When Venezuelan trade union officials attacked the ”dictator”, Hugo Chavez, his popularity leapt, as Thabo Mbeki’s has now. Mbeki’s attackers are, paradoxically, unpopular populists. Their attack already seems as curious as the Irish Times headline from 1934: ”[FDR] Roosevelt Reports to Congress on his Dictatorship.”
Was Congress of South African Trade Unions general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi’s carnivalesque outburst, with its drum-beating ”majorettes”, perhaps a new front in the ”class war” against a woman president? A majorette is, after all, ”the female leader of a marching band, who often twirls a baton”. And majorettes wear those ever so short, allegedly permission-giving, skirts.
Are some leaders of South Africa’s historically progressive ”left” entering a reactionary phase? Writer Richard Gott points out that the trade unions at the nationalised oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela, tried to topple Chavez long before the failed United States-backed coup. The South African Communist Party discussion document likewise expresses open contempt for the key figures of democratic sensibility, including Nelson Mandela. Just as Vavi seeks to cram his agenda down upon the National Union of Metalworkers, Chavez faced a Confederation of Venezuelan Workers that had been progressive since 1936, but whose leaders now defied intra-union and popular opinion to oppose Chavez.
The market-fundamentalist London Economist still applauds the bloody Pinochet ”reforms” that killed 110 Chilean trade union leaders. Yet 18 months ago, the same Economist articulated the Vavi thesis: ”These [growth, employment and redistribution policy] reforms left opponents reeling. Those who wanted to see a state-dominated economy were barged aside,” wrote the magazine. When the ”left” shares a hymn-sheet with the Economist, global house organ of Chicago school free-marketeering, a very complex game is under way.
”It cannot be too strongly stressed,” Franz Fanon wrote, ”that in colonial territories the proletariat is the nucleus of the colonised population which has been most pampered by the colonial regime.” Neocolonialism’s divide and rule runs not only along tribal lines, but also between the employed urban proletariat and the less organised rural poor. Hence the nuanced blend of rural poverty alleviation and trade union solidarity in the recent ANC discussion document, developing what Mbeki said in January 2004: ”We cannot afford to pay less attention to the peasant question, seeing these peasant masses as nothing more than voting cattle to return our parties to power, with no other role.” Meanwhile the SACP document has only three insultingly casual occurrences of the word ”rural”.
Behind the cartoon imagery of ”radical” Vavi and ”conservative” African National Congress, what is Vavi’s true claim to radicalism? That notorious skirt-wearer, the late Ruth First, explained that in her anti-apartheid commitments, she did not feel particularly South African: she was motivated by issues of global anti-imperialism.
Instead of modernising First’s indispensable anti-imperialism, the SACP discussion document nostalgically pouts: ”A socialist South Africa, to those who keep asking us what we mean by ‘socialism’ (as if we had forgotten what has been said for more than 150 years now) will be a South Africa in which, overwhelmingly, the ownership of the means of production — factories, land, banks, shops, mines — is socialised, and not in the hands of those whose prime motive is profit-taking.”
Chavez’s radical Venezuelan battle is not to ”socialise” a private Venezuelan oil industry, but rather to rein in an already nationalised industry that had been (as Fanon predicted) hijacked by self-serving elites — resembling, in fact, Maria Ramos’s challenges at state-owned Transnet, where higher wage and salary bills would mean higher transport costs and reduced services for rural and remote areas.
Fanon warned against the degradation of nationalisation into the mere ”transfer into native hands of those unfair advantages which are a legacy of the colonial period”.
The strange conjuncture of Schabir Shaik and Zwelinzima Vavi (mediated through the floating signifier of Jacob Zuma) suddenly makes a lot of sense. It threatens the same uninterrupted transition from colonialism to state-backed klepto-cracy that destroyed Mobutu’s Congo and the Soviet Union alike.
Oxford professor Robert JC Young cautions that ”Marx offers no emancipatory programme specifically for colonial revolution in the mode of Lenin, Mao or Fanon”. The SACP, stuck on the unreconstructed Marx of 150 years ago, cannot explain the challenges faced by leaders such as Mbeki and Chavez, as predicted by Fanon. The SACP document never notices Lenin’s key advance upon Marx: the decisive embrace of ”the national movements against imperialism”. Fanon warned that ”the trade union officials … have lost all contact with the peasantry” so that ”there is a lack of proportion from the national point of view between the importance of the trade unions and the rest of the nation”. A true radicalism must reinstate this sense of proportion. But the ”left” instead narrowly privileges its antique texts. This inadvertently assists the most hedonistic reaches of the black nationalist bourgeoisie, who can easily discredit the SACP’s unreconstructed Marxism of ”more than 150 years now”.
Radical anti-imperialism looks beyond Eurocentric Marxism to a later anti-colonial Marxism that is, as Anouar Abdel-Malek argued, ”a dynamic movement rather than a fixed body of doctrine” and was, in itself, a ”form of radical nationalism”.
By offering little more than the Eurocentric Marxism of ”150 years ago” plus the parochial family album of its own party history (and even that mis-stated), the SACP’s latest document fails those of us who like what Lenin signalled in his article ”Backward Europe and Advanced Asia” and in his later and better known anti-imperialist canon. Instead, a lazy SACP just stokes a little local ”dictatorship” hysteria and trades in stereotypes (”Zanufication”) that are as offensive from the self-styled left as from the usual pseudo-liberal quarters.
On the ”dictatorship” issue, Tony Leon’s Democratic Alliance has announced ”complete agreement with the ‘left’ faction. Not, in this case, because they are ‘left’ but because they are in fact right.” Leon’s acknowledged ideologue, RW Johnson, wishfully sighted this consensus long ago: ”The nationalist government has always argued that its liberal opponents are effectively communists,” Johnson wrote, ”[but] in fact it has been the other way around.” This was manifest silliness in 1977, when Johnson wrote it. But now?
A true radicalism must earn and stand its ground in the spirit of Amilcar Cabral, claiming no easy victories. In a spirit more radical than romantic, Mbeki recently quoted Joseph Schumpeter: the ”public finances are one of the best starting points for an investigation of society. The spirit of a people, its cultural level, its social structure, the deeds its policy may prepare — all this and more, is written in its fiscal history.” This is far more radical, for a liberation movement within a democracy, than what Moshoeshoe Monare has called ”the cacophonous power” of the anti-ANC shouters.
Instead of futile anger, the ANC makes what Mbeki has called ”the real fire that cooks”.
Ronald Suresh Roberts is writing a book about Thabo Mbeki and his intellectual tradition
