Howard Barrell
OVER A BARREL
If you want to risk feeling profoundly depressed – and some people do enjoy a state of hopelessness – then I have a suggestion for you. Go the African National Congress’s website (www.anc.org.za) and read the discussion documents for a meeting of its national general council due to be held in five weeks.
I ploughed through them on Tuesday morning and spent most of the afternoon in a state of stupified disbelief.
Most one-time communists, Marxists and assorted leftwingers have long since ditched as worse than useless thinking that relies on concepts such as “the national democratic revolution”, “motive forces”, “vanguard organisation” and “the new person”. A number, moreover, would choose an obscure and painful death rather than again hear themselves talking in this kind of language, taken from one of the documents: “The ANC also learnt to identify and seize decisive moments. Thus it had to temper impatience during periods of quantitative accumulation of conditions and factors, and to impel decisive action when the combined elements of qualitative movement forward were evident.”
This, if these documents are to be believed, is still, however, the language in which ANC members – together perhaps with three donkeys and two Himalayan yaks – debate with each other.
According to these documents, the ANC still believes we South Africans are in the middle of a “national democratic revolution”. This notion, developed largely within the Marxist tradition, still apparently organises the ANC’s way of seeing things. As a doctrine, it was originally tailored to meet the needs of revolutionary parties and liberation movements fighting anti-colonial and anti-feudal struggles. That is, for situations in which the struggles being waged were less obviously (if at all, really) anti-capitalist. The doctrine’s leading exponent was probably Mao Zedong, the Chinese revolutionary leader.
Basically, it teaches that a revolutionary organisation in a place such as South Africa should forge a multi-class alliance. This coalition should comprise the proletariat, as the leading social force, the peasantry, progressive intellectuals, members of the middle strata and, usually though not always, also that part of the bourgeoisie that can be described as “national” or “patriotic”. These social groups are called the “motive forces” of the national democratic revolution. Their task is to establish a form of popular government that can provide a launch pad to the next phase of revolution – to achieve socialism.
The doctrine has not been successfully applied anywhere over the past 70 years to establish either democracy or socialism. That, however, evidently does not worry the authors of these documents. But, then, there is little sign that their thought is sensitive to evidence.
What the doctrine does apply, however, is a profoundly undemocratic set of assumptions. These are evident in the ANC documents. The subtext of these documents – the message is also sometimes explicit – is that only the ANC (and its allies in government) embodies the legitimate aspirations of South Africans, can express patriotism, seeks the empowerment of black people and can express the majority will. The rest of us, the ANC would have us believe, are anti-patriotic or anti-democratic, or both.
Messages of the kind the documents put across are not merely the extravagant claims and postures of one contending party as it chases electoral support in a democracy. Rather, the meanings are different. They amount to a statement that no legitimate political expression can occur outside the ANC’s ranks.
That is potentially very dangerous stuff – as we can see in Zanu-PF’s intolerance of other parties in Zimbabwe. Zanu-PF’s intolerance is not dissimilarly constructed.
Prospects look bleaker for South Africa if we take seriously the documents and ANC secretary general Kgalema Motlanthe’s suggestion that the party set up a special school for ANC cadres. The intention would be to develop a “new person” imbued with what Motlanthe called at a recent press conference “a new school of political thought”. Out of it, I imagine, would march massed ranks of homogenised, dutiful, aggressively boring, pains in the arse who believed they had “The Truth” and that it should imprison us all.
The hapless citizens of the former Soviet Union experienced this kind of animal – so beloved of parties that see themselves as the conscious instruments of history’s greater purposes – in, among others, one Alexei Stakhanov in the 1930s. Comrade Stakhanov, a miner in the Ukraine, raised production by organising a group of subordinate workers.
The commissariat then celebrated him as a kind of ideologically purified version of the entrepreneur, one who was motivated not by self-interest but by what were said to be moral incentives. For his pains, and for those he inflicted on his fellow workers, Comrade Stakhanov was declared a “Hero of Soviet Labour” – and earned the contempt of those for whom he was supposed to be an inspiration.
We are not the Soviet Union. Our Constitution provides for multiparty democracy – and we have it. And the ANC was the major sponsor of that Constitution. So its democratic credentials are probably entitled to greater respect than I have shown thus far.
Moreover, there cannot fail to be members and leaders of the ANC who would be embarrassed to find that they are supposed to believe the nonsense that appears in the discussion documents for their national general council. That a movement with such a proud intellectual past should prove so apparently incapable of addressing cogently within its own ranks the new challenges before it!
I pin my hopes for a democratic future on other factors. One, policy as pursued in government is a long way off the rubbish in these documents.
And two, for the 20 years that I have watched or known the ANC, it has been talking about the need for “cadre training”, for adherence to a single view of its mission, and for clear unity of purpose and doctrine. It has always failed to achieve those objectives or sustain them for any length of time.
Moreover, to the extent that the ANC has succeeded, it has more often than not done so by default rather than by decision, or as the fortunate beneficiary of advances initiated by others.
In the words of a former leader of the ANC: “Howard, the ANC is a fuck-up – but somehow it works.” My hopes for our democratic future are vested mainly in the former quality.