/ 21 November 2014

Letters to the editor: November 21 to 27 2014

Plutocratic imperialism: Democracy has nothing to do with rule
Plutocratic imperialism: Democracy has nothing to do with rule

Rule by wealth junkies rejected

The Brenthurst Foundation is an Anglo-American Corporation think-tank and thus the intellectual voice of the people who rule South Africa – mining and finance capital. Its utterances deserve attention. Sadly, the foundation’s Terence McNamee’s utterances suggest that the rulers of South Africa are ignorant, slow-witted fantasists committed to perpetuating past mistakes (The time has come for a democratic Africa).

He says Africa has become democratic, and is rising. He then says Africa must become democratic, and must rise.

McNamee’s definition of democracy has nothing to do with popular rule. It means, instead, using elections to produce governments subordinate to Western plutocratic imperialism. The free elections held in Russia, and the staggering electoral support the Russian government enjoys, are described by McNamee as “autocratic”. Undoubtedly he means that the Russian government can’t be democratic because it does not submit to Western control.

He praises “multiparty” elections held in Africa, which have all led to the same end: control by the World Bank. This, he says, makes Africa the fastest-growing region in the world (as measured, doubtless, by the World Bank). He does not mention that it is more impoverished and less socially equal, and has been torn by more wars since those elections.

Apparently, Africans freely voted for poverty, inequality and conflict. But they were not given a choice. Most of the elections McNamee admires were charades through which corporate and imperial forces imposed their candidates. Often these candidates claimed to be running against foreign economic masters, but they invariably bowed to those masters the moment they were in power.

McNamee applauds Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, leader of the quasi-fascist Bharatiya Janata Party, whose militant wing murdered Muslims. McNamee applauds Rwanda and Ethiopia, two dictatorships that have launched genocidal invasions of neighbouring states.

Debates over ideology, he says, are “anachronistic”; they must be suppressed, because no alternative to plutocratic imperialism can be discussed. The reason for this suppression is surely that plutocratic imperialism has failed; socialist and quasi-socialist states across the world are the only drivers of growth – and promote whatever economic growth is occurring in Africa.

It becomes easier to understand contemporary South African politics when one recognises that neoliberalism is the opium of the plutocrats. But do we really want to be ruled by junkies? – Mathew Blatchford, Fort Hare


Reframe our nation’s suffering

The Mail & Guardian‘s three-page spread on the Irish soldiers’ monument was disappointing (Brixton to Orania: The great trek of the Irish Volunteers’ Monument). The attention drawn to the dubious justification for its removal, and the neglect of its former space, is welcomed by this Brixton resident, but two of the three pages dedicated to Orania’s apartheid-porn collection lacked context.

Sifiso Ntuli raises some salient points about this, one being the forgetting of Brixton (and its murder and robbery squad) in a liberated South Africa. We have yet to honour meaningfully those who died in the waves of genocide that swept through these lands in the past centuries. I would have expected the M&G to rise to the challenge of tackling the real battle surrounding this memorial, which is ultimately symbolic of the struggle of memory and forgetting that currently shapes our national psyche.

Ntuli has thrown a stone at the glass cage we have created to house our easily digestible narrative of “the bad guys are gone (together their memorials and statues) and the good guys are in charge”. Maybe our tortuous history of suffering as a nation is too complex and painful for us to deal with. Maybe we should stick to R5 000 shots of whiskey or the odd manicured flower bed, while our people defecate on what was once hallowed ground.

The reframing of our nation’s suffering, beyond the fiction of 1980s school textbooks, is a desperately needed conversation. Perhaps we should leave the making sense of our suffering to future generations, for we are simply too numb, fearful or lazy to grapple with solutions. My hope is that the M&G should play a more incisive and constructive role in this discourse. – Jonathan Padavatan, Brixton


A step back in the antiracism movement

Andile Mngxitama confirms that someone’s view of racism is linked to their perspective on the national question (We celebrate #knockout as a blow to racism).

Both Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko, although not Marxists, espoused the ideal of a nonracial society. Fanon insisted on armed struggle against the colonial system, and Biko wrote eloquently about the constructive use of anger in the anti-apartheid struggle.

This is different from Mngxitama’s case for everyday violence against the racism of civilians in a capitalist society.

Former Robben Islander Marcus Solomon says he can’t understand why South Africa does not have a mass antiracism movement and is not at the forefront of such a global effort.

That would be one way to address racism here. Despite Mngxitama’s sexist language, an antiracism project could learn from the feminist movement; it could “take back the nonracial space”, with mass meetings at places where racist incidents happened and so forth.

Yet to condone violence against white civilians is not only extremely reckless but is also the logical outcome of an ultraconservative version of black nationalism.

The 1976 uprising showed that the youth could shake up an autocratic system, but it required the 1984-86 revolt of the working class to overthrow that social structure. Hence the so-called decolonising of class theory is not going to take the youth far.

A nonracial society can only emerge from a mass antiracism movement and the resolution of the social question, but those in political leadership should, in the meantime, be more prudent about the national question. – Shaun Whittaker, Windhoek