Howard Barrell: OVER A BARREL
There are, I’m sure, many reasons to admire communists. One which dwarfs all others, though, is their talent for rationalisation. Their ability to explain away past failures in such a way as to be able to retain a set of ill-fitting core beliefs is quite remarkable.
The origin of this exceptional ability may merely be that they have practised it more than the rest of us. But I think that is only half the reason. The other is necessity. Failure has haunted the communist project at every turn.
When, late last century, the working class declined to fulfil communist prophecy and march out of Europe’s sweatshops and satanic mills to overthrow capitalism, it was said to be because of their inability to see what was good for them. They needed it explained to them by a vanguard party led initially by the intelligentsia.
When, under Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the new vanguard party had limited success in persuading Russian workers and peasants of the advantages of the system it was imposing, the reason was obstruction by 10-million or more rich peasants and unobliging workers.
When Joseph Stalin had “liquidated” these unfortunates and the communist project still did not work, it was because of the devastation caused to Russia by World War II. When, in the years after the war, it still did not work, it was because of imperialist threats and manoeuvring.
When, another 20 years on, communism was manifestly less successful than capitalism in providing for its people, this was because, according to Mikhail Gorbachev, communism needed to be restructured into something more sensitive to people’s desire to make their own economic and political choices.
When, offered half a choice, the vast majority of people in Russia and Eastern Europe said in the late 1980s, “Bugger this, we are choosing capitalism and liberal democracy,” the reason was, again, that the great mass of people just did not know what was good for them.
If they did not know, who did? Why, the same group of people they had rejected: communists, the vanguard party.
To be a communist means to risk crippling oneself intellectually. The process of reasoning involved is circular: every failure must be converted into a vindication of the core project. In the process, the more communist theory seems to change, so it remains substantially the same.
For the same reason, being a communist can entail being unusually resolute. It is no surprise that the bravest and most diligent fighters against apartheid were, almost invariably, communists: they were equipped with a secular religion that refused to acknowledge defeat. Everything – every suffering, sacrifice and reversal – could be justified and explained by the desirable and inevitable end towards which all history was moving: the classless society.
These and other reasons for my own abandonment of Marxism about 10 years ago returned to me this week as I read about the serious row between the African National Congress’s top leadership and the South African Communist Party, and as I spoke to a number of friends who are still communists. Their arguments reeked of the familiar, theological approach to politics.
I heard little pragmatic analysis of the SACP’s strange, overlapping relationship with the ANC and of how best to advance a left-wing agenda in South Africa. Instead, I heard a lot of doctrine being bandied about, such as the importance of maximising unity among oppressed and progressive forces during the “national democratic phase of the revolution” etcetera, as SACP members vowed to hang on in the ANC.
When I scratched my communist friends a little, however, there, barely hidden, lay the rage of humiliation. It is not difficult to see why. It is as if President Nelson Mandela and Deputy President Thabo Mbeki have improved on former United States president Lyndon Johnson’s advice on how best to deal with dissent within your own party. Johnson maintained it was better to have a dissident inside your tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in. Mandela’s and Mbeki’s innovation is to tell communists that, if they stay in the ANC, they may not pee at all.
This promises to create the undignified spectacle of leading communists like SACP general secretary Blade Nzimande and his deputy, Jeremy Cronin, doubled over in the ANC tent, their faces etched in agony and unction.
Someone suggested that SACP members may just have to learn to “pee with more precision”. But Mbeki is far too alert and clever not to notice and is probably irritated enough to order the chopping block on the banks of the first rivulet.
How much longer South African communists can continue to justify living under the constraints now on them in the ANC is difficult to say. On past evidence it could be decades.
They would do well to be aware, however, that they are not the only ones who want to advance a left-wing alternative to government economic policy. Moreover, there are others around as justified in calling themselves socialists and as keen to advance what they see as the interests of the working class and poor.
Communists and these other leftwingers would do us all a favour if they now found each other and launched their own pragmatic party of the left, putting forward clear policy alternatives to the ANC. They would have to convince us (and it would not be easy) that there is a sensible alternative to government economic policy. They would have to persuade us (again, not easy) that, as a country which accounts for 0,5% of the world economy, we could defy standards of economic management generally accepted abroad.
In the process, communists would expose the illusory unity of the old liberation movement and usher in an era in which different interests in South Africa vied openly with each other for popular support and political power. That would be a massive leap towards modernity and a democratic culture.
It would require courage – this time bravery without “certainty”. But not that much. With 20 000 paid-up members and about another 60 000 people on its books, with its own investments and trade-union support, the SACP has a better base on which to build than most.
Not least, such a move would bring blessed relief – among others for Nzimande and Cronin.