Alongside the government's drive to muzzle the media, there has been a parallel sinister phenomenon: a convergent ideological attack by a number of disparate social and political groupings, aimed against what one of them this month described as "political liberalism".
In a public statement issued on 13 October, headed "Abahlali baseMjondolo of the Western Cape responds to the Treatment Action Campaign", a representative of the Western Cape branch of the shackdwellers' movement Abahlali baseMjondolo stated: "We have our own critique of TAC, of its relationship to the ANC and thereby to a repressive, violent and often criminal government, of its political liberalism, of its internal organisation and hierarchies...".
Whatever can this mean? As used by AbM (Western Cape branch), the phrase "political liberalism" - which is not explained - appears here to have a derogatory meaning philosophically associated with a further statement by AbM (Western Province) on 16 October, in which it called for "living communism", a "communism built from the ground up" - whatever that might mean.
These phrases are interesting. They are also new, since AbM ( Western Cape branch) has been in existence for only two years, whereas this kind of political language - and its attack on "political liberalism" - did not previously appear in the discourse or the forms of community organisation of the parent body, AbM based in KwaZulu-Natal , which first took shape in 2005.
A clue to this riddle was provided a week later, in a thuggish statement of classic Stalinoid vintage. The heavy artillery of the South African Communist Party released a barrage attack "On the Developments at the SABC" aimed at the "networks of the liberal offensive against our democracy and its vultures, opportunistically joined by an ultra-left in disarray", which it accused of "mobilising to capture the SABC for narrow, and often white, elite interests." This was a concoction of racism and Stalinism combined, displaying the most sordid qualities of South Africa 's most sordid political history.
It followed an equally monstrous statement last month by the general secretary of the SACP, Dr Blade Nzimande - the Minister for Higher Education and Training, no less, seeking to emulate Stalin's culture minister, Andrei Zhdanov, in cultural repression - when addressing state sector workers in the National Education, Health and Allied Workers Union at Ekurhuleni on 27 September. "We have a huge liberal offensive against our democracy," Nzimande stated. "The print media is the biggest perpetrator of this liberal thinking." Thus, reported Business Day, the Minister for Higher Education argued (to cheers) that a Media Appeals Tribunal was "essential to protect socialism's future in South Africa ."
Then, on 20 October, Jeremy Cronin, the deputy general secretary of the SACP - who earlier published his own support for the ANC's drive to muzzle the media, alongside Nzimande - delivered a marginally more refined critique of liberalism in the online newsletter of the SACP, Umsebenzi Online, headed "The anti-democratic phobia of our liberals".
In this statement, directed against what he described as "the recent liberal offensive against government and the ANC", Cronin criticised what he called an "an underlying anti-majoritarian liberal agenda" in South Africa in the context of his own promoting of a "Leninist approach to the national question."
Here we have a frank re-statement of the classic assault on liberalism from the Left in South Africa: from the standpoint of the Leninist dictatorship in Russia (which, in the period of the apartheid regime, always came in tandem with verbal and other attacks on die liberaliste from the Right).
No messing around here, from Nzimande and Cronin, with any vague, romantic, misty phrases about "living" communism, or communism "built from the ground up". Liberalism is here addressed head-on, kaalvuis, by its historic enemy.
A further approach to unravelling the ideological riddle of AbM ( Western Cape )'s assault on "political liberalism" came on the same day as Cronin's article in Umsebenzi Online. Like the call for "communism from the ground up", this came also from the Western Cape , though from a more complex and more nuanced source.
On behalf of a relatively new Marxist grouping, the Conference of the Democratic Left, Professor Martin Leggasick - who teaches South African history at the University of the Western Cape - released a statement of support for the Abahlali baseMjondolo of the Western Cape Call to Action. There Professor Leggasick stated: "In contrast to others, we regard the tactic of direct action and civil disobedience as legitimate forms of protest under a neo-liberal and pro-capitalist state."
He continued: "Those that criticize the Abhalali baseMjondolo call for mass direct action pretend we live in a 'normal democracy' and forget the gross inequality and violence of the current system. They also forget that this system has a name - capitalism."
Here perhaps is a clue to the SACP's menacing growl directed at an "ultra-left in disarray."
The Wikipedia entry for Leggasick states that he and others "launched the Marxist Workers Tendency of the ANC. The Marxist Workers' Tendency was affiliated to the Committee for a Workers International, an international organization of Trotskyist parties and the newspaper, The Militant. Legassick was expelled from the ANC in 1985."
The parent influence on the Marxist Workers Tendency was a political grouping in Britain known as the Militant Tendency, led for decades by a South African-born Trotskyist, the late Ted Grant. It was notorious above all for its strategy of "entryism" into a much larger, more respectable political body, the Labour Party. During the exile period this governed very much the ultimately failed strategy of the MWT within the ANC. It is possible that a similar "entryist" strategy might be at work within Abahlali baseMjondolo in the Western Cape.
A website entry on behalf of the Conference of the Democratic Left states that it "has been in the making since October 2008 when about 60 activists from across the country came together to discuss the crisis of national liberation politics. Since then this initiative has evolved into a process of national dialogue which aims to unify anti-capitalist and progressive social forces around concrete struggles."
Simultaneously, another representative of the non-CP Marxist left in South Africa , Heinrich Bohmke, published an article criticising AbM on Politicsweb. In this article, headed "The shackdwellers and the intellectuals" (21 October), Bohmke too took a sideways swipe at liberalism, stating critically that AbM was "celebrated in the liberal press...".
This might as well have been another hostile reference to the "bourgeois press", in step with Nzimande.
A further insight into the overall orientation of the Conference of the Democratic Left was provided by a former leading light in the Young Communist League and the SACP, Mazibuko K Jara, one of the conveners of the preparatory Initiative of the Conference for a Democratic Left last year. Jara was one of several activists swept from their moorings in the SACP and the ANC by the Zuma tsunami before, during and after the ANC national conference at Polokwane in December 2007, and has since found another berth in the CDL.
Writing in an article headed "Time for a new democratic Left to enter onto the political stage" published in the Daily Despatch on 16 October last year, Jara wrote: "As Karl Marx put it in his Critique of the Gotha Programme: If capital remains the all-dominating economic power, economic and political decision-making will necessarily operate within the strict limitations and conditions imposed by it, no matter what one calls society and no matter which persons or forms of organisation are nominally in control."
This is all very well, except that Jara - like others of the so-called "democratic" left - omitted in this article to point out that Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme, written in 1875, is the theoretical blueprint of all the totalitarian dictatorships of the 20th century. No major political thinker in modern society called more directly than Marx for a programme of dictatorship.
In a passage discreetly omitted by Jara and Leggasick from their writings on behalf of a so-called "democratic" left, Marx wrote in Part IV of the Critique of the Gotha Programme: "Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat."
No other major political thinker of the 19th century called so bluntly for a programme of dictatorship - however "transitional" - and none had his programme implemented with such brutal force. First the dictatorship set up by Lenin and Trotsky in Russia in 1917, in immediate conjunction with Marx's prescription. Then the dictatorship set up by Mussolini in Italy after his March on Rome in 1922, in direct emulation of the no-nonsense dictatorship of Lenin's and Trotsky's Bolshevik Party in Russia. Then - Adolf Hitler, and the dictatorship of the National Socialist German Workers Party in Germany from its first day in office in 1933, third in succession from the Russian Bolsheviks and the Italian Fascisti.
This was the heritage of the anti-liberal argument in Europe, with consequences across the world to this day.
If there is any doubt as to what dictatorship meant in Russia when Trotsky was its most senior apostle next to Lenin, that should be dispelled by a reading of Paul Avrich's Kronstadt 1921 (Princeton University Press, 1970. Paperback, 1991). Within four years of the Bolsheviks' seizure of power in 1917, the suppression of the revolt of the advanced guard of the revolution at Kronstadt - under Lenin's direction, with active support from Zinoviev, Bukharin,Tukhachevsky and Trotsky, all later murdered by Stalin, who learnt his lessons well - provides a telling example of the meaning of that phrase by Marx, the "dictatorship of the proletariat".
Here sits the lie in the teeth of the perpetrators of these verbal assaults on liberalism in South Africa, since their real alternative to liberalism, as Marxists, no matter how blithely disguised as "democratic", is Marx's programme of dictatorship written for the German Workers' Party, in 1875.
If the question is asked, "Does South Africa suffer from too much liberalism, or too little?", my own reply is: TOO LITTLE.
Nothing is needed more in South Africa than a Reform Act to make its politicians accountable. The electoral law of 1994 set up a Nomenklatura of the ruling party/state, distinguishable in degree not in kind from the Nomenklatura of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union under Brezhnev. The whole country is treated by this electoral law as if it were a single, gigantic constituency, in which a majority of voters has the sole power to vote once every five years for a single national slate of the majoritarian party of government, the ANC, effectively transferring semi-totalitarian powers over MPs and over the voters themselves to a tiny handful of party bosses in Luthuli House.
The first article of the Freedom Charter, and the most important objective of the ANC since its foundation almost a century ago - "The People Shall Govern" - remains very far from being realised, since from Parliament downwards, from the Provincial Legislatures to municipal level, power is centralised top-down, with elected representatives unaccountable to their electors.
There will be no democracy in South Africa until this is changed. Voters across the country must be given the power to pull down from office any MP, any member of the provincial legislatures and any municipal councillor, should they themselves decide that that person is corrupt, or brutal, or incompetent, or lazy, or whatever. This can only be done through a constituency-based voting system. It is very possible that a multi-member constituency system would be most appropriate, in which the voters of Soweto, for example, elect, say, ten named individuals to represent them. Local people can then size up the merits of each individual representative by comparing his (or her) performance with that of the other nine, and any lowlife political crook can be sacked at the next election.
It is instructive that none of Marx's heirs - from the commanding heights of the SACP downwards - has bothered to advocate this simple reform. No, South Africa is not yet a "normal" democracy, Mr Leggasick - whatever you might have meant by this - since the voters have yet to be trusted to behave as adults, to make their own choices as to the fate of their elected representatives.
In that sense, the liberal argument for electoral reform has yet to be put to the people.
It is a disgrace it has been left so late.
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