Jeremy Cronin
Crossfire
Howard Barrell begins last week’s Over a Barrel column wondering: “If we believe someone is talking nonsense, should we bother to challenge him or her? Or should we just let their claptrap go .?” That is precisely the question I have been grappling with over many months of reading Barrell’s column. Exasperation has finally got the better of me.
Last week’s column, a sustained diatribe against South African Communist Party general secretary Blade Nzimande should be read together with two other pieces by Barrell in the same issue (“Between the left and the hard left” and “Unions face split over tactics”, August 27 to September 2).
Like nearly all his contributions, these articles travel down a well-worn path. Barrell tries to sow division by misrepresenting real debates within the government, the African National Congress, and the broader ANC/SACP/Congress of South African Trade Unions alliance.
Every week, leading government personalities, those with whom Barrell imagines he agrees, are cast as iron-fisted Thatcherites. They are enthusiastically urged by Barrell to push ahead – “the major test of seriousness of President Thabo Mbeki’s new administration will be the extent to which it brings all ministers into line with Gear [the growth, employment and redistribution strategy]”; Mbeki has “shown steel” in the public sector wage dispute; co-ordination of economic policy “will require iron will from Mbeki”.
Who are we talking about, our new president or Count Otto von Bismarck? What, in his enthusiasm, does Barrell make of Mbeki’s attack on the Democratic Party in his closing speech to the opening debate of the new Parliament?
“We proceed from very different ideological, philosophical and political positions,” Mbeki told the DP. He described the agenda espoused by DP leader Tony Leon (and his echo, Barrell) as a “soulless secular theology” that is guided by the “fundamental idea that everything must be left to the great leveller, the market”.
Mbeki went on to observe that “in our specific situation, what this means is that those whose race defined them as sub-human must now have no access to state support, which allows those who have the means to survive and dominate, to dominate”.
What the president is attacking is the “lean and mean” vision of the state so beloved by Barrell. In this sour world view, the state has to be “lean”, to vacate maximum space to what is euphemistically called the “market”. Insofar as the state is to retain any power, this power has to be “mean” – to deal with the noisy masses, the hard left, recalcitrant teachers, nurses, and all those who do not yet accept the “inevitability” of the iron law of the great leveller.
To sustain this fairy tale, in which an ANC government gets to play at being a DP government, Barrell has, constantly, to adjust the facts. The Minister of Public Service and Administration, Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi is portrayed, not as a tough negotiator, but as if she were leading an anti-trade union crusade. Jeff Radebe is described as “the man newly in charge of privatisation”, when in fact he is the minister of public enterprises (who recently intervened publicly to put a halt to wild speculation about mass retrenchments and privatisation in Transnet).
Last year, Barrell consistently misrepresented the government’s intentions around Eskom. Corporatisation was presented as privatisation.
As for the government’s current macro- economic framework policy, Gear – I can see that Barrell is in love with it like the Holy Grail itself. But has he actually read the document? Or has he relied on the neo- liberal think-tank, the Centre for Development Enterprise, for its particular self-serving and reductive version of Gear?
Let’s be clear, I am not denying there are differences within the ANC alliance.
The public sector wage dispute has pitted comrades from within the ANC (and from within the SACP) against each other. But the dispute is not between a government bent on crushing public sector unions and a trade union movement incapable of understanding budgetary constraints.
The responsible minister, Fraser-Moleketi, understands very well there can be no transformation if nurses, teachers, police, pension clerks and thousands others, critical to delivery, are beaten back with an iron fist into a resentful, sullen and disorganised mass.
Likewise, the public sector unions have not conducted themselves in the selfish, reckless way for which the Barrell script calls. Imagine Barrell’s pious sermonising had essential services been grossly disrupted during last month’s one-day strike. Imagine his triumphalism if the worker marches had deteriorated into anything remotely resembling the unfortunate student demonstration in Johannesburg on the same day.
Barrell’s lazy paradigm (the South African story reduced to “Bismarck versus the infantile left”) renders him equally incapable of grasping where the intra-ANC alliance discussion has travelled to on, for instance, managing the government’s debt.
Instead of giving us patronising lectures on privatisation (which he cribs from the DP’s Ken Andrew), Barrell should take the trouble to find out what has been happening.
We have been looking at, among other things, the Government Employees Pension Fund, estimated by some to account for 40% of the debt. Last year the government reduced its contribution to the fund from 17% to 15% and saved R900-million. Many of us believe there is still room here for much more significant saving.
Before the June election, the Mail & Guardian pronounced itself editorially in favour of an ANC vote, but regretted there was no viable choice further left.
One day, instead of dwelling on highly fictionalised ANC-alliance divisions, perhaps Barrell will explain to readers how he squares his own metal-and-pain Bismarckian enthusiasms with the broad editorial line of his newspaper.
Jeremy Cronin is deputy general secretary of the SACP and an ANC MP