Ebrahim Harvey has written an extraordinary article (“To break free from the white left”, December 15 to 21 2000) in which he puts forward a number of dubious propositions.
First he seems to argue, as a Marxist, that individuals’ viewpoints depend on colour and income. Secondly he argues that there are too many people of the wrong colour and income on the left. Following these propositions he holds that the existing left cannot, therefore, reflect the real needs of the population. He adds that the left, given its background, is Eurocentric.
There is no truth to any of these propositions. Marx does argue that consciousness is determined by material reality and hence the needs and demands of a class will reflect its material position in the class structure. It does not follow from this that each and every individual’s viewpoint is resolved by what each person eats and where he lives.
What applies to the mass does not apply to every individual. The idea that it does is clearly nonsense or Stalinism or both.
Marxism considers ideas on their merits, whatever the Stalinists did and do. It claims to be trying to establish the truth and that such truth can only benefit the working class, which as the universal class is alone able to overthrow capitalism. Whence that truth comes, from rich or poor, black or white, is irrelevant.
The problem is that a working class movement must be led, in large part, by its theory and hence by theorists. For this it requires intellectuals. An intellectual is someone who follows through his ideas regardless of the consequences to himself, though with every regard for the effect on society.
In the context of modern society, it means that an intellectual is someone critical of the nature of modern society, critical of its ruling class, critical of its government and critical of authorities wherever they might be. The rest are either bureaucrats of knowledge or little more than paid hacks and propagandists.
Naturally, most of what might be called an intelligentsia is of the latter kind and most of them will be white in South Africa because they are appendages to a European capital, as Harvey makes out.
The problem is that he identifies these people with intellectuals. Intellectuals can be potentially of any class or colour. Lenin followed Kautsky in arguing that theory comes from intellectuals who derive from the bourgeoisie. In South Africa, where the vast bulk of the population are employed or unemployed workers, living on the bread line, it is clear that they cannot have time for the development of theory. That does mean that such people will tend to be disproportionately of non-working class origins and so non-black.
There are, of course, quite enough educated black or so-called non-white people to constitute the vast bulk of such intellectuals but intellectuals are a tiny minority of educated persons, whether white or black. It is, therefore, unsurprising that the colour of the intellectuals will be partly determined by historically available opportunities.
Workers or their children may go to university but once they leave their class they have no material reason to be on the left and every reason to embrace the upward mobility the government is demanding that they take. On the other hand, those who do become intellectuals will be well-placed to lead the class, simply because they may have a closer relationship to the class. That is not automatic, however, and the fact that white intellectuals have not suffered the hunger and deprivation of the majority does not disqualify them from understanding the interests of the majority.
Socialism is certainly egalitarian and hence must involve the ending of poverty and the reign of abundance but the ultimate aim is the introduction of a society which is emancipated from wage-labour, where labour becomes mankind’s prime want.
Marxism may be misunderstood as Eurocentric in the restricted sense that it argues that socialism in one country is impossible and that no backward country can lead the world to socialism. One has only to see lllthe llfailures of the former Stalin-lllist countries and the different varieties of African socialism to llllsee how correct those doctrines have proved to be.
Any country, like South Africa, can overthrow capitalism, but socialism is a world system, with the highest possible levels of productivity, and unless the most developed capitalist countries go socialist, nothing will change and the original country will revert to capitalism, as we have seen.
Of course, the simple overthrow of capitalism would reinvigorate the world process of transition to socialism but there can be no illusions that South Africa, by itself, can build anything except an underdeveloped capitalism.
It is true that no Socialist International took root in Africa but that does not make Marxism Eurocentric. There have been powerful movements in Asia and Latin America. For Marxism to establish itself there must be a substantial working class and Africa is underdeveloped. More important, however, has been the stranglehold of Stalinism, that most anti-Marxist of all movements. Its insistence on national liberation and the unity of all classes under the bourgeoisie virtually wiped out any prospect of a working-class movement.
Let us not forget how the MPLA in Angola liquidated its left. We have to understand racism itself as something material, part of the whole nature of the epoch and not just in the mind. We cannot fight racism simply by having affirmative action policies inside the left. The intertwining of racism and capitalism to the point where racism became systemic within capitalism had fundamental consequences.
Anti-capitalist consciousness was diverted into an anti-white consciousness, which informed the whole struggle. Paradoxically, the capitalist class always opposed this systemic racism, while accepting it as the least worst alternative, because they preferred to raise productivity in part through the elimination of expensive white workers.
They have achieved their goals with the advent of a black nationalist government, supported by the SACP, dedicated to the market and the rise of a black junior bourgeoisie. It ought to be abundantly clear that it is in the nature of global capital today to increase inequality, so that only a struggle of workers as a class can overthrow both economic inequality and its racist effects. Such a class-conscious proletariat cannot care what colour or class their leaders are, as long as they remain true to their mission.
Hillel Ticktin is professor of Marxist studies at the University of Glasgow