What Is The Ruling Class Agenda?

What is the ruling class out to do in respect of Jacob Zuma’s shenanigans?

Since the ruling class don’t telegraph their punches, and since their control of the ideological state apparatus means that this apparatus doesn’t cover the ruling class qua ruling class, it follows that all one can do is monitor what the ISA does tell us and then try to figure out what it means.

The Mail and Guardian has a headline about Zuma being “off the hook” regarding Nkandla. Meanwhile, the Mail and Guardian‘s “Thoughtleader” website carries a syndicated article by William Saunderson-Meyer about how it is perfectly understandable that principled journalists are entitled to change their minds when they feel they have been wrong. This article concerns the editor of the Citizen, who wrote a mea culpa article about how he had conspired against Zuma, along with various other unnamed journalists, and now wanted to come clean. And the Sunday Times has had an article about the odiousness and childishness of the Economic Freedom Fighters in Parliament.

Perhaps these are unconnected. Perhaps not.

Zuma was never actually on the hook regarding Nkandla. What appears to have happened was that Zuma rather astutely organised that a quarter of a billion rand would be spent on “security upgrades” at his private residence — without leaving any fingerprints of his own, so that those who authorised the expenditure would be at pains to conceal what had happened, or at worst, could be sacrificed if a sacrifice were needed. Meanwhile, the money appears not to have been spent, but rather, to have been laundered, either going into Zuma’s purse through devious means or into the accounts of Zuma allies for unknown purposes.

The interesting thing about this process is that the Public Protector, who supposedly looked into the matter, did not actually notice that the bulk of the allocated money had not been spent on what it had supposedly been spent on. The jerry-built and absurdly overpriced structures concerned passed her by, somehow. She made no attempt to trace where the money had gone; essentially, her task was to attack President Zuma, on behalf of her friends in the Democratic Alliance, and not to attack big businesspeople who might have benefited but whose hostility the DA definitely did not need. Of course, she believed that this would harm Zuma, which would work only if the DA took the matter in hand.

Unfortunately, Zuma managed to delay and distract matters, being a consummate politician and good at procedural wrangling. As a result, everybody is now heartily sick of Nkandla, and meantime, a raft of prominent people have come out in support of Zuma’s right to have all the public money spent on his private residence that he pleases — meaning that a large number of people would go down with Zuma if Nkandla took him down, and they don’t want to go down.

Of course, Zuma accepted the money, for his own personal use in his private residence, and he should not have done so since it was misspent and he knew it was misspent because he could see it being misspent every time he went home, so he should pay back the money — but not even the Public Protector actually claimed that (she said “a portion of” the money, and you can argue that zero is actually a portion even if infinitely small).

But for that to be an issue, it has to be made into an issue, and the DA in Parliament, from the moment they decided to serve on the second Nkandla Committee, have been temporising and moderating their language and generally making it seem that they don’t think it’s such a big deal after all. It’s the EFF which has taken a stand, and the EFF which has tried to go to court to demand that the money be paid back — the DA is simply calling on the report of the second Nkandla Committee to be declared unconstitutional, which will probably turn out to be a no-hoper, in which case the DA is giving itself an excuse for letting the whole matter drop. And meanwhile the Public Protector, who has been putting on airs and throwing weight around which she doesn’t actually possess, is being hung out to dry, discovering now that it’s too late that the DA are not trustworthy friends if you don’t have money and are not white.

The Saunderson-Meyer article is interesting only because Saunderson-Meyer only produces stuff which is received wisdom for the right wing of the plutocratic elite, and makes them laugh because the plutocratic elite has no sense of humour at all. His article is, however, fairly serious; it praises a journalist for declaring his undying shame about having been nasty to Jacob Zuma. A couple of years ago, even a few months ago, such lickspittle behaviour would have aroused contempt in everybody, and the fact that Saunderson-Meyer stands up for the editor of the Citizen suggests that there has indeed been a sea-change.

The return of the repressed is what it is — the deservedly, and rightly, repressed. What the editor said was that he was very bad to criticise Jacob Zuma over the Shaik judgement, back in 2005. He shouldn’t have done it, he said. He was influenced by other foolish journalists! He was wrong! Jacob Zuma was innocent!

No, Jacob Zuma was not innocent. Judge Hilary Squires found Schabir Shaik guilty of soliciting bribes for Deputy President Zuma from the French company Thint. The bribes were duly paid, and Zuma carried out services in return for the bribes, by arranging for Shaik’s company to get the contract for credit-card driver’s licences, although the actual work would be done by Thint who would get the lion’s share of the money, but via Shaik’s company, which was incapable of fulfilling the contract itself. In other words, simple fronting, plain corruption for all to see, and Zuma was guilty, guilty, guilty, and the editor of the Citizen is a corrupt bullshitter, peddling bullshit which was last peddled in about 2008-9 when this bullshit had to be peddled in order to distract attention from the charges being dropped by a corrupt Director of Public Prosecutions. And Saunderson-Meyer is supporting this corrupt, much-discredited bullshit. Presumably it is being trotted out to distract attention from Nkandla and so forth.

So it would seem that the ruling elite has turned around and decided that Zuma is to be protected — or, at least, is not to be attacked as violently as before. Nkandla, like the bribery, and like so many of the other criminal activities which Zuma and his friends have undertaken, is to be swept partly under the carpet — it will remain, no doubt, rhetorically in the public eye, but it will no longer be represented as a tool which might remove Zuma. Perhaps it was already not such a tool — the ruling class is not homogeneous, and perhaps some of them decided not to use the judiciary against Zuma and therefore he cannot be charged with anything.

Meanwhile, after all the fuss which has been made about the former Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions and her perjury and fraud, and being put on trial for perjury and fraud, and accused of many other shenanigans, and basically held up as the main thing which is wrong with the DPP (although there is a hell of a lot wrong with it, and wrong with the whole South African legal, judicial, and criminal justice system) — suddenly everybody is soft-pedalling the fact that charges have been dropped by Zuma’s new Director of Public Prosecutions. What’s the big fuss? Hey, everybody — over there — look, it’s Oscar Pistorius! With no sign of a locator cuff padlocked to his blade! Pay attention to that, and to whatever else we tell you, but not to the crimes of the Zuma administration, we’re going to draw a line under those — for now.

What’s going on? Why row back? Zuma can’t actually hurt members of the ruling class, he is too afraid of them and they are too powerful, so why not attack him? Why not use him to undermine the ANC, and perhaps to install Cyril Ramaphosa in power a couple of years early, ensuring that a fully neoliberal figure is in office and ready to serve the elite? Only a couple of months ago it was the end of the world, Omar al-Bashir had escaped from the clutches of the torturers and murderers of the imperial elite and the local elite who serve the imperial elite were screaming blue murder — but now the tumult and the shouting has been artificially suppressed, as if the conductor has turned on the illuminated SILENCE sign.

The Sunday Times attack on the EFF (alongside the general attack on the EFF launched not only by the press but also by the DA itself) is suggestive. The article basically says that a few months ago it was acceptable to have the EFF attacking the ANC, but that this is no longer desirable and now such attacks, and the EFF’s criticism of Parliament as being no more than a front for state power, are childish and undesirable and to be condemned by everybody who is anybody — that is, by those who serve the ruling class. And, just to make the parallel plainer, the Saunderson-Meyer article also denounces the EFF and points out that the press used to uncritically support them, and that this was wrong, but that now the press has seen the light and is attacking them, as it should, just like the Citizen now realising that Zuma must be supported at all costs. Which is complete balderdash because the press has always attacked the EFF except for momentary periods when the EFF’s attacks on the government happen to coincide with ruling-class interests. But it casts a glaring light on what is going on.

It would appear that the ruling class has belatedly realised that in their adoption of campaigns like the Nkandla issue and the Marikana issue, they were furthering the aims of the EFF, who were much more sincerely concerned about such issues than the neoliberal parties, and whose constituency was much more sincerely incensed about such issues. When the DA preached about such matters, their audience blinked, but the EFF’s audience heard, and cheered, but did not decide to vote DA on that account — instead, they were delighted that the EFF’s stance was being confirmed even by their class enemies, and that the DA was going along with them. Hence the DA’s decision to support the repressive new Parliamentary rules which will facilitate the arrest and expulsion of MPs who dare to expose the misconduct of the Zuma gang in ways unseemly to ruling-class eyes. The idea is to settle the EFF’s hash, however much it makes nonsense of the DA’s pretense to support democracy and the rule of law.

What makes this urgent, probably, is the 2016 municipal elections. The ruling class was expecting to see the DA make big gains there, and perhaps issues like Nkandla were supposed to facilitate that. The assumption was that the EFF’s accomplishment in 2014 would be a momentary lapse, like CoPe’s success in 2009, and the DA would be able to swiftly collar their support. This doesn’t seem to be happening; installing a black dressmaker’s dummy as supposed head of the DA hasn’t been the triumphant success which was hoped for, and the attempt to wreck the EFF by using PAC entryists like Mngxitama to disrupt it has failed. Instead, the EFF may be using its PR gained through Parliament to set up some modest structures and, perhaps, get some more support — in which case it might actually do better in 2016 than in 2014, especially in areas of the Eastern Cape where it ought to have done well in 2014.

The DA’s big hope for 2016 is Port Elizabeth, and if the EFF does reasonably well there and gets, say, 7%, it might be able to prevent the DA from getting an overall majority. This is rather horrible for the DA, for it would then mean that it could only govern in collaboration with the ANC (since governing in collaboration with the EFF is unthinkable). In which case the DA’s supporters have to be prepped for the inevitable collusion with the ANC, and have to be weaned away from the automatic anti-ANC perspective which they’ve held for some time. So it’s necessary to make nice with Zuma again, for fear that otherwise some kind of radical leftist or liberal organisation might succeed.

And that’s our ruling class in a nutshell — bungling, opportunistic, corrupt political ignoramuses. Just the people into whose hands we should all put our lives!

Triumph of the Vacuum II: The Politics of the Catwalk.

The coronation of Aloysias Maimane as Duce of the Democratic Alliance in Port Elizabeth went as smoothly as might be expected of a ritual developed and conducted by a public-relations agency. It was engineered with care and facilitated by ensuring that a white person, Athol Trollip, was standing right behind Maimane, working the wires attached to his limbs and the teleprompter in front of his eyes.

The idea behind this is that race is the only thing which matters in South African politics. By installing a black man as the party’s front-person, the Democratic Alliance has ensured that it will continue to grow at its current rate. It is not necessary for that black man to have any understanding of politics, any visible talents, or any worthwhile policies. All that matters is his skin colour. That will fool black people, who understand nothing about politics, talents or policies, into voting for the DA. Problem solved!

Actually the problems are just beginning.

The position of Leader of the Party is a fascist concept, fully in keeping with the DA’s status as an ersatz fascist party. (A real fascist party would have some guts and better graphics design skills.) The DA’s goal is to do whatever big business tells it to do in order to crush the working class and improve corporate profits. A true fascist party would, however, mobilise the majority against minorities. The DA can’t do this because it is the party of whites and coloureds, who are resentful minorities and who are scared of mobilisation against minorities for fear it might end up as mobilisation against them (the whole anti-xenophobic campaign, though couched in the usual fake moralistic terms, is a product of white paranoia out of the same stable as the panic about farm killings). Therefore they must mobilise the majority by fooling them, by putting a model on the catwalk and urging them to admire him, in the same way that “celebrities” of whom nobody has every heard and about whom nobody cares fill the pages of the newspapers in the hope that someone will make money out of the process.

The question which nobody is allowed to ask is what this is all about.

This is because the original motive for the reformulation of the Democratic Alliance, after the defeat of the National Party in 1994, was resentment against the ANC’s victory. The Democratic Alliance positioned itself, under the able and loathesome leadership of Tony Leon, as the party most able to attack the ANC. The attacks on the ANC did not have to contain any substance, or even truth, because the DA’s audience was racially bigoted and politically biassed against blacks and leftists and therefore warmed to anyone who was noisily denouncing black leftists.

Instead of trying to challenge racist and reactionary ideas, the DA encouraged them and merged them with its real political agenda, which was neoliberalism. Essentially, it sold neoliberalism to its supporters through making it attractive by linking it with the prejudices which they adored. It has been very successful in this project, which is what makes it dangerous. On the other hand, it has also abolished all political and economic debate wherever it holds sway — which is part of the party’s problems, since it makes the party completely inflexible.

The problem with this political agenda is that neoliberalism has turned out to be as disastrous for the country as racism was, and yet the DA does not challenge either because both serve the interests of the tiny ruling elite which the DA serves. The working class knows this; only the middle class, ideologically embedded in the distorted values of the ruling class, cannot see it. Therefore, the middle class supports the DA, but the working class does not — and the black middle class, which has gone over to the DA, is not numerous enough to make an electoral difference. The DA is trapped in the status of a second-rank party.

What can be done about this? The obvious answer is to pretend to challenge racism and neoliberalism. Under the Zille administration of the DA, the attempt was made to challenge racism. That is, the party made a serious effort to promote coloureds and afrikaners into responsible positions and to put an african in the shop window by appointing Zille’s handmaiden Lindiwe Mazibuko as parliamentary leader. (This was not a conspicuously absurd appointment like installing Joe Seremane in the chairmanship of the party, because the DA’s MPs are a thick-headed bunch of poor speakers and hence Mazibuko seemed competent by contrast.)

This was modestly successful at best, but it did not address the real issue. The DA’s line is that appointment should be on “merit”, but “merit”, on analysis, turns out to mean belonging to the DA after having gone to a good school and being respectful to the Leader and the friends of the Leader. It does not mean competence. Moreover, whites and indians automatically have “merit”, coloureds may acquire “merit” through proximity to merit-possessing whites, and africans may have “merit” bestowed upon them by those whites, provided that they earn it through extraordinary subservience and through cultivating a properly white South African accent (a pseudo-American accent will do in a pinch). All this means that the DA has not conquered racism, it has rather subsumed racism into the cultural practices of Johannesburg’s Northern Suburbs and Cape Town’s Southern Suburbs. This is how the DA is able to persuade itself that parachuting a politically inexperienced black man with no track record into the leadership of the party is a brilliant step forward.

By brushing aside racism, however, the DA cuts the cable which held the party together. Working-class whites and coloureds do not like africans. Now they must watch middle-class africans leapfrog over them in the political sphere just as they have watched them do the same in the economic sphere. It’s not likely to please them. The calculation of the DA’s leadership is that they have nowhere else to go, which is probably true — but, as with the ANC, it is going to be hard to dynamise the voters once the party’s reason to exist has been abandoned.

All which remains is neoliberalism, a doctrine which Maimane has made it quite clear that he supports. This commitment to a policy immiserating the majority of the population to an increasing degree should be harmful for the electorate, but since it is a policy which is never discussed in those terms it is not harmful to the DA. The question is whether it was helpful.

In the past, the DA could claim to be standing for the free market and liberation from big government and all the other meaningless neoliberal shibboleths which whites and middle-class coloureds loved to hear, but this is now more difficult because they need african support and although middle-class africans like those things too, they are very conscious of the fact that most africans don’t. So the DA must tone down its stridency, or export it into the “civil society” sector where media and think-tank alike devote all their time to union-bashing and denunciation of the lazy workers.

But, meanwhile, the long struggle between neoliberals and social democrats within the ANC and COSATU has been won by the neoliberals, the social democrats have been purged or sidelined, and so the ANC is pursuing policies, outlined in the National Development Plan, which fulfil all the requirements of neoliberalism. Furthermore, the ANC can do this while unblushingly embedding the neoliberal project in a cocoon of leftist rhetoric (which is what the NDP is all about). Therefore, although the white ruling class of South Africa still don’t like blacks or the ANC, they have had to take a second look at the african party. Zuma has done much for them, and Ramaphosa can be expected to do much more. The ANC is not going away any time soon. Why rock the boat? Why not shovel money into the ANC as they shovelled money into Zuma’s campaign?

So the DA finds itself in a very difficult position. Their ruling-class backers are having trouble seeing why they should support an insignificant party when they can support a ruling party which does the job they want done. The ruling class may be racist, but they aren’t that racist. Meanwhile, the DA must express spurious claims to serve the people, and ritual denunciations of inequality and unemployment, which are indistinguishable from the behaviour of the ANC and which grate on the ears of the ruling class just as much as the empty utterances of the SACP do. Also, the big fear must be that while nobody in the ANC believes in any of that stuff any more, some of the DA people may do — or at least may be afraid that if they take power anywhere and then break all of their promises they will be hoofed out at the next election.

All this requires a very clear-sighted and powerful leadership capable of analysing the problems and implementing solutions to them. Instead, the DA has a weak leader and chair; the leader is probably incapable of accomplishing anything which the Federal Council of the party (which is not federal, despite its name) does not want, while the chair, coming from a peripheral province with hardly any DA control, is banking on becoming mayor of Nelson Mandela Metro next year. If he does not get the mayorship (and it is a toss-up despite the incompetence and corruption of the ANC) then he will not have any power or influence, much like Joe Seremane, and then the DA will be run by a shadowy committee, the Federal Council, whose members hardly anyone even inside the party has heard of. This is not a recipe for triumph. (And the trouble is that the way to cut through this would be to devote all possible energy to winning Nelson Mandela next year, but in that case the chair will be empowered, and the Johannesburg clique does not wish to place power in the hands of the periphery — as with the ANC in the Western Cape, they would rather the party lost than that they should see someone else within the party gain.

All this hints that the DA may have peaked. It may go on to greater successes, but it is quite likely that it will not. In any case, it can no longer do anything original, it can do nothing that the ANC would not do. Therefore, the DA cannot offer any solutions to the problems of political disenfranchisement, ideological vacuity and economic mismanagement which characterise South Africa today. It is simply an irrelevance, and in the task ahead of the rest of us, as Hunter S Thompson observed, these waterheads will only be in the way.

Parliament and its Enemies.

Gradually, the status of the EFF is beginning to crystallise. Now that it has a democratically elected leadership (something which the UDF never possessed) it can turn its attention to maintaining organisational discipline. This should mean calling people like Andile Mngxitama to account.

In the Pan-Africanist Congress and the Africanist movement in general there has long been a tradition of telling lies in order to foster private advantage, an advantage handicapped by the intellectual deficiencies of the PAC leadership. Mngxitama seems to be acting within this tradition. At least, when you go to a press conference to announce that you are the victim of a conspiratorial deal under which the leadership of your party has undertaken not to disrupt the Presidential State of the Nation address, it’s advisable not to hold that press conference the day before the leadership of the party disrupts the Presidential State of the Nation address. One is apt to be recognised as a very silly and incompetent liar when one does that.

But more to the point, there’s a big difference between “bringing the organisation into disrepute” when the organisation is riding high in power and influence, and when the organisation is an insurgent force which has to cope with immense amounts of attacks from all sides. The former is just pitiful; when Jeremy Cronin accused the ANC of being just like ZANU (PF), and was called on the carpet, he wasn’t kicked out of the party because he was easily exposed as a nauseating, opportunistic hypocrite (a role he has played ever since). If he had done something like that in 1989, he could easily have been shot (and the Jeremy Cronin of 1989 would have pulled the trigger himself).

Mngxitama doesn’t understand party discipline because his goal is not to accomplish anything, but to get himself talked about and potentially get some money out of that, which is the goal of most of our contemporary politicians. By his behaviour he’s showing himself unfit to have been elected as an official of the EFF — which is the petulant reason he’s telling all these lies and smearing his own party. Whether or not he’s kicked out, the point is that he will never be taken seriously as an EFF member again, by anyone, even the right-wingers who may try to exploit him as an example of the “divisions” within the EFF.

It is fortunate, in fact, that those members of the EFF who are corrupt Africanists are exposing themselves so clumsily as tools of white plutocracy (Wa Azania is another example of this tendency). One must remember that Africanists have often made healthy recruits for the Charterist movement; figures like Terror Lekota were once Africanists.

Meanwhile, the disruption of the State of the Nation address was, of course, a publicity stunt, but it also conveyed various messages which are worth conveying, so claims that such behaviour is doing nothing more than lowering the tone of political debate.

The most obvious message is that the President is dishonest and afraid of acknowledging his own dishonesty.

Another obvious message is that the President abuses his authority and prefers violence to debate.

Yet another obvious message is that what the President has to say is not worth listening to.

Furthermore, another obvious message is that when the rules of procedure serve to protect dishonest and cowardly thugs engaged in telling lies and wasting time, the rules of procedure should be exploited in order to show the thugs up.

All this is quite obvious to anyone paying attention to events. It is known to virtually the whole public, which is why this publicity stunt was so successful. Also, virtually everything that the Zuma supporters did, all the way down to the hysterical shrieks of Baleka Mbete and her allies, cast more light on it and made the issues more obvious. The DA was forced to piggyback on the EFF’s success, which was helpful for both of them (although virtually all commentators, and the ANC itself, attempted to discredit the EFF and endorse the DA, for the DA poses no threat to the established order whereas the EFF might).

The thing which the ANC took away with them from this was the idea that thuggery works. This is, in fact, the idea which the Zuma faction has always possessed, and it is a gross oversimplification. Firstly, thuggery works best when you have the support of the propaganda agencies (which the Zuma faction no longer has) and when the public is stupid enough to be behind you (which the Zuma faction can no longer be sure of) and when you are dealing with people who are either cowards, or paralysed by indecision or by divided loyalties. Thuggery worked against Mbeki because he had been betrayed by all his allies and thus could not take action against it. Thuggery did not work against the ANC Youth League, and it doesn’t work against the EFF. You can only intimidate people who are either cowardly, or know that you are prepared to carry your intimidation to the bitter end, and since the EFF aren’t cowards and don’t believe that the ANC will use apartheid-era tactics against them, these criteria don’t apply.

Thuggery also doesn’t greatly impress people who disagree with your basic principles, which is why it probably hasn’t impressed the DA. (Meanwhile, thuggery used by the EFF against the ANC might be more effective provided it is used in the pretense — or even the reality — of defending the Freedom Charter.) So when the ANC disrupted the Western Cape “State of the Province” address, they weren’t doing exactly the same as the EFF had done to them. No doubt to some extent they were rallying ANC supporters (who feel, with considerable reason, that the DA doesn’t look after their interests) but they weren’t making DA supporters uncomfortable in the way that the EFF did by focussing on the personal dishonesty and abuse of authority f the President. On the contrary, they were probably galvanising DA supporters. And, as for the ANC supporters, there must have been some who were aghast at the sheer hypocrisy of justifying an assault on MPs by saying that hooliganism must be rooted out of elected assemblies, and then promoting the behaviour which you had called hooliganism in another elected assembly. Therefore the action probably lost support without gaining any.

The fundamental problem about Parliament, and in a sense all elected assemblies in South Africa, is that they are fetishised and idealised to a ridiculous extent by people who ought to know better. We are told that because they are elected assemblies they are representatives of the masses, and therefore deserve a respectful hearing. Actually that is only true to the extent to which they actually represent the masses — and, on investigation, they usually represent the masses very badly, whether in a municipal chamber misspending the rates, in a provincial legislature mismanaging the provincial administration, or in Parliament failing to run things effectively. The general public want a lot of quite specific things which we are not getting, and our elected assemblies are failing (for the most part) to even acknowledge this, let alone do something about it.

Therefore, the protest against Zuma and the State of the Nation Address makes a certain amount of sense as a protest both against bad governance and against elected assemblies helping to enable, protect and cover up for that bad governance. The same would be true of disrupting the Western Cape legislature if one could believe that the people doing the disruption had any real intention of improving the governance or of discouring such cover-ups — which, of course, they don’t.

So, if these legislatures are not fulfilling their function, then they do not deserve to be held in high regard and treated with respect. Yet many commentators do not accept this, because in the end they hope that their factions will take control of the country someday and will seek to mismanage it in the interests of the tiny minority constituting their chosen faction.. Therefore they want the glamour of Parliament and high office, the fashion parades and uniforms and brass bands, to substitute for legitimate government, and therefore they do not want anyone to detract from those shoddy symbols. Also, of course, they do not want to encourage people to think too deeply about who they are voting for or what they are voting about.

Such people are obviously the enemies of democratic governance, and yet they are the ones who are chosen to speak on behalf of democratic governance by the propaganda organs of the ruling class — who are, clearly, themselves opposed to democratic governance. The enemies of Parliament, in other words, are everywhere in power. They are the enemies of the actual Parliament, the idea that a gathering of elected representatives might be able to make a difference to the lives of those who elected them — on behalf of the Parliament which has walls and restaurants and guards and glittering brazen ornaments.

Paradoxically, this means that the ANC in the Western Cape legislature was doing the right thing after all, although for the wrong reason and, because they were the wrong people to do the job, having the wrong effect. Unfortunately, nobody is going to think more deeply about the radical potential of an elected legislature because the ANC disrupts it. They will either think about how they can exploit and make use of the situation, or they will pretend to be outraged because they cannot exploit the situation on these terms, but only by pretending that shibboleths and empty symbols are the only thing which is important in politics. It’s very like the people who appeal to the Constitution in order to prevent the public from accessing their rights.

It is certainly important to know when it’s appropriate to accept discipline, even the discipline of people for whom you have little respect. Sometimes discipline is deserved, and sometimes it is advisable or necessary, simply because the alternative is chaos. Sometimes it has to be challenged. In a case where you are in a weak (but just and intellectually valid) position and discipline can be used to make it still weaker, then that discipline has to be jettisoned. But when you are challenging discipline simply because you do not have the strength of character, organisational loyalty and political intelligence to recognise the value of that discipline, when you would rather play in the muck and pretend that you are free — that’s when someone has to strike you firmly in the back of the neck. We need more such strikers in our political climate.

The French Disconnection.

So the Wahhabi Sunni militants in Yemen, who are theoretically at war with the Yemeni dictatorship which is aligned with the Saudi dictatorship (although elsewhere in Arabia these militants are usually aligned with, and often funded by, the Saudi dictatorship) decided that they could take no more of the massacres perpetrated against them. (These massacres are sometimes committed by Yemenis in the pay of the dictatorship, more often by Americans; the Americans and the dictatorship, however, are mostly fighting against the Shi’ite rebellion against the Yemeni dictatorship, although the Wahhabi Sunni militants are elsewhere mostly concerned to suppress Shi’ite rights and indeed to massacre Shi’ites, as in Syria and Iraq.) Doubtless murmuring under their breath “In the name of Allah the merciful, the compassionate”, these Wahhabi Sunni militants therefore hired some people who had been fighting against the Assad government in Syria on behalf of other Wahhabi Sunni militants, and sent them off to murder some French journalists in Paris.

If you think that makes any sense, you have not been paying attention (for which the Creator forgives you).

We should, first of all, clear all sense of outrage from our minds, which means that we should ignore virtually all commentary about the Charlie Hebdo massacre. There is a war going on, the war to sustain the supremacy of the United States in the world; a large part of that war is armed aggression against Muslim countries because it happens to be easier to legitimate such aggression in American eyes, and also because (purely coincidentally) there is a lot of oil under Muslim sand. There is a war within that war, in which Saudi Arabia is attempting to expand its influence in the Arabian peninsula and in Mesopotamia by promoting instability and fomenting Wahhabi violence in the region. In these wars the laws of war have been suspended; civilians are slaughtered without quarter or even concern and illegal weapons may be used. Hence, butchering unarmed people in Arabia or Mesopotamia or Paris cannot be condemned because there is no basis for condemning it.

Of course, we may say that the war should not be happening, that the laws of war ought to exist, and if we say that then we can certainly condemn the Charlie Hebdo massacre (like all the other related massacres) on moral grounds. Some have earned the right to do that. Nobody engaged in the war, however, has any such right.

Disregarding all that, however, it seems obvious that murdering the staff of an anti-government periodical is a very foolish thing to do under the circumstances. What is worse — publishing a cartoon, or exterminating a wedding-party? Logic suggests the latter, and yet the perpetrators of the Yemeni bloodbaths sit peacefully in their air-conditioned offices twiddling controllers and watching screens, joking with each other as their missiles blast civilians into sprays of blood, shit and flesh, while the journalists and cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo were themselves turned into such amorphous “bugsplats” by rifle and rocketry. Why the one, and not the other?

It’s not going to be possible to say, because, as is customary these day, the perpetrators were murdered by the French state. This raises the possibility that the perpetrators might have been employed, not by the Yemenis at all, but by the French state itself. A common characteristic of Arabian guerrilla movements is their eagerness to take credit for things which they did not actually accomplish; meanwhile, the French state had its own reasons both for attacking Charlie Hebdo and for promoting fear and loathing of Muslims. The speed with which the assassins were identified suggests that the French state must have had a good deal of information about what was going on, unless the assassins announced themselves (in which case why did they bother to wear ski-masks?). However, although such speculation is entertaining, it probably should not be assumed to be true.

Charlie Hebdo was engaged in what appears to be another war entirely from the one being waged in Arabia and Mesopotamia (and North and Central and East Africa). This is the war against sacredness, the idea that there are some things which can and should be deemed special by virtue of their very nature. Ridiculing sacred figures such as Mohommed and Jesus is a tactic in this war, which is an extension of the Enlightenment and an attempt to strip the world of any worship at all — except, perhaps, the worship of money and those who possess it. Understandably, pursuing such tactics outrages people whose world revolves around the sacred and who also view the modernisation in the name of the Enlightenment as simply a form of intellectual colonisation — as indeed it usually is.

So, although it might seem absurd to attack a magazine for making rude references to a religious prophet, it probably doesn’t seem so to those who financed the attack or those who launched it. They cannot, after all, get at the drone pilots, safe in the United States, or the other drone operators safe in Djibouti under French protection. They cannot get at the people who order these things in Washington, London or Paris. They can, however, get at people whom they probably conceive of as among the propagandists for a war against the Islamic world. Particularly those ones who do not receive protection (whereas official propagandists certainly would receive such protection, at least better protection than a couple of lightly-armed beat cops.

Still, the attack seems strikingly pointless. It only makes sense if you believe that the enemies of Islam are all essentially the same — that Charlie Hebdo is just one tentacle of an octopus of religious bigotry, and that by slashing at the tentacle you can cause the octopus to wince. In reality, most of the other enemies of Islam in France do not much like Charlie Hebdo. After all, despite its anti-Islamic fervour and its Zionism it still made frequent and pungent criticisms of the French state and the state religion. French leaders are glad to exploit the magazine’s suffering by mobilising anti-Islamic fervour around the massacre. Meanwhile they can delight in the massacre of its journalists and cartoonists; enemies of neoliberal uniformity are dead! Best if all is the fact that the massacre was carried out by Muslim gunmen who, when push comes to shove, were trained, equipped and commanded by forces under the indirect control of the United States which is allied with the neoliberal French state! So the neoliberal state arranges massacres which benefit it, but which it can use to justify its existence and tighten its grip on the throat of the people! What could be more perfect?

Naturally, although the gunmen may have believed in the octopus theory (which is just a mirror-image of white Western conspiracy theories about Muslims fostered by the neoliberal imperialists) their leaders probably did not. They did not believe that the massacre would accomplish anything to reduce the suffering of Muslims in the world. Rather, they believed that it would have two effects useful for them. Firstly, it would fool French Muslims into thinking that someone was sticking up for their interests, thus bringing them more fully under the Sunni-Wahhabi umbrella and thus increasing the tyrannical power of the Saudi dictatorship and its allies. Secondly, it would empower and encourage French Islamophobia, and thus build a sense of paranoia and oppression all around which would not only force French Muslims more fully under the Sunni-Wahhabi umbrella, but also make French Islamophobes and their dupes more subservient to the American anti-Islamic campaign, and thus less critical of neoliberalism. What could be more perfect?

Oh, Creator, you’re such a beastly cynic and conspiracy theorist. What hard evidence have you for all these things? (Disregarding, as one must, the entire tendency of neoliberal foreign policy since at least 1967, that is.)

Well, let’s consider the “We are Charlie” movement. According to the propaganda organs, a million people marched over the weekend in protest against the massacre. That’s an impressive number of people, all in absolute conformity, under the protection and with the encouragement of government officials of course, demonstrating in support of non-conformity and rejection of government. You don’t really believe that, do you? If that were the case, it would be 1968 multiplied (which the founders of Charlie Hebdo would approve, being old soixante-huit veterans themselves) and the government would collapse after the street fighting began.

No, they were marching against these filthy, corrupt Muslims who are seeking to take away our grand freedoms — the ones donated by the benevolent regime which has taken away our working rights, our privacy, our social mobility, our access to the media and our ability to change from one kind of government to another. We may have lost all our rights, but we still have freedoms, which are under threat from Muslims who must be bombed, or something. Maybe we can go fire-bomb a mosque tonight to show how we value our freedoms. The police won’t object.

Notice how much bigger this march was than the march against the Iraq war in London in 2003, and that was big enough (and if Jonathan Steel is to be trusted, was establishment enough). Of course, this is a march without a real objective, because nobody was urging anybody to make any demands or sacrifices or pursue any goals. Just a protest against gunmen shooting journalists, carefully drained of any context. You won’t take part in the march? Good Lord, are you in favour of gunmen shooting journalists? What do you mean, nobody marched against NATO’s murder of Serbian journalists in 1999, or of al-Jazeera journalists in 2001 and 2003? What has that got to do with anything?

It is, in short, a march of delusion. It changes nothing, except that it flings a wet, stinking blanket of conformity over the populace, like one of Napoleon III’s plebiscites. (“Do you support law and order and national harmony? Answer yes or no.”) And of course the current French government, like most governments nowadays, has about the same legitimacy as Napoleon III had.

Would the Saudis be able to turn out similar proportions of people in support of murdering French journalists? Probably. But they don’t need to bother.

Woeful Prospects.

It would be magnificent if some sort of grassroots, effectual alternative to the current pitiful crop of political organisations were to evolve in South Africa. It would be magnificent, but it is not very likely. For that to happen, the organisers would have to develop some kind of political independence from the circumstances in which they find themselves, and that is hardly going to happen all by itself.

Instead, what we are getting is the United Front, as organised (supposedly) by the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa. The United Front, supposedly, is a nationwide organisation, which will be established through People’s Assemblies. This all sounds alarmingly like Occupy Wall Street, although unlike OWS it appears to lack coherence as well as constituency.

The invited representatives to the latest People’s Assembly mostly come from organisations of slightly dubious merit, like Abahlali baseMjondolo, or from political parties which are profoundly questionable, like the United Democratic Movement, or from Trotskyite organisations which are manifestly coat-tail clingers. There are unspecified “faith-based” organisations and “civil society” organisations (and what is their agenda in joining the United Front?) .There are also figures like Moeletsi Mbeki, who bring a big bottle of staunch conservatism, white supremacism and neo-colonialism to the party. These are not figures who inspire confidence that the United Front will be something spectacularly impressive.

What, exactly, does the United Front stand for? It is against neoliberalism and it is against the ANC, but what does it wish to accomplish? Although NUMSA remains committed to the Freedom Charter, the United Front cannot easily accept the document because the Front largely consists of anti-Charterists. It could develop its own set of principles, but that would take a long time and would probably lack substance because at the moment the United Front consists of an extremely wide range of potential supporters, none of whom are obliged to come into the Front and who can thus veto almost any policy which they do not admire.

So this is a political organisation run part-time by a trade union which has not decided what it wants to do with this political organisation, an organisation which has little grassroots support but nevertheless receives much support from elite elements of the conservative or neoliberal chattering class. The organisation has few clear goals apart from hostility to the ANC, and its membership is divided on ideological and class bases. Its leadership lacks legitimacy and also lacks visibility. This all looks depressingly like a repeat of Agang, supposedly on the left rather than the right, but possibly covertly endorsed or even supported by the same people — that is, an elite plutocracy which is out to pretend that South Africans have some kind of electoral choices while running everything behind the scenes.

Even more recently, in about 2006 or so, Zackie Achmat, no doubt acting under orders from Martin Legassick as usual, declared that he was relaunching the United Democratic Front. As he had no idea what the UDF had been, or how to do such things, this “relaunch” was a total failure. So, more recently, have been the various Trotskyite “unity” organisations “set up” in various centres, which invariably fail to attract anyone except other Trotskyites and waterheads. So it was obvious from the beginning that the Trotskyite political advisers which NUMSA was employing were not going to offer much in the way of organisational ability.

Since the above was written, the launch of the United Front has been delayed yet again, while the trade unions which supported NUMSA over the Zwelenzima Vavi debacle and NUMSA’s subsequent expulsion from COSATU have made it clear that they have grave doubts about the United Front — or don’t support it at all.  These two points are not good signs, despite all the efforts by the ruling-class media to talk them up.

The United Front now has a sort of steering committee, although since there is no organisation it is far from clear what the responsibilities and duties of this committee are. Preposterously, Zackie Achmat has been appointed to this committee, suggesting that celebrity (somewhat stale now, however) among the white chattering classes is more important than organisational ability or political consistency. (Achmat is consistent in doing whatever Legassick tells him to do, but this doesn’t amount to much.) Mazibuko Jara, an ex-SACP person active in Cape Town Trotskyite circles (specialising in high-flown meaningless rhetoric) is also there, further showing how the UF is eagerly embracing failure.

But there are people with administrative and real political experience on board as well. Ronnie Kasrils, Thabo Mbeki’s right-hand spook, is there. So is Wayile, the former mayor of Port Elizabeth (apart from the fact that he also has a reputation for being an Mbeki-ite, his main claim to fame is his NUMSA leadership in the province). It’s hard to see how Trotskyites, who hated Mbeki with a passion and collaborated with big business and foreign governments to bring him down, are going to work hand in hand with people who served Mbeki with distinction; the best guess is that Kasrils and Wayile, who have no organisation backing them (unlike Achmat and Jara who have the full force of Western Cape Trotskyism behind them, numbering literally dozens of supporters) are there as fronts and teasers.

Why is the only union in COSATU which had a remotely socialistic agenda, and with any sign of the courage to stand up to the ANC, falling on its face with such a sickening thud? Was this inevitable, or was it a product of failed ideologies, or is it a product of a covert reluctance to challenge the established order? And, of course, what can the rest of us do about it?

This has happened before. Neville Alexander set up the National Forum in the early 1980s with the goal of challenging apartheid by uniting all the Trotskyites and Africanists and anyone else who wasn’t a Charterist under one banner. This made the NF a gathering of bourgeois faux-radicals united only in their hostility to the ANC, and whose anti-apartheid credentials were as feeble as their relations with the working class that they claimed to speak on behalf of. The fact that the organisation was dominated by egomaniacs, of whom Alexander was not the least, didn’t help much. When the revolutionary conditions of early 1984 arose, the NF was left behind in a cloud of dust, feebly squeaking to anyone who would listen that it was not yet time for strenuous action, comrades.

The failure of the kind of politics that NUMSA now stands for, and to some extent stood for back then, was not so disastrous in the early 1980s. In those days there was a clear enemy, and therefore it was comparatively easy to organise resistance. Conditions were favourable; it wasn’t necessary to engage in much political education (although there was a lot more of it then than there is now). When fools set up pirifully unsuitable organisations, there was intelligent and resolute people ready to set up effective organisations to get actual work done. This isn’t really the case now (for all that the EFF have turned out to be, as expected, a great deal better organised, procedurally and popularly, than CoPe were, and may have more staying power depending on what happens at the 2016 elections). The EFF may turn into something effective, but they are nothing like what the ANC and UDF possessed, or even what AZAPO possessed before they pissed it away in the mid-80s.

So, as a result, when disorganised and ineffectual bodies are set up, there is no clear alternative to them. People have to like them or lump them. Because they are so dysfunctional and objectively timid, however, it is more likely that the public will ignore them, perhaps sitting on the sidelines and watching, or perhaps shrugging their shoulders and turning away, rather than doing anything to support them or make them more effectual.

It doesn’t help that the public is barraged night and day with political garbage and consumerist balderdash which dovetails with it. While the most recent Mail and Guardian deals with “the left” (smearing the EFF, uncritically boosting the UF while denouncing Marxism as old-fashioned) the previous one dealt with “narcissism” — which basically in their terms meant becoming obsessed with personal appearance, instant gratification, trivia and electronic communications. It is impossible to be a leftist if one is concerned only with such things, because there is simply more to humanity than such matters. What the consumerist system demands is that individuals turn away from society and from human engagement; the spectacle of young “lovers” sitting across restaurant tables under the silvery moon, gazing smokily into their smartphones while they frantically text people elsewhere who don’t care about them, is both universal and pitiful.

As a result, the general culture, controlled by the plutocracy, naturally serves the interests of the plutocracy and discourages leftist organisation except on the terms of the plutocracy, which is largely anthropological — “isn’t this primitive leftist culture entertaining?” — or opportunistic — “beware, support us uncritically or the evil leftist over there in the corner will nationalise your smartphone!”. The left, thus, is both feeble and co-opted. This needs to be challenged, and it certainly won’t be challenged by noisily repudiating leftist traditions in exchange for occasional headlines, in the manner of most of the leading lights of the UF. In that sense the EFF started out well; the question is whether they will be able to overcome the plutocracy’s recent enthusiasm for supporting the EFF so long as they restrain themselves to activities which serve the plutocracy’s propaganda interests, such as Nkandla and the more trivial aspects of the Marikana massacre.

 

There Is No Decent Place To Stand In A Massacre.

A cluster of concepts, “decency”, “civility” and “the lesser evil” are closely related, widely used and deserve a little analysis and condemnation.

They arise out of contemporary political circumstances. The world is faced with numerous political crises, some real, some exaggerated and some imaginary. In all these cases one has to take a stand, even if the stand one takes is not to take a stand. However, one of the political crises is the collapse of conventional ideological leadership and analysis. Politicians routinely adopt postures which contradict their professed principles and betray their promises. To enable this they couch their propaganda in seemingly apolitical terms — “civilisational” or “religious”. This encourages people to resort to moral concepts which as political as those cultural terms, but are unrecognised as such.

“Decency” implies doing the right and proper thing, the moral thing, or in political terms the “principled” thing. Given a specific predicament, “decency” provides a specific response. However, this response is necessarily guided by cultural assumptions, which are unspoken. “Decency” implies acting more or less without thinking — which is appropriate when instant decisions are needed, as when a house is burning down, but inappropriate in a political context when decisions have consequences a decade or more down the line.

“Civility” requires that whatever one does is conducted in a right and proper fashion, which does not embarrass or outrage others. This has its influence on decent action, because certain actions might embarrass or outrage others and these are therefore to be avoided, even if they are decent, because they are uncivil. However, “civility” is usually taken as applying only to those who are “decent”; those placed outside the pale of “decency” do not deserve “civility”. “Civility” may seem a minor issue because it relates largely to the way in which one talks about actions. Howevwer, in a democratic society talking about actions is a necessary precursor to taking them, so “civility” can be an effective way of controlling actions through discouraging debate.

“The lesser evil” applies where a clearly-defined set of options may be ranked according to their moral legitimacy, but where none of these options is strictly “decent”. One has to choose the least morally bad thing. This is the “decent” thing to do, although the consequences may be indecent in leading to a lot of suffering. Discussing this suffering might not be wholly consistent with “civility”, so too much attention to the “evil” nature of the “lesser evil” is to be discouraged on grounds of civility. Describing someone or someone’s favoured policy as a “lesser evil” still leaves it as “evil”. If one were to constantly pursue “the lesser evil”, however, this would ultimately to strip “evil” of its moral pejorative status and turn “the lesser evil” effectively into good — because no “good” option was present to be discussed.

All these words and phrases, and the context within which they function, are euphemisms of a type specific to the petit-bourgeois class which serve to protect it against the reality within which it is embedded. A shared acceptance of what constitutes “decency” and “civility” is class-based. The petit-bourgeoisie claims to have ethical standards which must be preserved through “decency”. However, the function of the petit-bourgeoisie is to serve the bourgeoisie, which is neither “decent” nor ethical, and either this unethical nature must be denied, or the petit-bourgeoisie must pretend to be separated from the bourgeoisie in its “decency”. Meanwhile, the proletariat, where it has avoided saturation with petit-bourgeoisie propaganda, tends to prefer grub to ethics. Hence strikes tend to turn violent and the language of the working class is often far from “civil” — language which tends to upset the petit-bourgeoisie almost as much as the actions which relate to it.

“Decency” and “civility” imply that there is only one scale on which to judge such things, which is the scale of the person employing the terms. Implicitly, certain cultures and civilizations have greater “decency” and “civility” than others. An obvious example is the horror which various Western commentators express for the practice of cutting off the heads of one’s captives, or of slicing off the clitorises of one’s womenfolk. “We” would certainly not do such things; only “they” do. People who are not “decent” are suggested to be deficient in terms of their culture. That culture can then be condemned (which permits those who own the terms to make further assumptions, and take further actions, against that culture, ending in the reductio ad absurdum of Islamophobia, as in the gatesofvienna website, the manifesto of Andres Breitvik, or the speeches of the Prime Minister of Australia.)

It is not difficult to argue against beheadings or clitoridectomies on a general basis. The problem is rather utilising the concept of “decency” here, for this behaviour is indeed indecent, but (as is widely pointed out) the Western activity of blowing its political opponents into tiny pieces with bombs is not conspicuously more “decent” than the act of beheading. However, one can turn a political opponent into an aerosol by pressing a button, whereas the videoed beheadings entail knives, axes and cleavers, and blood on the floor instead of on faraway sandy plains which are not foregrounded in the media. In other words, “decency” entails “civility” by suppressing consciousness of unpleasant things.

The West does not cut off women’s clitorises any more. but there are numerous ways in which women suffer suppression or control of the behaviour which they wish to undertake. This control is not usually physical, but it is nevertheless very visible — as, for instance, in the bizarre policies of the American extreme right which has pursued hostility to abortion on demand to the point of becoming increasingly hostile to contraception. The fact that this is possible shows that the fear of, and desire for the control of, female sexuality in the West is quite widespread. Moreover, although Western liberalism purports to allow absolute freedom for women, much of that freedom is in fact closely channeled in order to turn women into men with female genitalia, or alternatively, into sex objects for masculine entertainment.

What this points to is not praise for head-chopping or condemnation for feminism, but rather, to a desperate need to look closely at the ideas and motives which lie behind behaviour which Westerners are encouraged to see as indecent, or indeed utterances which we are encouraged to see as uncivil. Chopping off heads is a terror tactic, exactly like any other tactic intended to instil terror, such as necklacing; it is a weapon of the weak intended to frighten the strong. Clitoridectomy is a male project to curb female sexuality, and also to stamp male control over culture; justifying it through Islamic culture (though there is nothing about it in the Quran) ensures that misogyny receives the sanction of the male Islamic clergy.

Condemn these things on the basis of received ideas is undesirable because anything can be condemned on the basis of such ideas — homosexuality, Christianity or whatever. It is much more sensible to ask whether the goals are generally desirable or the means effectual. For instance, even if the conquest of the Fertile Crescent by Wahhabis were desirable, cutting off the heads of infidels is unlikely to serve that goal, since it attracts violent assaults from powerful infidels elsewhere. (This is probably the reason why the head-chopping is happening, since the bosses of the head-choppers are probably Americans.). It is also arguably desirable that women be allowed to exercise their sexuality as freely as they wish to, and if they must be collectively curbed from doing so, cutting off bits of their bodies is a grotesque way of doing it which is surely culturally unsustainable. Thus it is possible to argue against these behaviours without making extreme cultural assumptions — it is possible to start a debate, one which the proponents of beheading and clitoridectomy would probably not wish to engage in because they couldn’t possibly win.

However, the concept of “decency” reduces its proponents to the same level as that of the proponents of beheading and clitoridectomy. It is a way of avoiding discussion, of rushing those who accept the concept into action without debate — except for the simple debate over “are these people just like us?” with the unspoken corollary that if they are not, they deserve to die. “Decency”, then, is a call for a crusade.

“Civility”, in its turn, is a device for refusing to question the need for a crusade. It is always proper, in a debate, to maintain some kind of standard of behaviour beyond which you should not go; it is not proper, in a game of chess, to pull out a pistol and shoot your opponent if you see your defeat looming a few moves hence, because nobody would play chess against you under such circumstances. But this kind of actual civility serves to further debate, not to suppress it. The use of “civility” amounts to changing the subject from substantive issues to non-substantive ones, and the question arising out of this is why substantive issues are not to be discussed.

A good example is the recent Salaita case in the United States, where a university professor was fired from his university for making extremely rude comments on Twitter about the Israeli attack on Gaza. The university argued that the professor was not meeting the requirements of “civility”, which would presumably require him to establish #IDFrjollywellnotcricket, or some such more courteous hashtag. By discussing whether Salaita was being sufficiently “decent” towards psychopathic racist murderers, the people criticising Salaita were changing the subject away from whether psychopathic racist murder should be condemned. (Most of the people supporting the campaign against Salaita are strongly in favour of psychopathic racist murder so long as it is conducted by Jews. On the other hand, the University’s motive seems to have been a desire to attract money to the campus by establishing itself as an anti-Palestinian and pro-Zionist entity. Many commentators have been uncivil and indecent enough to mention these facts.)

Locally, we have an obvious example in the behaviour of the EFF in Parliament when President Zuma addressed the National Assembly. The EFF were extremely uncivil to President Zuma, accusing him of defrauding the public and demanding that he pay back the proceeds of his fraud. The Parliamentary Speaker explained that it was unkind to make such abhorrently truthful remarks and demanded that they be withdrawn in the name of “civility”, whereupon the EFF became positively crude and vulgar and the police were called. “Civility”, here, was being used to protect a criminal from being exposed as such; the rules of Parliament were being employed so as to undermine the interests of the voting public.

What has such things to do with the “lesser evil”? The argument here seems intended as a last gatekeeper to capture those who are not entrapped by the former concepts. “Lesser evil” acknowledges that the system is rotten, for it says that the choices are all evil — in which case, by the laws of “decency”, we should bomb them, or at least withdraw all goodwill from them. However, one then says that it is our duty to select the evil which is least evil — first do no harm. This sounds reasonable. So, in America, one should always vote Democrat, despite the party’s evil, because if one does not, the still more evil Republicans will win. In Britain one should always vote Labour, despite the party’s evil, because if one does not, the still more evil Tories will win. In South Africa, one should always vote ANC, despite the party’s evil, because if one does not, the still more evil DA will get in.

You see through the concept of “decency” and realise that it is a scam to hide corruption; you see through the concept of “uncivility” which stops you from discussing corruption — but then you run up against your duty to act; you must restrict yourself to supporting the option which will do less harm than the other. The question is, why? Why support only that option? Why are you supporting that option when so many other people think that the Republicans or the Tories or the DA are actually the “lesser evil”, presumably on the basis of their own concepts of “decency”? Why be so carefully “civil” and refrain from condemning evil as evil, whether it be little or big?

This is the question which is not to be asked, and which concepts such as this discourage people from asking. And this is how we are taught to be subordinated. And this is what we ought to struggle against — indecently, uncivilly, and for the greater good.

Aims and Objectives During Zuma’s Decline.

Because of the extraordinary mendacity of the ruling-class propaganda organs, it is difficult for many to understand what is going on — which is, of course, the goal, since if you don’t know what’s happening you are unlikely to do anything effective about it.

What happened at Mangaung was that Zuma dealt with a nascent minor rebellion in his party using his customary method, which was purges, thus (as he thought) ensuring that he would not face the kind of serious rebellion which Mbeki faced in the run-up to Polokwane. Zuma’s purge was cheered to the echo by the ruling-class propaganda organs. Why? Obviously, because it favoured them especially.

The big change brought in at Mangaung was that Motlanthe was replaced by Ramaphosa, while Mantashe remained where he was. (As for other posts, they count for nothing, being dispensible.) Motlanthe had to go because he was concerned for the interests of the ANC — that after five years the country was increasingly unhappy that Zuma had broken all his promises and that Zuma’s socio-economic policies were destructive for the interests of the general public. Motlanthe feared that the ANC’s electoral support would continue to slide unless the ANC adopted newer policies, and also recognised that the ANC Youth League was clamouring for precisely those policies — which was why the Youth League had to go, as far as Zuma was concerned. Motlanthe was duly purged, the Youth League went, and the ANC’s electoral support slipped.

Ramaphosa, however, is much more a ruling-class man than Motlanthe, who has a certain loyalty to the ANC. Ramaphosa’s primary loyalty is to the mining industry and its white foreign barons. Therefore he is beloved of the ruling-class propaganda organs. This means there is a fundamental split between Zuma and Ramaphosa, one which cannot be bridged — because Zuma’s primary loyalty is to himself, to save himself from losing power and going to jail. Ramaphosa could initially be trusted to act against Zuma’s short-term enemies because this served the ruling-class agenda which Zuma was following. However, he has now become Zuma’s main enemy, and it is very difficult for Zuma to act against him since Ramaphosa is backed by Zuma’s principal backers.

This explains why the ruling-class propaganda organs are attacking Zuma with so much more energy than they did before Mangaung. Back then, Zuma was a stick with which to beat the ANC, but he was also the ruling-class puppet in government. Now he is an obstacle to the installation of a still more compliant ruling-class puppet. The object of the ruling-class is to foment hostility to Zuma to the point at which there is a palace revolution against him, presumably before 2017 when Ramaphosa will undoubtedly be installed as President of the ANC. Mantashe, Zuma’s grey eminence, has been promised the Deputy Presidency in exchange for stabbing Zuma in the back. Once Zuma is deposed, Ramaphosa will inevitably take over — and as a result of yet another destructive sequence of purges within the ANC, he will be in a very weak position, even more dependent on ruling-class structures than Zuma was. It’s a win-win situation.

The reason for all this is that Zuma is intensely unpopular, but also that policies which Zuma opposes are intensely popular. Therefore, the danger is that Zuma might be removed by force of popular hostility in order to install sound policies by force of popular acclaim. Putting Ramaphosa in place makes it possible to avoid this; the ruling-class can exploit popular hostility to Zuma and shout along with the crowds denouncing him, because they know that when he goes their man will smoothly step into power and the real reasons why the crowds were attacking Zuma will never be addressed.

All this means that those trying to bring about a better life for all in South Africa will have to be very careful indeed. The ruling-class is not stupid, or at least its agents are not, and blundering around behind them, which is the customary policy of the South African left, can only lead to disaster.

Things have become simpler, however. It now seems very unlikely that NUMSA will go ahead and set up its new political party. The reasons seem to be that NUMSA’s alliance with the Trotskyites was an opportunistic issue, in which NUMSA’s goal was to threaten the ANC with a walkout unless and until Vavi was reinstated. Now that Vavi has been reinstated the smoke which was coming out of NUMSA’s “locomotive of history” turns out to have been computer-generated, and neither NUMSA nor the Trotskyites have any real intention of moving down the tracks. It was all posturing from start to finish. It remains possible that COSATU might purge NUMSA or some of its leadership, in which case the posturing will start again — but such inconsistent behaviour is not going to win NUMSA any points with the public.

So we are left with the Economic Freedom Fighters as the only force resisting Zuma on any effective or principled level. The ruling-class propaganda organs have an ambiguous attitude towards the EFF; on one hand they are represented as a positive force because they are anti-ANC, but on the other hand they are represented as unseemly, undignified and unfit to take seriously, because they are not under ruling-class control and their agenda is as completely opposed to ruling-class desires as is the agenda of almost everybody else not on the ruling-class payroll. In other words they are a threat because they represent a far greater force than their showing in the 2014 election would suggest.

It is true that the EFF behave in a self-indulgent way sometimes, as do almost all radical forces in South Africa. Notwithstanding, they are preparing their provincial congresses. Provided that this is not going to turn out as chimeric as NUMSA’s political party (or as the hilarious chaos of the ANC Youth League’s provincial congresses) the EFF will democratically legitimate its leadership within the next few months, resolve any problems with its structures, and put itself administratively on track towards contesting the 2016 municipal elections — elections in which it will very probably do a great deal better than it did in 2014, especially if it is able to exploit the incessant uprisings against corrupt and incompetent ANC municipal governments. (The DA has never been able to exploit these uprisings because it is terrified of such radicalism, but also because ultimately the DA supports corruption and incompetence when it favours ruling-class interests, as it does in municipal areas; the DA wants to cut subsidies to small black municipalities and bad service delivery provides a pretext for this.)

Therefore, the EFF may see itself a rapidly-growing force. But what is its objective to be? Its activities in Parliament have focussed on two important issues: attacking Zuma and attacking Ramaphosa. This may seem to be unduly personalised behaviour, but in the context it makes excellent sense.

Granted, Zuma and Nkandla are trivial matters in the great game of class warfare in which the EFF are engaged — but keeping Zuma weak is important because at the moment Zuma is the ruling-class agent securing elite control over the polity. Therefore there is no harm in attacking him on grounds provided by the ruling-class organs. Most particularly, there is benefit in attacking him within the context of the “parliamentary” and “constitutional” structures set up by the elite to prevent real political debate or progress. The EFF’s attack on Zuma through a defiance of parliamentary and constitutional rules calls those rules into question and thus calls into question the elite’s suppression of debate and dissent.

The same is true, even more so, in the EFF’s attacks on Ramaphosa. Once again it may be said that the EFF, like the “Marikana Support Committee”, is being unfair and even childish in linking Ramaphosa with the Marikana massacre. There is actually no evidence that Ramaphosa had anything to do with that massacre; he was out of government at the time, and nobody could seriously pretend that Ramaphosa had any influence over Lonmin’s platinum mining operations (or any other aspect of the mining industry — the influence is all the other way).

However, Marikana is in the news; for reasons of its own, the ruling-class decided to make an issue of it, and in the run-up to Mangaung, Dali Mpofu decided to attack Ramaphosa, using material presumably leaked to him from ruling-class sources. Possibly the elite wished to remind Ramaphosa that just as they were making him, they could break him, and therefore allowed Mpofu’s attacks to receive considerable uncriticised coverage. This, however, means that the elite cannot effectually challenge the attacks being made on Ramaphosa, which therefore leave him discredited in the public eye. (Not that this matters from the elite’s perspective, since it leaves Ramaphosa more dependent on them than ever.) Attacking Ramaphosa on this relatively spurious basis, therefore, serves to direct public hostility at Ramaphosa and thus makes it a little easier to mobilise support against him within the ANC — even though, of course, Mantashe can easily protect him against any hostility expressed through ANC structures.

But perhaps not so much as in the past. A Zuma-Ramaphosa battle would already be a bruising and damaging struggle. However, the ANC is much more fragmented than in the past. The provincial structures are chaotic. The ANCYL scarcely exists. The Women’s League is spayed, and the Military Veterans’ League, led as it is by a deserter who turns out to have been a former chef, is simply a joke. The SACP is insignificant, and COSATU deeply divided. Into all this potential conflict, throw a massive groundswell against Ramaphosa, and we have the possibility that in the run-up to the 2017 Conference the party might actually disintegrate. This, surely, is what the EFF is banking on — and provided that the EFF does well enough in the 2016 municipal elections (even just doubling its support-base might be good enough — two figures is always more impressive than one), it might be able to exploit the crisis and perhaps unite the bulk of the dissenting ANC supporters under its banner in a special general election and win a plurality. In which case, there might be hope.

The only danger is that the EFF might get bogged down in trivia — in focussing on Nkandla and Marikana, not as symptoms of what the government is doing wrong, nor as tools of political propaganda, but as ends in themselves. If it falls into this trap it will be doing the ruling-class’s work for it. We must hope that behind the scenes some serious political debate and analysis is going on, and that in the fullness of time, perhaps at the national conference, the EFF will provide a real revolutionary way out of our national crisis.

I Go Chop Your Naira.

Last April the globe was shaken to its foundations, or at least the roots of its bleached hair, by the news that Nigeria had finally Made It Big. Their economy had surged ahead of South Africa’s and become Number One in Africa. The Economist was delighted that “sluggish, complacent South Africa” had been defeated by the new go-ahead country. News24, never slow to attack South Africa on any basis, quoted a U.S. economist from Bumhole College, Colohoma, who explained that Nigeria’s triumph was entirely due to the fact that it had privatised its electricity generation (hint, hint, ESCOM).

There were, however, a few problems identified. While the Economist explained that hordes of foreign companies were investing in Nigeria, it failed to explain that two of the ones it cited (SABMiller and Shoprite) were South African companies (ignoring another, MTN). It also noted that the Nigerian government was incapable of collecting taxes (although the Economist‘s neoliberal philosophy does not see that as a problem). Nigerian society is of course deeply corrupt and the economy largely runs on oil. But who worries about such issues when the economy is surging with a tremendous surge, like the effects of the world’s biggest suppository?

Or is it?

The CIA World Factbook gives Nigeria’s 2013 GDP as $502 billion. The World Bank says $522 billion. The United Nations says $262 billion. These are supposedly experts, and yet one body gives a figure twice as big as the other. In contrast, the South African 2013 GDP ranges between the World Bank estimate of $350 billion and the UN’s $384 billion. That’s a range of only 10%. It seems, then, that the figures are unreliable. Perhaps this explains why Nigerian GDP inflates and South African GDP deflates according to the degree of US control of the observer.

The 2013 revenues and expenditures are probably more measurable. In 2013, according to the CIA, South African revenues were $88 billion, expenditures $105 billion. (Oddly enough, Wikipedia’s figures for 2011 are, respectively, $102 billion and $118 billion; reflecting a dramatic fall in currency value in two years.) In 2013, according to the CIA, Nigerian revenues were $24 billion and expenditures $31 billion; the 2011 Wikipedia figures are $23 billion and $31 billion, suggesting that Nigeria’s much higher inflation rate than South Africa’s, and the even more dramatic fall in currency value there, is not being accommodated. Or perhaps Nigeria’s figures are guesstimates. Who can say? By these figures Nigeria’s tax revenue is somewhere between a third and a quarter of South Africa’s — although its budget deficit manages to be about half of South Africa’s. How does a country so much richer than South Africa acquire so little revenue from its wealth?

Nigeria’s sudden surge is supposedly due to “telecoms, banking and the Nollywood film industry”, according to the Economist. These were apparently not counted in the economy previously. Apparently, Nigeria didn’t count its banks and its phone companies and its movie industry as part of the economy. But banks are the ones who are employed to do the counting. Nigeria is extremely, and unjustifiably, proud of its horrible film industry. Thanks to South African investment, Nigerian telecoms have been growing rapidly (though sending income to Johannesburg rather than to Lagos). It’s not credible that a country which seriously wished to assess its national income would ignore these elements. This suggests that the surge in economic clout is essentially smoke and mirrors. (Banks are very well equipped to rig the system, while telecommunications were the source of the fraudulent dot-com boom, and of course movies are all about illusions.)

Nigeria is a significant country. Its population is over three times South Africa’s. It therefore has great potential to overtake South Africa. However, by global economic orthodoxy its economy ought not to be growing, because that orthodoxy says that corruption and protectionism prevent economic growth, and Nigeria has both. Realistically, with such an insignificant government revenue the government can do little to stimulate economic growth. But in the first decade of the century, according to a wholly unreliable website called indexmundi (let us pretend that such a website is reliable, for it probably presents the picture which big business and NATO approve of), there was an astonishing surge in Nigerian growth:

 

Year	Growth rate
2001	8.164
2002	21.177
2003	10.335
2004	10.585
2005	5.393
2006	6.211
2007	6.972
2008	5.984
2009	6.96
2010	8.724
Average:	9.051

 

That’s impressive. It’s odd, though, that it swings so rapidly from 21% down to 10% and then to 5%, and then back up — almost as if the figures were being manipulated. There are other useful figures — the naira/$ exchange rate, which is hard to fiddle, and the inflation rate, which is easily fiddled, and which most countries underestimate. (Starting with 1999, the last year when the official exchange rate was pegged at 21.89).

 

 

Year	Naira to dollar	Inflation rate	Decline in Naira
1999	21.89 (88-90 PM)	6.618
2000	85.98 (105.00 PM)	6.938	~75%
2001	99-106 (104-122 PM)	18.869	~19%
2002	109-113 (122-140 PM)	12.883	~6%
2003	114-127 (135-137 PM)	14.033	~11%
2004	127-130 (137-144 PM)	15.001	~2%
2005	132-136	17.856	~4%
2006	128.50-131.80	8.218	~-4%
2007	120-125	5.413	~-2%
2008	115.50-120	11.581	~0%
2009	145-171	12.543	30%
Average inflation	11.814

 

So the naira roughly halved in value between 2000 (when its value collapsed by 75%, to what the black-market value had previously been) and 2009. Not exactly Zimbabwean-scale collapse, but unimpressive by any standard. And, with an average inflation of almost 12% (if Nigeria is like every other country in the world, this is doubtless an underestimate), one would expect an even greater fall; doubtless some currency juggling was keeping the value of the naira higher than it deserved to be. But, compared to South Africa, Nigeria’s performance is pitiable. Such comparisons are never made, even though virtually all the unjustified praise of the Reserve Bank relates to currency value. Instead we are constantly told how terrible our country’s inflation performance is and how weak and unstable our currency is. If such things are really important, Nigeria ought to be in the toilet instead of having stellar economic growth which, somehow, nevertheless, does not lead to the country looking any richer than it ever did, or being able to build its own infrastructure or win a war against raggle-taggle insurgents in the north-east.

So what conclusions can we draw from this? Predominantly, that we don’t know whether South Africa or Nigeria is the biggest economy in Africa, and we have no means of finding out because the sources of information are unreliable. However, it looks very much as if the South African statistics are more reliable than the Nigerian, and therefore as if South Africa might still be ahead (whatever that means — probably very little). After all, the surge is supposed to have happened at a time when the world’s economy was in a weak position, while West Africa was in economic and political chaos as a result of the Ivory Coast and Libyan wars, and Nigeria itself was engaged in a rapidly-expanding war in its north-east. This is a surprising occasion for an economic surge coming from nowhere and driven by no sign of substantial investment.

Why, then, was there no scepticism whatsoever about the rise of the Nigerian colossus? There seem to be two reasons. One is that the South African media and its attendant pundits have no desire or will to challenge Western propaganda, and the West persistently wishes to attack South Africa — as with the recent ludicrous fuss about the supposed refusal of a visa for the Dalai Lama, which led to the cancellation of a loathesome conference (of “Nobel Peace Laureates”, i.e. of psychopaths, mass murderers and useful idiots of Western imperialism) which had been set up for the specific purpose of being cancelled, so as to smear South Africa and China. (Similarly with the smear campaign against Russia launched with the false claims about Russian nuclear power plants being built in South Africa, which the Leader of the Opposition shrieked about as if Kremlin agents were waddling around Pretoria with fur hats and snow on their boots.)

Another is that the South African establishment has a great deal of disdain for South Africa, and therefore loves to find material to use against it. The apparent goal of the South African establishment is to make South Africa more like Nigeria — with a weak government, an all-powerful corporate elite, gigantic inequality and total subservience to Western capitalist imperialism. It is nice that they have found such an example to emulate, especially since the black South African bourgeoisie has bought into the whole horrid mess.

All sane people can do is hope that in the real world things will be different.

Problematising the Left (IV): The Loss of Realism.

If one reads George Orwell as a leftist instead of as a neoconservative or a liberal (the images which current propaganda provide for him) one comes across two very interesting aspects of his work.

Towards the end of Homage to Catalonia, Orwell talks about the compromise with which the war would inevitably end due to the Republican government’s refusal to adopt revolutionary tactics. He was writing in 1937, after having fought with the POUM militia on the Huesca front and in the Barcelona street-fighting, and it was understandable that he had a parochial attitude to the war. Still, he understood fascist ideology; he had no excuse for imagining that the fascists would compromise if they were winning. He was simply so angry with the Stalinists for their behaviour in crushing what remained of the revolutionary movement in Catalonia (although, as Trotsky rightly pointed out, that revolutionary movement essentially connived at its own crushing) that he couldn’t see the Stalinist obsession with class compromise and alliance-building was very different from the Fascist agenda.

A related matter appears in several of Orwell’s essays between the publication of Homage and the outbreak of World War II, and also appears in diluted form in the novel Coming Up For Air. This is Orwell’s profound hostility to militarisation. In the novel it takes the form of the bomb accidentally dropped by a British bomber on manoeuvres on a British town. In the essays it takes the form of hostility to arms manufacturing, conscription and regimentation, which are persistently gibed at or denounced.

Orwell understood that fascism was planning war, but believed that this would be an imperialist war between capitalists and super-capitalists (the latter being the fascists). Therefore he did not want either side to win; rather, he wanted the capitalists to be overthrown in a socialist revolution, after which the socialists would defeat the fascists. The stronger the capitalists were, the more difficult it would be to overthrow them; therefore they should not be armed. Besides, Orwell convinced himself, the capitalists might sell out to the fascists, in which case all that weaponry would be used to crush the social revolution.

This isn’t a completely absurd assumption, but it turned out to be a disastrous one, because it assumes that the war at home is more important than foreign aggression. If Orwell’s desires had been fulfilled, Britain would have been conquered by the Nazis in 1940 and Orwell would have ended in a concentration-camp. (Orwell delivered brilliant rhetorical attacks on his own position during the 1940-42 period, especially in Partisan Review and Tribune, denouncing pacifism and anarchism in terms which he privately admitted to be unfair — sometimes in apologetic letters to the people whom he was attacking.) Orwell’s assumption seems to have underpinned a great deal of the left’s inchoate hostility to rearmament during the period.

It is sometimes claimed that this was all the fault of the Communists, but up until the Nazi-Soviet Pact the Communists strongly supported resistance to fascism, and some of the most powerful proponents of the anti-force line came from the anarchist and far-left movements who were also opposed to the Communists. If the left were unwilling to struggle against fascism, did they believe that fascism was a paper tiger, as Orwell seemed to have felt (against all evidence) immediately after his return from Spain? Did they simply think that the whole struggle was game, in which the rhetorical point-scoring of a badly-chaired party branch meeting counted for just as much as the conquest of the Sudetenland or Catalonia? Were they, in short, cut off from reality? Orwell later, bitterly, referred to much of the left as “masturbatory”, and the appellation seems appropriate to the times.

Fast-forward to the 1980s in South Africa and one sees something quite similar. The apartheid regime was trying to legitimise its rule by co-opting a black elite into serving as subordinates for the white elite. This was quite obvious, resembling what had happened in the late 1970s in Rhodesia and Namibia. Meanwhile, although in some ways apartheid repression was relaxing (for instance, in terms of censorship) numerous political leaders were disappearing or dying mysteriously, detention without trial was intensifying, and after 1984 the army was increasingly used to suppress demonstrations, while the country was placed under emergency rule after 1985. The left had an ideological duty to oppose apartheid (especially because it was increasingly conniving with multinational capital) whereas if the left failed to do this, apartheid was breeding a death-squad state which would surely crush the left in the way that it was being crushed in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, as everybody on the left knew.

But much of the left was conspicuously not struggling against the apartheid state or its minions. The elements of the National Forum — the Trotskyites around Neville Alexander, the Black Consciousness proponents of AZAPO and the various other groupings which joined or associated themselves with this movement (such as the PAC) — were not running around organising rebellions, boycotts or anything of the kind. On the contrary, they were condemning rebellions, breaking consumer boycotts, calling for people to break strikes and cross picket lines, and sometimes physically attacking members of organisations who were rebelling, boycotting and striking. Simultaneously, however, they were producing documents which proved that their own political line was infinitely more anti-apartheid than the line taken by those supporting the Freedom Charter, and also that whereas the Charterists were merely non-racist, they were anti-racist, and therefore they ought to be supported.

Why were they doing these things? They believed that their political positions were the correct ones, whereas the Charterists were incorrect. Therefore they felt that it was more important to ensure that the correct political positions prevailed rather than allowing the incorrect ones to prevail, even if that meant delaying virtually all political activity until the incorrect political position could be demobilised and defeated. They were pretending that resolving the political differences between themselves and the Charterists were more important than either getting rid of apartheid or defending the left against a potential massacre.

How could anyone sustain such a nonsensical position? This was done by demonising the Charterists in order to glorify themselves. Specifically, the National Forum contended that the Charterists were essentially in league with the whites because they were not as anti-white as the PAC and AZAPO pretended to be, and that the Charterists were essentially in league with the capitalists because they were not as anti-capitalist as the Trotskyites around Neville Alexander pretended to be. (In reality, the former were less anti-white, and the latter much less anti-capitalist, than they claimed. Alexander was the toast of the liberal white community, and the white liberal media constantly tried to promote AZAPO and the PAC as alternatives to the ANC. In the end this was a rhetorical distinction which the National Forum elevated into the status of a doctrine.)

Again, the term “masturbatory” does not seem inappropriate; the far left in South Africa at the time were fantasising in order to give themselves pleasure. This was obvious to the Charterists, who developed a deep contempt for the National Forum supporters (having earlier been willing to work with them during the period of the tricameral constitution referendum of 1983). More to the point, it meant that the National Forum opposed every anti-apartheid initiative and thus became irredeemably tainted with suspicion of being actually pro-apartheid, and of professing radical positions while actually holding reactionary ones. From this it was not far to concluding that the Africanists and Trotskyites were apartheid agents, a notion naturally congenial to the Charterist leadership and especially to the SACP, who particularly hated Trotskyism because of Martin Legassick’s failed coup against them in the 1970s. This simultaneously made the conflict between the Charterists and the far left more bitter, and ensured that the far left would lose support which it never subsequently regained because it was trapped within its negative posture.

What do these examples tell us about the contemporary realistic attitude of the far left? Logically speaking, the far left should be in a stronger position than it has been in for many decades. The SACP and most of the leadership of COSATU, for long the bellwethers of the Charterist left, have utterly discredited themselves as leftists and are simply providers of patronage — which enables them to hang on to their leadership positions but ensures the erosion of their popular support. The neoliberal business elite has largely wrecked the economy, trapping it in a low-wage, low-productivity, low-investment neocolonial mode, and its control of the government ensures that this will continue while the government only discredits itself further. It is obviously time for alternatives, and the far left can make huge play from providing them. Indeed, most of the success of the EFF, despite its inchoate policies and its problematic organisation, derives from this obvious point.

However, it is also obvious that precisely because the people have been repeatedly betrayed by their leaders, they are not going to simply support an alternative automatically. What if the person providing the alternative is a huckster, as so often in the past? What if the alternative provided turns out to be a pyramid scheme, or a system for siphoning cash into the pockets of the elite, as so often in the past (and particularly in the present). Why throw the rascals out, only to throw the other rascals in? It’s a question endlessly asked by those facing precisely the same problem all over the world.

So the far left has to show that it has a solid ground in reality and in what the people want, and here, it seems, the far left has floated away from the shore, way out of its depth, clutching concrete lifebelts.

The far left appears convinced that the masses support it and that the government is unpopular. Therefore it is not necessary to persuade the masses of anything, or indeed to provide a serious alternative to government policy. The far left has also bought into the 1960s Trotskyite concept that the masses are necessarily more radical than the leaders — a notion necessary to sidestep the “vanguardist” Leninist notion that the leaders have to educate the masses into radicalism — and therefore that a revolutionary situation always exists.

As a result, the far left has offered its support for service delivery protests and for the platinum-belt strike (interestingly the far left offered much more unconditional support for this strike than for the NUMSA strike even though the NUMSA strike was conducted by a union actively cooperating with the far left). The problem with this support is that it is support for reformist initiatives which do not in any way further the organisational or political interests of the far left. Of course such support could be used to build organisations and disseminate political ideas, but the far left has not been doing this — and as a result the platinum-belt strike benefited only the highly dubious union AMCU, while service delivery protests serve, as usual, the interests of local ANC politicians who organise them.

On the other hand, the far left also supports whatever anti-ANC campaign is available. Sometimes this entails wildly exaggerating the significance of very small local initiatives which sympathise, or pretend to sympathise, with the far left. Very often, however, this entails collaborating with right-wing anti-ANC initiatives which ultimately serve neoliberal goals, simply because this collaboration gives the far left an easy opportunity for a mention in a reactionary newspaper article. (The far left also is fond of utilising mendacious discourse around such issues as “democracy”, which the far left does not conspicuously support in practice.)

As a result the far left continues to have the reputation of being possibly closet neoliberals but undeniably untrustworthy for any serious purpose, while simultaneously arousing the hostility of local ANC supporters by their support for local anti-ANC initiatives. Hence the far left gains no reliable support at any level from these campaigns. The problem is compounded by the inability of the far left to combine; the far left in Gauteng, Johannesburg and Cape Town seems incapable of any effectual union, and even within those areas, egotistical leaders of tiny organisations insist on their own independence, probably so as to appropriate the funds flowing in from abroad (not only the Rosa Luxemburg-Stiftung, but also, much more problematically, the Open Society Foundation which has links with the US State Department.)

If the far left were realistic, they would be more homogeneous and their policies would be consistent instead of being opportunistic to the point of incoherence. If they were realistic, they would be much more effective, and would have a chance of growing. Unfortunately, if they were realistic they would have to acknowledge that they have a long way to go before building a real organisation (which has been blindingly obvious for forty years). It seems that most prefer to live in a dream-world in which such organisation is unnecessary and in which they are always-already victorious, and always-already robbed of the fruits of their victory by the evil ANC. It is largely a replay of the 1980s or of the 1930s, except that there is little evidence that anyone else, whether the Tories or the ANC, will step in to save the country from the neoliberal capitalist elite whom the far left consistently either ignore or pander to.

Problematising the Left (III): What Causes The Disconnect?

There is surely no reason to become a leftist for the money or the power. Nor is there a good reason to become a leftist in order to support the established elite. Therefore we can assume that bribery or good connections are not in themselves reasons why leftists come to support imperialism or plutocratic capitalism.

Still, they do. The previous couple of posts demonstrates this in some cases, and there are many more. The “neoconservative” movement in the United States, and the “New Labour” movement in Britain, rely heavily on former far-leftists who have shifted to reactionary positions. The reasons are obviously not simply idiosyncratic — the occasional intellectual who happens to have psychological problems, as one could argue that Arthur Koestler did. There are too many cases for that. Hence it must be some sort of problem arising out of some ideological assumptions or organisational circumstances related to the left.

It is tempting to see this as an epiphenomenon of the collapse of Communism; certainly that event did immense harm to the self-confidence of actual Marxists. (Nearly three decades later people like David Harvey are terrified of being overly prescriptive for fear of seeming Stalinist.) On the other hand, a lot of the people who are in this space, like most organised Trotskyites (and their predecessors) were always opposed to the USSR and the Communist Party (and are currently opposed to the Chinese government). So that might be a contributing factor for many, but not the sole or even the most important one.

Perhaps it is a more complex variant of such an epiphenomenon, however. The collapse of Communism meant the collapse of left-wing disciplined organisation, the collapse of confidence in the idea that socialism could be attained by the efforts of a massive phalanx of intellectuals and activists backed by the gigantic fist of the working class. Under such conditions all that was needed was unanimity around the correct line, which usually turned out to be the line provided by the Central Committee who received it from the Chairman, and which usually turned out to be the wrong line, so that the entire party and its allies marched together towards disaster. It is easy to see why this kind of political activism lost its attractiveness once it lost power — although in practice, despite their disavowals of it and their endless blather about democracy, most left-wing organisations adopt strikingly similar techniques.

But these techniques do not work without a tight-knit organisation backed by a powerful guiding ideology. Therefore left-wing organisations fragment and their members see themselves in individualist terms rather than in collectivist terms. Therefore again, such members, having adopted left-wing principles, feel no organisational or ideological allegiance. Nothing overrides their private opinions, as it does in an organised political movement; there is no sense of “Well, I don’t really like this, but I’ll do it for the good of the cause”.

In the contemporary world, this is particularly problematic because the overwhelming propaganda of the neoliberal reactionary movement is everywhere. Thus on one hand such individualistic leftists are in danger of buying into the propaganda inadvertently, and on the other hand, because they are individuals and lack collective support, they are in danger of adopting the position that since the propaganda is overwhelming and there is no visible sign of an alternative, some kind of compromise is necessary and even sensible. This compromise would probably take the form of accepting some of the policies of the neoliberals while rejecting (or pretending to reject) others. This is exactly what the social democrats did, and it proved to be suicidal; the left condemned them only, seemingly, to fall victim to the same disastrous practices.

So the left is not only organisationally dissipated, but its members are liable to become stealth supporters of the current oppressive and exploitative regime. This is not the same as the way in which non-members of left-wing organisations have always flitted in and out; people who impulsively decided to join a radical movement and then equally impulsively decided to leave were leftists before they joined and remained leftists afterward. What seems to be happening now, however, is that many leftists are finding ways to cease to be leftists after they have become dedicated leftists, and therefore use their existing leftist techniques to pursue their no-longer-leftist policies, while continuing to pretend to be leftists! What we have, therefore, is a flood of Koestlers rather than Burnhams; a flood of people who insist that their socialist god has not failed, but who, when you look inside their temple, turn out to be worshipping the golden calf with a cartoon of Marx sellotaped onto its face.

Since these people don’t know that they are frauds, because they are fooling themselves, they are convincingly self-righteous, and many who see through them are repelled from the whole left, deeming this a typical characteristic — which all too often it is.

Another problem which may help account for the curious disconnect of the left from sane or healthy political standpoints is its state of being frozen in time. There is a sense in which the left’s lack of faddishness is healthy. Admittedly, the left does have its own intellectual fashions, certain ideas or patterns of ideas which are (or were, back when the left was more coherent) in vogue from time to time. However, for much of the history of the left there was a strong sense of not being fooled by the accident of contemporary circumstances. Believing that they were in touch with a historical movement which might take centuries to work out but which would almost certainly end up in their favour — a coherent popular exponent of this was Jack London in The Iron Heel — they did not allow themselves to be distracted by momentary issues whether these were for or against them. (Of course, this was taken to mad extremes by the Stalinists, who didn’t allow trifling problems like the suppression of the German Communist Party to distract them into focussing much serious attention on the Nazis until it was much too late.)

But today the left takes this to even more of an extreme. Louis Proyect, for instance, refers to those who choose to support the Eastern Ukrainian resistance (or at least condemn the imperialist project which installed the junta in power in Kiyiv) as “campists”. Does this mean that he is accusing them of being ostentatiously homosexual? No, he is accusing them of dividing the world into a socialist camp and a capitalist camp, unlike sensible Trotskyites like himself who recognise that the two sides are both capitalist and therefore should both be rejected. In other words he is living in the 1960s, or at least wishes that he were and wants his readers to believe the same. A large part of the left, at least the renegade, pro-NATO left, has adopted comparable tactics — where appropriate, adopting Cold War attitudes towards Russia or China, or transposing these onto the Islamic world (while, usually, finding themselves able to support those “Islamofascists” who happen to be receiving military assistance from NATO and its Wahhabi friends in the Gulf).

But the world is not exactly the same as it was in the 1960s. The left is in an infinitely weaker position across much of the world than it enjoyed in those days. The most important problems confronted by the world are even worse than they were in those days — and meanwhile most of the problems which existed in the 1960s have not gone away. It’s just that the left no longer possesses the power to address them, which makes it tempting to assume that they cannot be addressed except by more powerful forces — which usually means forces which are actually opposed to the left, like “civil society organisations” and plutocratic entities and so on, but which are often perfectly willing to adopt leftist guises and even permit leftists to act as their frontpeople. There, again, the left is fooling only itself — especially since the left’s ideological structures are increasingly unknown to the broader public which is not exposed to them because the left lacks the means to promote its ideas.

Can all this, then, be solved? Can the left avoid this process by which so much of its leadership, and sometimes even its organisations, turn into the opposite of what they set out to be, while loudly declaring the success and integrity of their positions?

One hopeful point is that this doesn’t really seem to happen so much in situations outside the ambit of the Western left. The Maoists in India and its environs, or even the more left-wing of the Bolivarians in Latin America, do not seem so liable to fall into this trap — perhaps because, however improbable their causes, they nevertheless have something which needs to be accomplished and which they know cannot be accomplished by reciting the phrases of their enemies while implausibly mumbling about one’s commitment to Marxism in stale jargonistic phrases. Nor are they, by and large, plagued by a lack of organisation, or even of desire for organisation. They know that there is real danger out there with which they must deal, even if their response to this danger is often irrational. Even our own Economic Freedom Fighters, however doctrinally insipid or intellectually shallow they may appear, know that things are tough and getting tougher and that someone has to fight their corner if they are to survive, and that if they don’t, nobody else will, and that their enemies are not going to magically transform into their friends through compromise or adopting their phraseology.

However, the Third World is not the solution. Ultimately, the leftists of the developed world are needed to bring about revolutionary change and stop the developed world from attacking the rest of us. Somehow, then, the wealthy leftists of the world need to be persuaded to shed their insufferable smugness and their treacherous weakness and become real leftists again, or else we are all still in big trouble; victory in Vietnam did not matter when the Western far right was able to transfer its aggression to other things, and today Vietnam is more neoliberal than not. It’s hard to see how this can be done, but perhaps South Africa and Latin America are the places to learn how to do it.