"The whiteman must no longer project his fears and insecurities onto other groups, race and countries. Before the white man can relate to others he must forego the pleasure of defining them. The white man must stop viewing history as a plot against himself.' - Vine Deloria

Introduction

In his recent article on Liberalism and the DA, Ryan Coetzee is in pains trying to convince us that;

• Contrary to the assertions of President Mbeki and those who echo his sentiments today, liberals have a rich and complex conception of the self.
• Liberals are in fact the greatest respecters of group identities and that the idea of "the primacy of the individual" is entirely compatible with group identification and indeed is necessary for real respect for those identifications.
• Liberals, by virtue of their attachment to the primacy of the individual, are capable of an authentic and empathetic solidarity with their fellow human beings, including specifically those who suffer in whatever way and for whatever reason.

It is bizarre what Coetzee is trying to achieve here. He admits that individual behaviour is mediated through cultural and moral norms and is influenced by social circumstances. Yet at the same time try to convince us that the cultural, moral and political norms are not important, at least not above individual whims. Thus he undertakes his Sissyphisian task that is typical of liberal fetishism.

Fetishism of Liberalism

Contemporary liberals like to make a distinction between libertarianism and liberalism. In a way liberalism is a bastard child of the more respectable libertarianism which refers to both an ideology - a set of more or less organized set of claims or ideas about political positions and actions - and a philosophy.

Practically all core liberal ideas are derived or can be associated with the growth of personal and social liberation from the modern history of Europe (the rise of entrepreneurial capitalism and dogma-debunking science in the context of an increasingly rambunctious public sphere, with a skepticism of royal, church, and ultimately government authority presently, especially in England and the USA). Libertarianism-as a philosophy and ideology-is thus to a great degree a carrier of the individual liberation and social deconstruction, as achieved in the modern West to the rest of the world.

Liberalism took some of libertarianism positive connotations, with economic and moral empowerment and equality being treated as necessary requirements to the realisation of democratic rights. But by and large, as is clear from Coetzee's article, liberalism is a fetish whose notions of liberal rights (whether natural-John Locke-or categorical-Immanuel Kant) operate in a negative way, asserting what should not be done to a person or be imposed upon her interests or preferences in the name of a religious truth, a local tradition, a community norm, or a political goal.

What the liberals like Coetzee conveniently avoid is the mention that liberalism has become the notions of individualism and rationality that emphasises economic profit over the social, moral and political. And that this has resulted in the serious fragmentation of society. The modern world as the result has been brought about largely by this notion at the expense losing its ability to connect with one another. It has lost even the ability to coherently explain that loss, and consequently has made us live a materialist, egotistical, self-interested, isolated existences, with little sense of a common good, hardly any moral standards for judgment, etc. Solidarity and traditions have been serious undermined with little hope for transformation to better ends if the liberal trend continues unabated.

Yet Coetzee is trying to convince us that somehow this world of disjointed individuals, "by virtue of their attachment to the primacy of the individual, are capable of an authentic and empathetic solidarity with their fellow human beings, including specifically those who suffer in whatever way and for whatever reason". Next we will be expected to believe that pigs fly.

Some liberals argue that this is typical liberalism gone the wrong way. That real liberalism represent the deep structure of life according to communitarian principles. After all the likes of Coetzee rightly argues that being born into a state of sovereign and independent nature, outside of embedded relationships of power and meaning (family, group, etc.) is impossible. It is here that the fallacy of his liberal theory becomes glaring. And this dangerous confusion of liberalism is easy to miss if your eyes are not alert to its fetish. For instance, what is Coetzee saying in this passage?

Our approach to affirmative action is that redress is needed in response to past injustice, but that the redress needs to be targeted at individuals, not groups, who still suffer the effects of that injustice today. We do not believe, as President Mbeki once argued in parliament, that redress must be directed towards groups because the injustice was directed towards groups. His statement was deeply reflective of the assumptions of his African nationalism: it implicitly acknowledges that the existence of African nationalism in the first place is a consequence of racism - a response to it; also it implies that redress for some is in some sense redress for all, because all are part of a greater whole (so if an incredibly wealthy black person wins a BEE contract and buys a Mercedes Benz, other black people living in abject poverty have vicariously been uplifted).

Put aside the misrepresentation of what President Mbeki said, Coetzee starts by arguing that they believe in the affirmative action for individuals and ends with a snare that argues against affirmative for individuals.

There's no doubt that liberalism emerged as the movement of the classical individualist who were trying to form moral coherence to their self-chosen utilitarian commitments. Their basic duty was to their own conception of themselves, and for their ultimate vested interests. This trait the liberals have never lost even if by slight contrast now it is marked by a greater involvement on external elements. They are now learning - due to demands of democracy - to respect and accommodate the collective goals also (in South African context this also comes from political expediency).

The problem is that to liberals collectivism is defined as something imposed and policed by the state; the Borg Hive, the submersion of individual will and agency to the greater good. Worse still, despite all his pretensions in understanding that human beings can exist both as individuals and as members of a society, Coetzee refuses them freedom to subordinate themselves to the needs of a voluntary chosen social plan. Although he acknowledges that the state can legitimately serve social needs, he views collective benefits as incompatible with individual freedom. Why? Is he trying to say there's no such thing as the concept of social justice for the collective?

In liberalism's view, there is no way to put an objective value on a grievance or to weigh it against other claims. And because liberalism locates all responsibility and agency only at the level of the individual, it sees no way in which any claim can be generalised to society. This is because, as I've already indicated, the political philosophy of liberalism recognises only negative rights. For them positive fulfilment beyond the most basic needs is a matter of individual striving only.

Traditional liberalism, until recently, has never addressed collectivism as a spontaneous, nongovernmental, egalitarian phenomenon. Largely because, I suspect, they smelled a rat of socialism in it. Whereas this kind of socialism can certainly fit comfortably within the structures of market capitalism. It even has a broad and complicated pedigree in history, and in my view, very much suited for the South African context.

One can be excused in supposing that Coetzee is half-heartedly trying to propagate for what is called libertarian collectivism to the South African context. The premise of libertarian collectivism, of course, is the assumption that "The individual is the true reality in life. . . . he does not exist for the State, nor for that abstraction called ‘society,' or the ‘nation.' . . . Man, the individual, has always been and, necessarily is the sole source and motive power of evolution and progress" [Goldman, 1934, The Individual, Society and the State].

More cautious ideas of the zealots of libertarian collectivism can be salvaged through modern synthesists like David Ellerman, who understands the theory of surplus value as well as the power of markets. They understand better what happens when free people, living under a limited government that respects their right to make choices, band together to form an egalitarian corporation in which all are entitled to the full value of their labour-including the right to make decisions about how to reinvest or otherwise dispose of the fruits of that labour. And who then stand or fall together, on their ability to provide products or services whose value is assessed by the market. 

There are all kinds of imaginative ways in which libertarian collectivism can coexist with capitalism and markets. There's the example of fishing co-operatives, in which investors and crew are paid in shares of the catch-a form of economic organization that is found wherever fishing is pursued as a way of life, and which has ancient origins. The "fair trade" coffee collectives, from Guatemala to Ghana, that negotiate a common interest within a market environment. Or the Argentine workers who are buying out-or taking over-their factories. What about the original ethos of the Jewish kibbutz, explicitly socialist, collectivist, voluntarist, democratic (in both the political and the personal sense), and engaged with a free market?

As a way of caution, or deflecting undue criticism, let me say I don't believe South Africa is not yet a well-heeled capitalist nation that can be able to use its resources (natural, human and otherwise) to achieve justice and prosperity for its people through socialism. It still needs to have a better civil culture, democratic heritage, a well-evolved technical know-how, well established libertarian traditions, skilled and educated work force before it can even consider a proper system of socialism. By the way, as a good Romantic humanist, Marx believed in the uniqueness of the individual, but his moral goals differ to liberal individualism because he believed true self-fulfilment can only be found in the extensive reciprocity of the collective.

Lastly; I had to smile at Coetzee attempting to take head on the relentless criticism of the DA's "token" blacks, that they are merely ‘coconuts'. Coetzee attempts to frame the black individual's right to be a coconut as yet another example of the freedoms allowed by Liberalism. This is quite a bizarre claim, sweeping away so many decades of radical black intellectual debate on the authentic black identity. At least it made me understand where the statement came from by the then national spokesperson (now the DA leader in parliament) of the DA, Lindiwe Mazibuko, at the Cape Town Press Club; "Where does black politics begin and end?" She confessed to being perplexed by the notion of ‘black politics'.

The problem with "coconuts", which is why the DA will achieve little gain with the selective promotion of black people perceived to be "coconuts", is that they are not parodying whiteness of their own volition. It is how they feel they must act in order to conform to white society and institutionalism.

It is an imprisonment, not a freedom. With the knock on effects affecting others too, who refuse to conform to white norms and so remain marginalised. Furthermore, the tragic sense of a ‘coconut' is its bat-like identity - will never be fully integrated into the white identity while by habits and implicit resentment or looking down of the former self - cannot belong to the social compact of his/her original identity.

[Far from it that the DA's problem, as far as most black people are concerned, should be portrayed only as ideology or racial; it is also on socioeconomic stratifications. As far as I'm concerned the DA is the other side of the same coin of African nationalism. Hence their espousal of the failing neoliberal economics, etc. But that can be the argument for another day.]

Conclusion

It is easy for South African pseudo liberals to avoid the complex mixture of hate and racism: the relationship between ethnicity and race that was brought about by our history. It is easy to say let's be anti-race and look at the present as a class-based revolution or something; to try to burry race into the reality of our nascent class politics, and forget the fact that our social necessities are largely race based. We can do this, but in the South African context we shall still find ourselves confronted by the reality of race as a class dimension, and blackness being linked to indentured servitude.

We shall discover that poverty polarisation is largely defined along racial lines and is fostering a climate of violent action along those lines. We shall discover that it is easy to lament or condemn the clumsy aggression of populist; but much harder to accept that this too emerges from a process of political and governmental decomposition that has left millions to survive without support, which makes them give their votes to the promise of radical instant remedies. Pseudo-liberalism's strong point has always been an endless flow of fetishes: bogus statistics, political gossip and public relations that gives a bad case of informational overload towards misrepresentation and confusion.

It is unfortunate in this country that we either have to conform to the dumbing down of freedom by the African nationalists, or be ridden like felons by the fetishism of liberals. Our political platform has become the dream of the mad. Our democracy has become the doctrine of ‘personal' (nationalist) or ‘individual' (liberals) opportunism. We have given up crucial ideals, like virtue, which makes difficult demands on us, and replaced them with the notion of benevolence (liberal) or nationalism (nationalist).

Changes that we need in our country are at the level that stirs religious passions, such as the crucial need for moral, ethical behaviour and radical mindset shift. The whole understanding of reality and orientation towards it is at stake here. We need ways of meeting each other half-way. This can only come if we all make serious compromises and will require a right combination of good ideas and leadership for the renewal of hope.

Mphuthumi Ntabeni is research manager of COPE in the Western Cape Provincial Parliament

Click here to sign up to receive our free daily headline email newsletter