real
Dale McKinley
Right to Reply
It didn’t take Howard Barrell long, did it? Only just back in the country, he has wasted little time in regaling readers with his own peculiar brand of sarcasm, masquerading as informed opinion (”Pissing on the communists’ parade”, July 10 to 16).
His target? Us poor old communists, whose excellence in the art of rationalisation just nudges out our propensity for cult worship at the altar of uncle Karl’s (or Lenin’s, or Stalin’s – take your pick) mummified vision of a classless society. With faint sounds of an intellectualised rooi gevaar echoing in the background, Barrell constructs an edifice of assumption that rests on a knife’s edge between a comfortable ignorance and an uncomfortably restless conscience.
Wielding a broad, Eurocentric brush, he sweeps all communist history under the carpet of the former USSR and its Eastern European satellites. Not once does he acknowledge the ideologically rich and organisationally varied ”communisms” that continue to find relevance.
Accordingly, communism can now be dismissed as a litany of vanguardist experimentations gone wrong, a bothersome yet seemingly indefatigable boil on the skin of human history. As Barrell would have it, we communists have, throughout, travelled the straight and narrow, oblivious to those in whose name we have supposedly acted and blissfully unaware of the possibility of (imminent) failure.
From his universalising perch, Barrell obviously sees no need to differentiate between Stalin’s death camps and the (continuing) 30-year history of democratic governance of the Communist Parties of India.
Applying his critical faculties to the recent ”row” between the South African Communist Party (SACP) and leading members of the African National Congress (ANC) over economic policy, he tries to spin his assumptions into a web of harsh realities that we communists must face. Evidently burdened by ”the rage of humiliation” from being told off by leaders possessing an equally evident unquestioned authority, communists must now get real (”pragmatic” if you’re a non-believer) and break the alliance.
Communists do not need to apologise to anyone for pledging to continue contesting an economic policy that has manifestly failed, on its own terms, and to do so as members of both the ANC and the SACP.
Barrell and many others need to be reminded once again: while the growth, employment and redistribution strategy (Gear) might well be the fundamental policy of the government, it is not, merely by declaring it so, the fundamental policy of the ANC.
Communists (and ”other left-wingers”) have put forward a host of ”clear policy alternatives”. Whether they are taken as being ”sensible alternatives” by Barrell and others seemingly enamoured of the mythical success stories of late 20th-century capitalism is of concern to the extent that society’s understanding of what is ”sensible” continues to be monopolised by the few who possess capital.
The political form of a communist alternative in South Africa rests equally on the shoulders of the ongoing struggles of its inhabitants and the willingness of communists to give practical content to those struggles. Contrary to Barrell’s arguments, though, this is not going to happen by simple declaration or by scurrying off into an ideological comfort zone when things get rough.
Dale T Mckinley works for the SACP, but he writes this in his personal capacity