Suren Pillay
CROSSFIRE
The opening epigraph to Salman Rushdie’s fascinating account of his journey to freshly post-revolution Nicaragua opens with the following limerick:
There was a young girl in Nicaragua
who smiled as she rode on a jaguar,
they returned from the ride,
with the girl inside
and the smile on the face of the jaguar
Rushdie was alluding to a nagging discomfort that crept over him as he watched, talked and listened to Sandinista leaders who had fought a brave struggle against a vicious dictatorship and who now were in power.
Any allusions to the present are intentional, although we may replace “jaguar” with “Mercedes” to lend the limerick a South African flavour. Many have swopped T-shirts and fatigues for clean-cut designer suits. That’s where I share some of Dale McKinley’s observations raised in “The evolution of the ANC” (February 25 to March 2) and others who have expressed similar views.
“The ANC leadership is conducting a homecoming of sorts. Revolutionary it is not,” concluded McKinley. There are many who do share the opinion that there is a need for a substantive left opposition to the African National Congress. There are some who wonder how the South African Communist Party reconciles itself to itself. There are others who never had any faith in the SACP and hope for the re-emergence of other left organisations who considered themselves “anti-Stalinist” or Maoist or Trotskyist.
Taking the liberty of generalising, one could say that despite the vitriolic venom that often passes between these groupings, they do seem to share a lot. Least of which is an existential crisis.
McKinley seems quite content to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the ANC is a bourgeois organisation, that it never really had a commitment to socialism and that it has fulfilled its class ambitions. What happens after we say, yes, we agree? Silence.
Some on the left seem to feel vindicated by being able to prove this thesis on the ANC’s class character and seem to then feel they can relax with a clear conscience. Is being “left” about criticising and agitating against the powers that be or is it about vindicating one’s conscience ad infinitum?
One could suggest that the left is caught between two laments: firstly, good old Tina –there is no alternative; globalisation is imperialism, is total control, pass my McBurger. The second lament is split as follows: if Stalin failed/ if Trotsky won/ if Maoism was dominant, we would have had a revolution. Alternatively, if the ANC’s working class interests had won we would have had a revolution. Neither of this happened.
McKinley’s assertion that whatever it is, the ANC is not revolutionary has echoes of a dogmatist stubbornly holding on to a correct interpretation of a religious text. My concern is not whether the statement is true or not. It’s the implicit monopoly of the person that makes the judgment that’s disturbing, because a debate is foreclosed.
One wonders whether the left in South Africa needs these twin laments in order to continue to hold on to a left identity. Is this sado-masochism meets Marx? Is the left’s identity going to continue to be established by what did not happen? In the past tense?
The identity of movements and organisations constituted in conditions of oppositionality become destabilised once they come into power. The outcome of that destabilised identity is contestable. Rushdie saw it with the Sandinistas and it did not look like it was going well. Kollontai saw it with the Bolsheviks. We are seeing it with the ANC. We are seeing it with those who did not get into power, like the Pan Africanist Congress and the Azanian People’s Organisation. Crisis of identity. That’s when we sentimental human beings start finding solace in nostalgia.
We may need to liberate “revolution” from the grasp of reified ideological discourses and impute it with a meaning that speaks to the present. “Revolution” is an empty conceptual category which we give meaning to. That meaning changes over time and between places.
Strangely, those who hold on to the right to define its meaning at all costs often become “conservative”.
Those meanings do have a common thread. They signify that which may be transgressive, which goes beyond the limits, steps out of the common truths, the taken for granted and so on. Its meaning is contingent and emerges through struggle and contestation. That contestation is often associated with programmes of change that speak about alternative societies, economies, politics and cultures.
McKinley and others who claim the right to define who is and who is not a revolutionary foreclose the debate, foreclose the contestation and dialogue that needs to happen about what it means to be revolutionary today, about what it means to fight the revolutions of our time.
For sure, the conditions which gave rise to the socialist critique are still there. In fact they have intensified. Material inequity has widened dramatically between and within nation-states.
Those on the left should be weary of becoming known as that fisherman who always talks about the one that got away, or left- wing versions of Krisjan Lemmer and the manne at the Dorsbult Bar.