Kuseni Dlamini: CROSSFIRE
Is the left in South Africa and the rest of the world facing a ”mysterious decline” (Crossfire, May 8 to 14), or is it having a ”facelift” (Crossfire, May 15 to 21)?
The left has never been held in lower esteem than it is today. At best, it is seen as impotent in the face of global economic complexity and social change. At worst, it is seen as part of a conspiracy to defraud the general public.
It has also been argued that the historical tasks of the left, especially in Europe, have been completed and the basic aims of the early socialists can be achieved without a transformation of society. In other words, we have reached the end of ideology, or, as Francis Fukuyama puts it, the end of history.
The crisis of the left reflects the lack of an innovative central organising vision, political strategy and direction that is flexible and pragmatic in its response to the challenges of globalisation and domestic socio-economic change in South Africa.
The left needs a radical and new identit if it is to do more than rail against the injustices of the present, and provide a realistic hope of change in the future.
It needs a relevant guiding faith, even a dogma, and a theory to engage the dialectical forces of globalisation and fragmentation currently at play across the world.
Other than its vociferous criticisms of the growth, employment and redistribution strategy, the left has failed to come up with a workable alternative around which to mobilise and win public sympathy and build a hegemonic bloc. Without this, the left will continue to lack the essential attribute of a revolutionary force, something ironically prescribed by founders of the socialist movement.
The ”mysterious” decline of the left is a result of the inadequacy of the left’s post-war model of social analysis. This (now outdated) model was, and still is, based on the conception of the nation-state as a political community, the working class as a political movement, and the state as a political agency.
However, today the primary site of political power, the nation-state, has seen its autonomy reduced by the globalisation of economic decision-making, and the parallel decentralisation of industrial organisation.
As Daniel Bell put it, the national level is too small for the big problems (control of currency speculation, environmental protection, defence and security) and too big for the small problems (public service delivery and regional and local development).
This has occurred at a time when the traditional base of the left, the industrial working class, is shrinking, resulting in the inevitable alteration, if not complication, of the class map of contemporary (industrial) society. That is why the left in South Africa, and elsewhere in the world, is unable to cope with social and economic change and lacks the required ideological confidence and, by implication, political clout.
To resolve this dilemma the left needs to pursue not just its traditional ”class settlement”, but a new relationship between men and women. Over the past 20 years, feminism and the women’s movement have posed fundamental questions to socialist conceptions of class, social structure and progressive political strategy. This has effected an enormous shift in the politics of gender.
The left must also pursue an ecological contract between generations. Green politics has posed a central challenge to the mainstream ideologies of the century. It demands of all major parties a re-orientation.
The left also needs to respond creatively to the challenges posed by the other bases for social fragmentation (ethnicity, religion and sexuality) which cause the politics of identity to be in a constant state of flux.
The deepening and unstoppable globalisation of socio-economic activities, the fragmentation of working class communities as well as the limitations of the nation-state demand new strategic thinking about economic renewal and social reform by the left. This requires a serious rethink of the left’s historic assumptions about social reality.
Firstly, the left must rethink the ways in which it extends (or wants to extend) social control of the economy and look beyond the productive economy to emancipate individual potential. It must not only concern itself with redistribution of wealth, but involve itself in the processes of wealth creation.
Secondly, the left must accept that public ownership is not the only way to achieve the main aims of the socialist project. Thirdly, it must realise that the existence of markets is not antithetical to the public interest; the challenge of the time is to ensure that markets work in the public interest. Fourthly, the individual must have rights against all vested interests, public and private.
The development of such a vision, strategy or direction does not require a global catastrophe. What it does require is for the left to re-invent itself and come to terms with the realities of a globalising and liberalising world. It must engage with the forces of globalisation and neo-liberalism. Jonathan Steinberg’s pessimism is worrying and based on a one-sided or unilineal view of the impact of globalisation. His failure to realise that globalisation poses threats and opportunities which must be grasped by the left, if it is to successfully re-invent itself, is inexcusable.
Jeremy Cronin needs to tell us more than that ”the left did not disappear, it is being transformed”. If it did not disappear, where is it? If it is transforming, what is the content and scope of the transformation and how long will it take? More fundamentally, what is it transforming into? In view of the new global conjuncture of socio-political and economic forces, the left needs more than a ”facelift”. It needs to re-invent itself. But how?
The intellectual left is in a similar, if not more serious, crisis. The role of left-wing intellectuals in post-apartheid South Africa is at best obscure and at worst non-existent. Cronin should have shed some light on the role of the South African Communist Party in the transformation he is talking about.
During the anti-apartheid struggle, left-wing scholarship flourished. Nowadays, few academics want to be called or call themselves Marxists, even at liberal institutions like Wits, Natal and the University of Cape Town. This may be partly because some academics want to position themselves for public and private contracts as consultants to supplement their income. Also, some (white) left-wing academics are afraid to be too critical for fear of being labelled unpatriotic or harbouring sympathies with the past.
The left’s relevance does not lie on its utopian vision of the future, but in the quality of its critique of the present; in other words, its analysis of contemporary society and its ambition to achieve progressive change. All this must happen in a historical context that must be properly analysed to be appreciated. The left in South Africa and the world needs to re-invent itself simply because its project was a product of a particular historical moment that has come to an end.
Kuseni Dlamini, a Rhodes scholar, works for De Beers, but writes in his personal capacity