go into the country with a bundle of rands, exchange them for Zimbabwean dollars at the current rate of something like a million to one, and have yourself a party. (The use-value of Zimbabwean dollars lags behind their exchange-value, so foreign currency constantly appreciates in value.) The point is that whoever bought your rands can then use them as hard currency. So far as it’s possible to tell, this is how Zimbabwe got it together to pay off its debt to the International Monetary Fund; it kept the printing-presses humming and swapped Zdollars for rands, USdollars, pounds, kwacha, euroes, yuan, yen and anything else they could scrape together until at last they had the moolah to hand over in a form that the IMF would accept. In doing this they pushed inflation up to the then-skyrocketing level of 600%, which back then, a couple of years ago, was the highest in the world.

But now it’s just plain silly. 600% is still inflation and you can imagine bringing it down. 100 000% and you don’t have a currency any more. This is along the lines of the hyper-inflation in Germany in the early 1920s, which seems to have been largely caused by a deliberate decision to make the mark worthless; all those billions of marks which Germany owed the Western Powers in the reparations clause of the Treaty of Versailles could happily be handed over under such conditions, because they would barely buy the Western Powers a pint of beer. How the hell did this happen in Zimbabwe?

Zimbabwe is, certainly, in a bad way economically. After it reneged on repaying its International Monetary Fund loan in 1997 (after the disastrous failure of the IMF’s Economic Structural Adjustment Programme under which the loan was granted) Zimbabwe couldn’t borrow money abroad (except maybe in South Africa, and at that time the interest rates in South Africa were ruinously high). Zimbabwe got a bit of foreign currency from the Congo war, in exchange for pouring out its soldiers’ blood — but far less than it expected, and in the long run Zimbabwe didn’t have the capacity to invest in the Congo to provide infrastructure required for economic development, so there, as in Mozambique, Zimbabwe paid the price and South Africa scooped the profit.

But then the internal problems for ZANU (PF) couldn’t be delayed any longer. The consequences of the IMF’s catastrophic plans drove prices through the roof and kept wages low; Morgan Tsvangirai became a national figure leading workers to struggle against these conditions. He then set up a political party, the Movement for Democratic Change, dedicated to bringing back the IMF’s catastrophic plans — as if the doctor should diagnose anaemia and recommend slitting the patient’s throat. It was apparent that Tsvangirai was in the pocket of rich Zimbabweans who had profited by the ESAP (it didn’t become clear until later how much he was also in the pocket of foreigners), but Tsvangirai was persuasive, had strong media support, and had no scruple about drawing on grievances such as the Matabele-Shona divide.

ZANU (PF) had a trump card to play; dislike of Zimbabwe’s whites united all black Zimbabweans, and dislike of the rich white farmers, especially. The long-standing unresolved land issue was brought into play; the government orchestrated land invasions to drive most of the white farmers off the commercial farms, paying derisory or nonexistent compensations. ZANU (PF) called this the “Third Chimurenga” (the First having been the war against Rhodes’s settlers in the 1890s and the Second, the war against Smith’s settlers in the 1970s). It was a famous victory.

Unfortunately it was a victory over itself. The commercial farms had provided Zimbabwe with its meat and its surplus grain, as well as with the tobacco which was Zimbabwe’s big foreign exchange earner. With the farms split up into small subsistence plots at best, or at worst seized by politicians or businessmen and held fallow for future exploitation, no tobacco, no commercially-available meat and very little surplus grain was available. The commercial farms had also provided employment which no longer existed (stopping an injection of cash into the economy) and had assisted neighbouring subsistence farms when times were tough. All this vanished.

Suddenly Zimbabwe had lost about half its saleable agricultural crop (and had also shattered all hope of seeing any investment in agriculture; luxury crops like cut flowers and pepperdews disappeared, the market taken up by South Africans in Limpopo instead). Furthermore, because of the decline in grain and meat production, Zimbabwe could barely feed itself; most of the time it had to import food to keep the cities alive, but unfortunately the loss of export revenue meant that it couldn’t afford to pay for the imported food. Half the time it couldn’t afford to import fuel for its vehicles or electricity for its cities, or even spare parts for its machinery and medicines for its hospitals. Everything deteriorated.

Just to add to the problem, Zimbabwe’s tourism industry depended almost entirely on white South Africans and white Britons. The British government, however, declared Zimbabwe a kind of international public enemy, making a huge fuss about the stolen 2000 Presidential election (which would have been more credible had they also broken relations with the United States’ government, but never mind cheap shots). They whipped up fear of Zimbabwe, and British tourism to Zimbabwe collapsed. Much the same happened in South Africa (where the media, largely controlled by British and Irish businessmen, followed the British line) and where the country was flooded with new white Zimbabwean exiles with sad stories to tell; again, tourism collapsed as people feared going into the country; it’s never hard to arouse racism amongst white South Africans. Zimbabwe’s foreign currency reserves suffered.

So, it’s easy to see how Zimbabwe’s economy should face a crisis of inflation. On the one hand, since the value of the gross domestic product fell steeply, and since there were shortages, there was a discrepancy between the value and the amount of money around. Prices therefore shot up, accelerated by speculation. To keep things looking normal, Zimbabwe printed more money, which kept the economy functioning but made inflation even worse. The collapse of the Zimbabwe dollar made it even harder to import things even from neighbouring states; what could you pay with, when Zimbabwe needed its coal for electricity and its grain to feed its cities?

Speculators, especially within the government, began hoarding foreign currency, further fuelling inflation. The rural population, unable to feed itself in bad times, could no longer receive food from a benevolent government which had no reserves, and there were no rich white farmers to distribute largesse, so they flooded to the cities, overstraining the infrastructure (and there was no money to reconstruct it). Eventually the government resorted to forced removals along the lines of the old South African apartheid government’s policies (the West condemned these removals much more stiffly than they had done over the apartheid removals).

All this is pretty bad. And yet . . . why 100 000% inflation? The economy has certainly weakened, but it is not falling to a thousandth of its value in the course of a year. Nor is the Zimbabwean government printing a thousand times the currency this year that it printed last year. Economically it makes no clear-cut sense. The Ivory Coast has suffered calamities on a comparable scale, and over a comparable period, to Zimbabwe’s — split in two by a civil war with a demagogic President demanding pogroms against his enemies while the infrastructure collapses from lack of investment. Burkina Faso doesn’t have any of Zimbabwe’s advantages. The DRC and the Republic of the Congo barely exist as states. Why don’t these countries have economic problems anything like the economic problems of Zimbabwe? Is the Zimbabwean government uniquely evil and corrupt in Africa? Surely not.

One thinks, first, of Morgan Tsvangirai and his death-defying double-somersault from populist to neoliberal propagandist. One notices the way he was worshipped in the West and worshipped the West in return, shunning the ANC in South Africa and instead chumming with the white DA, and the way in which a very particular, narrow, West-friendly press evolved at the same time as his rise to power, under Trevor Ncube. Was this accidental? Then one notices the good Mr. Makoni, who previously strove to resolve the economic problems of the country, but now wants to ship the President he served so faithfully off to suffer the corrupt whims of the International Criminal Court, the judicial arm of international neoliberalism. Why should he mention that? One thing Zimbabweans are suspicious of, and that’s right-wing white foreigners with questionable agendas. Obviously Makoni isn’t trying to win support in Gweru. He’s talking to London and Washington. Is he seeking backing there, or does he already have it?

In which case, as in the case of the MDC, it seems likely that Western interference in Zimbabwe is continuing. Now, if there’s one thing which the West has with which to interfere, it is money. It would probably be possible to mess with the Zimbabwean economy quite effectively, especially given an unofficial exchange rate which would theoretically allow a quite modest US dollar millionaire to buy up the whole country. Is something going on there? Is the West deliberately damaging the Zimbabwean economy in order to bring down the ZANU (PF) government and install one or other of its clients in charge of the country.

Heavens, no, the West wouldn’t do a thing like that, would they?

Madisha and the Decline of the Left

This is even less perfect than some other Creations. But, anyway . . .

The removal of Willie Madisha, head of the SA Democratic Teachers’ Union, from his leadership position in the Congress of South African Trade Unions is extremely interesting. To understand it, however, a lot of context, as usual, is needed.

Back in 2006 the Treasurer-General of the SA Communist Party, Phillip Dexter, was called in to investigate corruption and mismanagement at the Mpumalanga Development Corporation. This might seem a little odd; why call in a Commie to handle such things? Because Dexter headed a Cape consultancy which claimed to be good at that sort of thing. This is because Dexter comes out of a trade union background, and the trade unions were the first organisations to latch on to corporate investment by political entities.

Dexter found corruption and mismanagement, but he also found trouble. The muckraking magazine Noseweek accused him of being corrupt and incompetent himself. Ouch. It also accused him of thuggish behaviour, breaking into a journalist’s hired car and stealing the journalist’s material. Double ouch. But then Dexter went and wrote to Noseweek pointing out that none of their accusations could withstand scrutiny, and — unusually — Noseweek withdrew. This was partly because the magazine discovered that the journalist himself seemed to have been involved in shenanigans with the car and it was possible that he had invented the story about the breakin to cover them up.

Now, Noseweek is a conservative magazine and this might have been a standard nail-the-left scenario. On the other hand, there might have been reasons for others to leak dirt against Dexter. The SACP had a conference coming up.

At the 2007 Conference, Dexter was going to have to face a please-explain questioning time, because the SACP was virtually bankrupt. It wasn’t clear why this was so, since with 50 000-odd members all paying a proportion of their salaries into the SACP’s accounts, as the Party’s constitution requires, the Party should have been flush. It hadn’t run any major campaigns on its own account for years, so expenditure was not, or should not have been, great. Where had the money gone? Dexter was in trouble and casting about for straws.

What Dexter also faced, conveniently, was the need to audit Party membership. This should actually have been handled by the Party’s Secretary-General, Blade Nzimande, but Cde Nzimande was much too busy elsewhere to handle such responsibilities, so it was shuffled off on Dexter. This was fair, since most of the Party’s money was supposed to come from the membership. Why wasn’t it doing so?

There seemed to be a problem. Dexter claimed to have discovered that the Party was wildly inflating its membership. It had started out with a membership of about 50 000 soon after unbanning in 1990, and was claimed to have climbed to nearly 60 000. Dexter claimed that actual paid-up members were far less, something like 15 000. In other words, the Party was only a third or even a quarter as big as it pretended. If it was still spending like a big Party, that could account for its poverty.

But luckily there were donations. Dexter managed to track down one in particular, a donation of R500 000, equivalent to the Party’s annual membership fees, from a businessman named Modise, made in 2002. (Why was a businessman giving money to a party dedicated to the destruction of capitalism? Don’t ask.) Dexter contacted Modise and asked if the story was true, since he had seen no evidence of payment. Yes, said Modise, he had indeed paid the money and would like to be assured that it had been used wisely. He had given it — to Willie Madisha. In brown paper bags. In the boot of a car. It sounded more like a drug deal than a political donation.

Dexter went to the Party’s politburo and asked for more information. It isn’t clear what happened, except that he was told to keep his mouth shut, both about the membership issue and about the money. The problem was that the Party conference was supposed to be a huge success. There were plans to spend a vast amount of money (donated by COSATU) on a 2000-person jamboree. This was half as big as the planned ANC Conference at Polokwane later in the year, although the SACP claimed to be only a tenth as big as the ANC. It was hard enough to justify having one in every 25 members coming to a Party Conference, especially of a Party which had no money to pay for them, as opposed to the vastly wealthy ANC which was accepting less than one member in a hundred at Polokwane, and which was tightly auditing its provincial support base. But what if in fact there were only 14 000 Party members? In that case, the Port Elizabeth conference would be practically a Party General Assembly! It simply couldn’t be justified.

Someone went to the papers. Maybe it was Dexter whistle-blowing, maybe it was one of the people who had seen his report. Anyway, the media discovered what had happened and had a field day. One of the immediate consequences of that was Dexter’s immediate suspension from the SACP; he was removed from the post of Treasurer-General at the Conference. Meanwhile, hard questions were asked of Willie Madisha. Did he know anything about this?

Yes, said Madisha. He had received the funds from Modise. However, he said, he had immediately handed them over to Nzimande. Nzimande responded by saying that he had never seen the funds and knew nothing about them. Meanwhile, Modise laid charges, saying that his money had been stolen. The police found his charges credible enough to begin an investigation. Soon after this, however, Modise was arrested on fraud charges (not related to the donation); he remains in jail in Kimberley.

Obviously somebody was lying. Modise could have been lying, except that it was not clear why he should have laid charges if they were likely to be exposed as frivolous; he could get into trouble. Madisha could have been lying; perhaps he and Modise were in cahoots, pretending that money which never existed had been stolen. Or, perhaps Madisha had stolen the money. Nzimande could have been lying; perhaps he had received the money from Madisha and used it for his own purposes. Dexter, on the other hand, was not lying about anything (unless he was fraudulently underassessing the SACP membership — but he was not kicked out for that). Yet at this stage the only person who had suffered was Dexter. This seemed bad; it was as if the SACP were more concerned with covering up than with providing factual information.

The SACP and COSATU swept into action. They began investigating Madisha.

The problem was that Madisha was the President of COSATU. His Secretary-General, Zwelelzima Vavi, was the leader of the pro-Zuma camp in COSATU; Madisha was unsympathetic to Zuma (and was therefore portrayed as a supporter of Mbeki). Similarly, whereas Nzimande led the pro-Zuma camp in the SACP, Dexter was unsympathetic to Zuma (and was therefore portrayed as a supporter of Mbeki). In a series of moves, Madisha was first kicked out as President of SADTU, then forced to step down as President of COSATU. That got rid of the trouble-makers. The entire question of what had happened to the money, if any, simply disappeared, and the whole issue became whether Madisha had brought discredit on COSATU or not.

Vavi gave evidence to the COSATU investigators that Madisha had wrecked cooperation with the SACP by acknowledging the donations issue. It could only be reconstructed by getting rid of Madisha. The question of whether Madisha was telling the truth did not matter; what mattered was keeping close links with the SACP. Was the SACP led by a criminal? That was not important for COSATU; ethical considerations had to take second place to power.

So Vavi engineered Madisha’s effective expulsion from COSATU.

What conclusions can be reached here? It is clear that the whole issue is a cover-up. Dexter was sacked for revealing it and Madisha has been sacked for speaking to Dexter and for standing by him. Otherwise, the whole issue should have remained on ice until a) it was proven that money did indeed change hands, and b) if so, it was discovered whether Nzimande or Madisha had received unauthorised and unaccounter-for money. It did not; action was taken against Dexter and Madisha, although nobody has accused them of wrongdoing, but no action was taken against Nzimande, although he is either the victim of an intricate smear campaign, or he is a thief.

The Magic of the National Budget

Every year for the last thirteen years the South African Finance Minister, Trevor Manuel, has presented a Budget to Parliament. This follows the British pattern; the Budget is worked out by the Ministry of Finance and although it is presented to Parliament, Parliament has no say in changing it. However, unlike the British pattern, the South African Budget is known fairly well in advance, because it is calculated over a three-year period (what is called medium-term expenditure) and so there is not the kind of secrecy fetish which in Britain has Chancellors of the Exchequer photographed holding suitcases which allegedly contain the mighty secrets of wealth and power.

The Creator is in possession of two responses to the Budget for 2008, one from the Daily Dispatch and one from the Mail and Guardian. Both are special supplements to the newspaper. You can either assume that the Budget is such an important part of everyone’s annual ritual that it is worthwhile providing people with detailed information on it, or you can assume that consumerism has reached such a pitch that people are ready to make money out of the most insignificant pretext.

Take the Dispatch first. Its 8-page Budget special’s cover bears a portrait of Manuel holding his two spread hands out before him like a magician conjuring up something. The portrait overlays images of RDP houses and electricity pylons against the background of an African sunrise which all makes Trevor look a little like an airbrushed Chairman Mao. This illustrates the news that the budget for the Eastern Cape increases to R35,9 billion, an increase of R7,5 billion, meaning that the previous budget was R28,4 billion, meaning a 26% increase. (18% allowing for 8% inflation.) However, a great deal of this seems to be expenditure on issues related to the Coega industrial development project around the Ngqura harbour, so the increase will not mean a 26% increase on all expenditure.

Then we are told there is to be R35,8 billion spent on housing over the next three years; there is the acknowledgement that 2,4 million homes need to be built (approximately what has been done in the past 13 years) and meanwhile R2,2 billion is to be spent on “upgrading informal settlements” — presumably, providing shanty-towns with amenities like toilets, water-taps and electricity connections. The 2007-8 house-building target was 220 000, meaning a 10% increase in the rate of building under the 1994-9 RDP, although the population is up and the economy has grown by considerably more than 10%. In 2010/11 this is supposed to increase to 265 000, which, if it is met, is a little more like it. However, the Minister of Housing has argued that the rate needs to be doubled.

Manuel admitted that the price of a bag of mealie meal had increased by 35% in 2007-8, but resolved to do nothing about this. An article on education revealed that per-pupil education spending in the province was R554.

Safety and Security, a perennial problem, rose by about 10% (i.e. 2%) from R36 billion to R40 billion. It was expected to rise to R49 billion by the 2010 budget — that is, increases were expected to stay much the same.

Only then did the page come which dealt with tax cuts which “keeps public smiling” — that is, the part of the public which pays taxes was happier. The article, by the newspaper’s Business Editor, revealed that R7,2 billion would go in tax breaks for what were called “salaried workers” — about 33% of this money would be returned to those earning below R150 000 a year (about five times the national average wage). 28% went to those earning between R150 000 to R250 000 a year (five to eight times the national average). Presumably, the remaining 38% of tax breaks went to those earning more than R250 000 a year, meaning that the breaks were extremely regressive, but the writer wisely did not mention this. Admittedly, no tax would be paid by those earning R46 000 or less. Corporate tax went down from 29% to 28%, a 3,4% cut which, the author said, would somehow lower the cost of capital for new investment. (If the company did no investment, it was presumably extra Mercedeses all around the boardroom.) Exchange controls for “institutional investors” (which sounds like a big break for loonies) were completely eliminated and the “rand futures market” opened up — which sounds in the real world like a big generous hand for capital flight and speculative traders.

Manuel attempted to make the Public Works Programme sound more impressive by talking about “a further R1 billion over the period ahead”, and the newspaper fell for this. However, the actual increase was from R3,7 billion to R4,1 billion, an increase of just under 11%, or 3% really. The sleight of hand was undertaken by confusing the medium-term budget with the annual budget, and for the reason that public works are popular, so hiding the fact that the programme absorbed only a tenth of the police budget was a good idea.

HIV spending, oddly, was around R2,2 billion, although it was supposed to be R6,5 billion by 2010. This did not make much sense. The Eastern Cape alone was getting R2,1 billion over the next three years. However, according to Manual 418 000 people (or about 0,8% of the population) were currently on antiretrovirals, with another 500 000 scheduled to come in later). So while the figures did not add up (probably because the newspaper was confused) the data was at least reassuring.

The rest of the supplement — two pages — dealt with political speculation that Manuel might be fired by Zuma, and with denunciations of the Budget, mostly by the SA Municipal Workers’ Union, who felt that it was a rich person’s budget (which was not totally unfair), by the DA (which felt that the Budget was unfair to the rich, which was ridiculous) and, best of all, by the Tobacco Institute of South Africa, which felt that the Budget was unfair to lung cancer promotors.

So this supplement, while often fooled by the complexities of the Budget (or perhaps willingly participating in the fooling) did at least manage to tell us something worthwhile. But note an absence: no table telling us how much was spent or what proportion of the Budget was spent on what. Well, what can you expect from a small-town paper? Better, one would think.

One would think that the Mail and Guardian’s 12-page budget special should be 50% better than the Daily Dispatch.

However. On the cover is a small photo of Manuel (no gigantic pylons dominating the rosy skyline) and articles talking about “chin up” and “holding the line” against the Deputy Minister for Trade and Industry who wants a genuine trade and industry policy which would actually promote manufacturing. (Well, we can’t have that!) Another article, also on the cover, asks if Manuel is to be sacked or not, and another compares him with Barack Obama, the US Presidential candidate (which is an insult to Manuel on a par with dumping a bucket of diarrhoea over his suit).

Praise for spending on education, where spending rises from R105 billion to R121 billion, an increase of 15% (7% really). Higher education gets a rise from R13,3 billion to R15 billion, an increase of 13% (5% really), so once again, a lower slice of the budget (from 12,7% of the budget to 12,4%). Health-care increase was not mentioned in the article on health care budgeting, because the article was written by Belinda Beresford who does not approve of the government. She did — unprecedentedly — mention that the government had an antiretroviral policy. (Incidentally, she quoted the entire provincial budget allocation, possibly thinking that this was about health care.)

The next page saw some criticism of the Budget — naturally, from a financier from Metropolitan Asset Management, who didn’t like the tax levy aimed at raising money for electricity generation (no doubt financiers can more easily pick peoples’ pockets in the dark). In fairness, she also complained about the static level of social grant spending, and she pointed out, as the Dispatch didn’t, that the tax breaks tended to go to the rich.

The section on transport did not say what was being budgeted for transport, although it wittered about various cities spending loads over the medium term. However, on the next page the Minerals and Energy section revealed that R8,2 billion would be spent. The claim was that the energy budget would be “greener”, a concept which the Mail and Guardian, a great greenwasher, lives. Again, there was no mention of what the Minerals and Energy budget actually was.

Then came the page dealing with what the budget means for you. The author said that those earning less than R46 000 a year would not be taxed, which was true, and that this saved “R540 a year”, which was false. Those earning R100 000 a year saved R540 a year (0,54%), whereas those earning R200 000 a year saved R1 955 a year (0,97%) and those earning R500 000 a year saved R4 655 a year (0,93%). So richer people got roughly double the tax break that poorer people got. That was helpful, though the page didn’t put it like that. The corporate tax break was described as a “welcome relief” which “put R5 billion back into corporate profits”, which at least helps explain what the author’s agenda was. The author admitted that individuals pay 40% while companies pay 28%. (Very interesting, that the Mail and Guardian journalist was more enthusiastic about capitalist inequality than the financier was!) On the next page, an article explained that all restraints on mining companies encouraged mining companies to go elsewhere, so there should be no such restraints.

Thereafter came a page on defense spending, claiming that an average 6,1% increase over the next three years was in line with inflation (actually 2% lower than inflation, so this meant regular cuts) — and the article did not mention what defense spending was.

After an advertisement came a page on the ending of exchange control, saying that it was a positive message (for whom, not stated) and also that it would not encourage foreign investors (who would expect more from the government). The author said, with apparent pleasure, that more money would flow out of the country. Another article complained that child support grants were too low (but did not say how much was spent on them) whereas an article in land reform noted that the spending on land reform went up from R4 billion to R6,6 billion (a 65% increase).

Another article explained a 16% (8% in real terms) increase in provincial spending, up to R238 billion, giving a breakdown of what each province got, and — that was it.

So the remarkable point here is that the “quality weekly” did not provide significantly more information than the small-town daily. Another remarkable point, however, is that neither newspaper provided an actual breakdown of the 2008 budget and how significantly, if at all, it differed from the 2008 budget. It’s as if readers are really not intended to see the forest; we are all supposed to gaze in awestruck wonderment at all those beautiful trees. Conventional news comment was restricted to how much the tax cuts were and how much more people were paying for beer and cigarettes. Apparently this is all that the rest of us are supposed to care about.

And a favourite complaint from press and politicians combined is that the public doesn’t get involved enough in real issues . . .