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| Richard Pithouse |
The African
National Congress has been captured by a predatory elite that is
cynical, corrupt, ruthless and reckless. It is actively reinscribing
unbridgeable inequalities into the deep structures of our society.
The transit camps and new townships in the cities, the enduring ways
in which the former Bantustans remain separate and unequal zones in
the countryside, the state of public education and the growth of
unemployment and precarious work all mark out this out with
undeniable clarity. Workers live in shacks while their bosses gather
unimaginable wealth. There is an abundance of land for game farms and
golf courses but from Johannesburg to Cape Town the state sends out
its men with guns to illegally and violently dispossess people that
seize just enough land, often wasteland, to erect a one room shack.
Attempts to
find some ground for basic survival in an inhuman society are treated
as criminal and consequent to sinister conspiracies. The ANC is
violently intolerant of independent thought and organisation amongst
the grassroots constituency in whose name it assumes a natural and
permanent right to speak and act. It arrests, beats and tortures its
grassroots critics. It fabricates criminal cases against them, drives
them out of their homes and openly threatens to kill them.
Neither the
fact that there are and have been many governments far worse than the
ANC nor the reality that progress, sometimes profound progress, has
been made in many areas since the end of apartheid are sufficient to
redeem the party. After all it itself has, in its better moments,
invited us to judge it on the basis of the Freedom Charter, the
Constitution and, most of all, the aspirations of our people for
dignified lives. The increasing frequency of the suggestion that
distance from apartheid rather than proximity to some positive
aspiration is the proper metric with which to take the measure of our
progress is simply another mark of defeat.
Jacob Zuma
and Julius Malema, both evidently corrupt and authoritarian men,
present us with deeply masculinised, and at times even
militarised, images of a mode of personal power that seeks to ground
itself in the symbolic economy of violence rather than democratic
organisation and debate and to legitimate and express itself outside
of both liberal democratic institutions and popular democratic
practices. Of course its true that the ANC retains the supports of
progressives, liberals and technocrats of various sorts. But while
there are prospects for progress in some areas, like health care, the
reality is that in most instances bringing these people into various
projects within the party is a mode of legitimation and containment
rather than sincere engagement.
Different
people will, on the basis of both their principles and experiences,
call the precise moment at which the ANC became indefensible
differently. But now that the very public massacre in Marikana has
followed the very public murder of Andries Tatane - and now that the
grotesque authoritarianism within the police, the union movement and
the Communist Party has been openly laid out in our public sphere -
only the wilfully naïve and the cynical can sustain their
professions of faith in the democratic aspirations of the ANC.
Neither the
fact that some among the striking miners had killed nor the fact that
as a group they had prepared themselves for battle justifies their
slaughter. The strikers were certainly not killed to defend the
sanctity of life or to contain political engagement in liberal
democratic institutions. The ANC, from Zuma to the trade unions,
routinely acts outside of those institutions. And when people have
been killed in xenophobic attacks, or in the midst of COSATU strikes,
the state does not respond with mass slaughter. A trade union
federation aligned to the ANC can destroy property, intimidate people
and beat people up in public without a violent response from the
state. Yet a poor people's movement that organises independently of
the ANC and engages in protest action that results in no harm to any
person, makes no threats of harm against any person and does no
damage to property is quite likely to be subject to serious police
violence. This reality is at the heart of the matter. The ANC's
support is fracturing amongst both organised workers and communities
and its response is typically characterised by recourse to conspiracy
theory and then slander and violence rather than self-reflection and
dialogue.
There is no
doubt that this massacre marks a historic turning point. But while it
is essential that
we take full
and collective measure of the ANC's failures it is equally essential
that we do not take the easy option of only ascribing the distance
between our faltering aspirations for a democratic and just society
and the altogether more bleak and brutal realities of South African
life to the ANC.
Party
politics is a farce in which different factions of the elite pretend
to represent the people as a whole. There is no party that seriously
speaks to, let alone for, the aspirations of the majority. And civil
society also has a lot to account for. The arrogance that undergirds
its habitual conflation of NGO power with popular power and the
routine and often racialised paternalism with which it frequently
engages or presumes to speak for poor people is predicated on a
simple contempt for the equal humanity of people who are poor. Its
widespread reliance on technocratic and legal solutions to deeply
political problems has proven to be both culpably naïve and
complicit with the professionalisation of certain modes of political
engagement that has entrenched the expulsion of ordinary people from
our public sphere.
The media,
with its systemic disregard for the equal humanity of poor people,
also shares some of the responsibility for bringing us to this point.
The academy, in which the elitism and personal ambition that
undergirds much of the attraction to the constituted power of
international institutions, the state, donors and NGOs rather than
attempts to develop solidarity with the oppressed, and especially
solidarity that can contribute to the constitution of nodes of
popular and democratic counter-power, is also culpable. Religious
leaders have often preferred to share the stage with politicians
rather than to be present amidst the day to day suffering and
struggles of their congregations.
The left has
often been far more committed to building a base on the NGO and donor
terrain than to building solidarity with actually existing popular
struggles. When it has engaged popular struggles it has often done so
in a manner that is profoundly patronising and, in some cases, more
about legitimating its own donor backed projects rather than building
real solidarity. It has also failed to mark a clear distance from the
real authoritarianism and, in some cases outright thuggery, that it
has long sheltered and sometimes even celebrated.
Business,
which has been corrupt at the highest levels and which is often
ruthlessly predatory, is deeply implicated in the morass into which
we have descended. Middle class South Africa likes to think of itself
as virtuous, hard-working and untainted by the excesses and
corruption of the really powerful people in our society. But when the
fear of the poor and contempt for the poor that often swirls just
beneath the surface is masked that mask is seldom firmly fixed.
This massacre
is no tragedy. It is an outrage that will leave a permanent stain on
our society. It is also an outrage that was perpetrated by an
increasingly predatory and repressive regime. But while it is
essential to face up to the reality of what the ANC has become it is
equally essential to acknowledge that the ANC is not solely
responsible for the situation in which we find ourselves. It is time
for a collective facing up to the broader realities of our society
and a collective rethinking of a way forward.
