In the legendary Helena Sheehan-Jeremy Cronin conversations, Cronin pondered the tension between intellect and organisational discipline. But Dumisani Makhaye’s artless slapdown of Cronin in August evaded this fascinating issue, merely dismissing Cronin as a would-be “white Messiah”.
Makhaye’s critique of Cronin inevitably struck a popular chord, given the long ambivalence of white leftists towards black African aspirations. Too many early white leftists were prepared to defer black liberation to a remote second revolutionary stage, after white workers had first shattered capitalism. Those white leftists who prioritised racial injustice in South Africa after 1928 were often labelled (and labelled themselves) “Negrophilists”, a peculiar term that underlines the very racialisation that it seeks to undo, like the term “comrade nigger” that was current among Alabama communists of the same era. So Makhaye’s strategy was bound to find the jugular within the tortured politics of non-racialism.
But Cronin is, in fact, keenly aware of the complexities of racial status in a non-racial movement. “It’s hard as a white member of the [African National Congress] to come in too robustly on African renaissance,” he repeatedly told Sheehan. “It sounds like you’re an Afro-pessimist.” The impression therefore lingers now that Cronin — a passable poet, powerful essayist and brilliant theorist — in the end had the better of the debate with Makhaye. Makhaye’s attack and Cronin’s abject recantation might even seem like the best evidence yet of the very “bullying” that Cronin complained of in the interview: the brute boots of organisational discipline trampling the fragile flower of intellect.
But is this so? Read carefully, Cronin’s 45-page interviews collapse amid their own contradictions and evasions, when judged by their very own logic. If the concern is for pluralism and free expression within the alliance, few will look to the South African Communist Party as guarantor. Rightly or wrongly, the ANC has expelled Bantu Holomisa for careerist indiscipline. It has dismissed Winnie Madikizela-Mandela from her deputy ministership for underperformance and abuse of perks. Tony Yengeni, Andile Nkuhlu and a string of lower-profile local government officials are gone from office or party membership, for suspected corruption. The ANC made short work of Peter Marais, a bull too large for Tony Leon’s hand. But in all the vagaries of power since 1994, the ANC has never once removed anyone for intellectual or ideological deviation. Only Cronin has done that brand of what Joseph Conrad calls “weary work”: he presided over the expulsion of that hapless loudmouth, Dale McKinley, for no reason other than ideological indiscipline. The hard man of the movement is Cronin himself. From the tedious moralism of Deputy President Jacob Zuma to the antic iconoclasm of the repentant Pik Both, the ANC is the true safe-house of pluralism.
Cronin worried to Sheehan about “the bureaucratisation of the struggle”, which could become repressive as the “new bureaucracy”, despite its “good intentions”, becomes increasingly distant from the people. This is the heart of what Cronin meant by “Zanufication” of the ANC, a term more easily identified with lawless property seizure, crooked Congo militarism, basket-case economics, jailed journalists, persecuted dissenters, fraudulent elections and state collusion in anti-white violence. Cronin’s use of the colourful term “Zanufication” as a synonym for bureaucratic centralisation is already eccentric, if not intellectually dishonest.
But it is Cronin’s centralisation complaint that astonishes. If indeed there is a risk of a remote new bureaucracy in this country, few will look to the SACP as the bulwark against it. It is remarkable that Cronin, with all his intellectual alertness, could warn against “new bureaucrats” without recognising that that debate more concerns the SACP than the ANC. Cronin criticises Pallo Jordan’s defence of the African renaissance, but neglects to mention Jordan’s own, rather more relevant, critiques of the bureaucratic centralisation of the Communist Party.
In his 1990 essay Has Socialism Failed? (which Cronin mentions to Sheehan in a separate context) Joe Slovo belatedly faulted Soviet and Eastern Bloc communism for excessive bureaucratic centralism. But Slovo did not go far enough, Jordan commented afterwards, in owning up to how the Soviet new bureaucrats themselves became “petty tyrants with inordinate powers over the working class”. This was no abstruse issue, given the repeated history of repressive African bureaucracies, Jordan added. It was “the root of the massive discontent that finally drove millions of East German workers to prefer Kohl over Honnecker and Egon Krenz”. Jordan ended by urging the SACP to try harder to “shed its Stalinist baggage and reinvigorate its jaded intellectual traditions”. But now Cronin wishes to present the SACP as the last defenders of unfettered intellect and of populist bureaucracy. This is a gasp-inducing Orwellian reversal.
In fact, Cronin and Sheehan cannot seem to decide whether they prefer an ears-open populism or a languid vanguardism. At one point Sheehan cautions Cronin against working too hard: “So many people can’t see the woods for the trees, but then when those who can are kept too busy with particulars to address the shape of the whole, that can be a problem too. Not everyone can see the whole and communicate what is at stake effectively.”
This self-congratulation threatens to revive Makhaye’s nonsense about a Messiah-syndrome. While implicitly urging Cronin to be more vanguardist, Sheehan simultaneously protests against the allegedly “authoritarian” manner in which policies such as the growth, employment and redistribution strategy have been formulated. When Cronin sees the woods for the trees, it is leftist and benign; when others do, it is authoritarian and ominous.
The notion that he is indispensably clever is, once again, most convincingly denied by Cronin: “We have been losing at the level of policy formulation … I think that, being of a philosophical bent, my aptitudes are of a generalising kind.”
Cronin dismisses the African renaissance as “fuzzy” and “escapist”, but his own policy contributions are as elusive as Deputy Minister Winnie Mandela’s were. With the unravelling of the Washington Consensus, the World Bank, which Cronin wantonly bashes, is now itself a site of struggle. Bashing the bank in abstraction is far easier these days than seizing the new opportunities to reform its detailed operation. Amid these challenges, Cronin remains more “parlourmentarian” than parliamentarian, confessing to Sheehan that he is still slowly learning how institutions and legislative detail work.
Those who live by the barrel ought to be prepared to die by it. When the Mail & Guardian publishes Cronin’s contribution to internal ANC policy debates, Cronin calls this publication “unethical”; but his own chat with Sheehan is littered with references to an internal document of the ANC’s national executive committee.
In my favourite moment of the Sheehan-Cronin pensees, Sheehan laments the passing of the “stronger left” that the Labour Party had in the early Eighties, while Cronin simpers that this strong British Left was later “marginalised”. So the British Left was supposedly “strong” in the very years that an initially diffident Margaret Thatcher was truly beginning to wipe the floor with Michael Foot’s unelectable opposition? That is rather like saying that Tony Leon’s liberalism is truly strong in its electorally irrelevant muscularity. It was the electorate that marginalised Labour’s Militant Tendency. Should we now abolish the electorate to undo the “marginalisation” of Cronin’s cronies?
In the Seventies, while he was in prison, Cronin liked to tease the prison censors with politics in his letters. He told an African fable in which a lion is appointed to watch over a bird that has been incarcerated in a hole for some misdemeanor. The clever lion gets bored. It pulls out a whisker and places it over the hole. “The bird, deluded into thinking that there’s still a full-blown lion at the other end of the whisker tip, continues to cower in his hole,” Cronin wrote, “and after many days dies of starvation. The moral of the story (I like to think): it’s worth twitching the whiskers from time to time. If you produce a growl … well, at least you have the satisfaction of knowing that you are not the victim of your own timidity.” Nobody can call Cronin timid; only absurdists will call him racist. But he does seem genuinely confused. He needs to answer a question: is the threatening lion from the apartheid Seventies still waiting outside the hole? If not, why is Cronin still twitching whiskers?
Ronald Suresh Roberts is a Johannesburg-based writer who has advised the government on post-1994 law reform