Crime statistics, the Farlam Commission of Inquiry and service delivery protests, gone violent, all have something in common. They illustrate a very violent society. Nikki Moore is therefore more than flippant in undermining the real reasons for the service delivery protests that occurred in Grabouw last week.
"Violence begets violence"
This phrase has somewhat become a cliché in our time. Yet if one were to understand what Martin Luther King Jr meant when he said it, one would appreciate that not only was King opposing the war in Vietnam but he was also suggesting that the conditions faced by the majority of African-Americans led to the social crime and grime experienced by this community in the United States.
Three decades before King, Christopher Caudwell, in dismissing bourgeois pacifism, wrote:
"...the only way to secure peace is by a revolutionary change in the social system, and that ruling classes resist revolution violently and must therefore be overthrown by force."[i]
However, Caudwell made sure to distinguish between bourgeois violence and the violence employed by the proletariat. He defined bourgeois violence as that which: "...arises, just as does feudal or despotic violence, from the characteristic economy of the system." He continued:
"...the whole bourgeois economy is built on the violent domination of men by men through the private possession of social capital. It is always there, waiting ready at any moment to flame out in a Peterloo or an Amritzar within the bourgeois State, or a Boer War or Great War outside it. As long as the bourgeois economy remains a positive constructive force, that violence is hidden."[ii]
Put differently, Caudwell states that the violence perpetrated by the bourgeois, the ruling class, is one that is primarily about the private possession of that which is supposed to be owned in common but more importantly that this violence is often systemic and therefore subliminal.
By dismissing bourgeois pacifism, Caudwell notes that time and again it is the pacifist who would oppose proletariat violence but at the same time "...refrain from opposing bourgeois violence, [because] he generates it, by helping on the development of bourgeois economy."
Two types of violence
We are therefore to understand that there are two types of violence. The systemic and subliminal violence, as perpetuated by the existing social conditions, on the one hand, and the violence of the oppressed that comes in response to that ruling class violence, on the other.
To clarify this distinction better, we could employ the work of the Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic, Slovaj Žižek. In his work Violence (2008), Žižek makes a clear distinction between subjective violence and objective violence. Subjective violence describes the empirical violence that we might experience e.g. the suicide bomber, assault, murder, rape and war. It is physical violence, as it were, and often we are most fixated with this violence. We believe that peace is the absence of violence i.e. subjective violence.
However, objective violence is the violence that exists through an unjust system. It is symbolic and systemic; symbolic in language and in form, such as racism and sexism whereas it could also be systemic through economic and political systems, such as capitalism and its twin neo-liberalism. These causes of gross inequality and poverty, the exclusion of the vast majority of citizens in the operations of the state (or the market?) and the opportunity to reach their potential given only to a few, and not others, are only three examples of the systemic objective violence that exists in our current social conditions.
Hence Žižek's thesis, like Caudwell, is that subjective violence is but only a response to objective violence. At the same time, it is important to note that coupled with this understanding of violence, as subjective and objective, goes the comprehension of the process of ‘normalisation'. Given the subliminal, systemic and symbolic nature of objective violence it is easy for these to be ‘normalised', i.e. it becomes part of the system, part of life.
Among others, poverty, racism and sexism have become normal. People are told to live with it and get on with their lives. These objective violent acts are normalised i.e. made ‘acceptable' just as the violent acts perpetrated by countless South African men against their partners. Chatting to residents of Bonteheuwel this past week, they mention that gang activity, shootings and therefore killings have become "normal", they are no longer surprised by these atrocities. They, literally, adapt or die.
Violence in SA and the Western Cape
Apartheid was subjectively and objectively violent. While all of the subjective violence, the deaths, the torturing, the disappearing, the army shooting in our townships, the dompass, might have been done away with the blatant reality of Apartheid's objective violence remains. The history of the Western Cape in subjective violence, the only province to have experienced a genocide and slavery, has a lasting effect through the objective violence that continues to this day in the province. This is an objective violence that is real in its symbolic, systemic forms as well as having been normalised.
Those who continue to suffer from racism, sexism, homophobia, poverty, exclusion and lack of opportunity in our country and the Western Cape in particular are made to believe, by the pacifists within our province, that things are better now or, even worse still, things were better under Apartheid. "Don't bring up the past!" these pacifists exclaim. We have had freedom for 20 years, they remind us; whilst all along the objective violence remains intact.
Daily, as seen in the crime statistics, people who suffer the most from subjective violence are also the ones who suffer the injustice of objective violence. The Farlam Commission is investigating what led to the subjective violence that took place at Marikana but who is investigating or cares about the objective violent reality of the people working in and living around the mines?
Therefore one has to ask what led to the outbreak of violence in Grabouw last week, in this possibly the richest Municipal District in South Africa, as articulated by Moore? It is easy to attach blame to parties or organisations, accusing that it could or not be part of their so-called strategy of "un-governability", yet they refuse to ask the real questions of the failure of the municipalities to intervene in addressing the violent conditions faced by people living in the Overberg in general and Grabouw in particular.
Two weeks before the break-out of the protests, I visited Grabouw for a community workshop of the Theewaterskloof Municipality. (Moore might now suggest I had a finger in planning the protests - that's how we seem to reason). Plenty-a-pot-holes met me as I entered Hillside and sewerage drains in Pineview were overflowing. Siteview, Slangpark, Waterworks, Irak, Khonaledi and Dennekruin all tell the same objective violent story.
For example, there are no recreational halls or facilities in these areas whilst consultation with the communities, the bare-minimum for a participatory democracy, was non-existent, especially with regards to the municipality's integrated development programme (IDP). The community of TWK complained about lack of housing, the lack of basic service delivery such as roads and sewerage maintenance; all of this in the so-called best-run province in the country.
Together with the myth that it is the aim of the ANC to make the Western Cape ungovernable is the myth that people migrant to the Western Cape because the province offers the best delivery of state services. This is simply not true and Moore in her article acknowledges that. The province with the highest migration is Gauteng; purported by the DA to be a terrible provider of state services. People migrate because of economic opportunities and when they have found an opportunity they bring the rest of their family.
[Migrant labour has a history of its own in South Africa and is an element of the system's objective violence. Skilled labourers may move with their families, unskilled labourers are simply not afforded this same right by our commentators].
As the province with the largest agricultural sector in the country, no matter who governs, the Western Cape will attract the most farm-workers, unskilled labour. Yet the plight of farm-workers deteriorates as I write. Farm-workers in Grabouw and the whole of the Overberg are no better example of the objective violence that exists within the host municipalities and province and the failure of these state entities to act. Surely, a call for a moratorium on evictions of farm-workers from farms will be a good starting point?
Clean audits, compliance, being rated the "best-run" province does not equal good governance. It might mean clean governance but not good governance. Even worse, it does not mean good democratic practice or adhering to the Constitutional imperative "...so as to, heal the divisions of the past and establish a society based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights ..." as dictated by the Preamble of the Constitution.
Unless there is a recognition by the ruling party in Theewaterskloof, the Overberg and the Western Cape that more investment needs to go into addressing these past injustices in order to create a society based on, among others, social justice, objective violence in the municipalities and province will remain intact. As a result, subjective violence will spring up naturally as it does in other parts of South Africa and will certainly not need a so-called programme of "ungovernability" by the ANC.
The words of Caudwell and even Dr King continue to ring out: "Since a dispossessed class will fight to the last ditch, while there is hope, how can the transition be affected other than violently...?"[iii]
Endnotes
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[i] Caudwell, C. 1938. ‘Pacifism and Violence: A Study in Bourgeois Ethics'. Studies in a Dying Culture. Copy could be found here.
[ii] ibid.
[iii] ibid.
Wesley Seale has a Masters in Governance and Development from the University of Sussex, UK, and is the Policy Development Officer for the ANC in the Western Cape.
While he writes in his personal capacity, the above is an adaption to a blog entry he wrote in 2012.
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