On Reading Propaganda (II).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the slogans are all replaced by and by,

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

And the beards have all grown longer overnight.

Come and meet the New Boss,

He’s the same as the Old Boss.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Reading Propaganda. (I)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Supposing South African Socialism? (III)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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