The National Union of Mineworkers has informed us that
workers organising their own strikes are being covertly 'manipulated' and their
strikes and protests 'orchestrated' by 'dark forces' and other 'elements' that
amount, of course, to another manifestation of the infamous 'third force'.
'Backward' and even 'sinister' beliefs in magic consequent to the rural origin
of many of the workers are, we've been told by an array of elite actors,
including the Communist Party, central to this manipulation. Frans Baleni,
horrified at the insurgent power of self-organisation, has not just informed us
that his union is trying to “narrow the demands” and persuade workers to
“return to work”. He has also called for “the real force behind the upheavals”
to be “unearthed” by the state on the grounds that “It is completely untrue
[that] the workers are responsible” for the ongoing revolt.
Neither Baleni nor anyone else demanding a witch-hunt to
penetrate the depths of an elaborate conspiracy and dig up the real source of
the miners' rebellion seems able to realise that they're on a hunt for nothing
other than their own paranoid fantasies. And we've yet to see a statement
pointing out that there is no part of society in which people don't look
towards some sort of magic to strengthen themselves against the vicissitudes of
life. Middle class people are, for instance, often fanatically wedded to all
kinds of belief in magic ranging from prosperity cults organised, oddly enough,
in the name of a Palestinian carpenter who scorned wealth to various kinds of
quackery, the fantasy that the possession of commodities can miraculously
transform us at the level of our essential being and actual belief in concepts
as entirely divorced from reality as the fiction that we inhabit an ongoing
'national democratic revolution', that
there could be a 'Zuma moment' to match the 'Lula moment' or that 'the free
market' could liberate us all.
Many aspects of the ANC's vertiginous decline are, indeed,
'alien tendencies' to the ANC as it has existed at certain points in the past.
But paranoia about 'sinister forces' covertly manipulating popular action has a
long history in the party. During the struggle Steve Biko was, notoriously,
presented as a CIA agent and dissent in the ANC's camps was automatically
ascribed to traitors working for the apartheid state. Of course the Cold War
was full of intrigue and conspiracy and the apartheid state was a third force
supporting Inkatha in its war on the ANC. But the ANC's history of having to
operate amidst genuine intrigue does not mean that every time ordinary people
challenge the party they are the unthinking dupes of some conspiracy.
Since its assent to power the ANC has, in striking
continuity with apartheid and colonial discourses, frequently named the white
agitator as the sinister Svengali manipulating ordinarily deferent people into
rebellion. The white agitator is frequently assumed to have all sorts of
fantastical powers. He (and it appears to always be a he) has sometimes been
presented as hoping to bring back apartheid and at other times has been
presented as an agent of foreign governments 'hell-bent on destabilizing the
ANC'. Baseless allegations about covert manipulation by other political
parties, and, on occasion, imagined ethnic plots, have also been used to
explain away popular dissent as a conspiracy on the part of a rival elite. But
now it seems that responsibility for the rebellion across the platinum belt is
being ascribed to Julius Malema and the factional battles in the ANC.
The ANC has no monopoly on a paranoid worldview founded on a
systemic inability to grasp that workers and other poor people have precisely
the same capacity for political thought and agency as all other people. The
tendency to respond to popular organisation via the paranoid lens of a moral
panic in search of a folk-devil is a general feature of our elite public
sphere. The DA, for instance, has blamed drug dealers and the ANC Youth League
for protests in Cape Town that are clearly both self-organised and genuinely
popular. Some NGOs have invented their own folk-devils to explain their lack of
influence over popular politics and to delegitimate popular organisation. And
various factions of the left outside of the ANC have shown themselves entirely
unable to think about popular politics organised both independently of the ANC
and outside of their control without recourse to their own, and equally
fantastical, version of the white agitator thesis.
These realities mean that while the particular form of the
paranoia that follows the ANC's inability to comprehend popular political
agency is certainly inflected by its experience of the struggle, the Cold War
and, of course, the enduring Stalinism of the SACP, it is in no way a unique
phenomenon. On the contrary it is typical of elite politics across the
political spectrum and across a wide variety of organisational forms from
political parties to NGOs, the media and the academy. This is consequent to the
fact that we live in a class society where elites undertake bruising battles
against each other, sometimes in the name of poor, but share an investment in
the ongoing manufacture of a fundamentally irrational 'common sense' in which
the full and equal humanity of oppressed people is denied. It is this shared
paranoia at the prospect of people effectively considered as barbarians
entering, and thereby desecrating, the hallowed ground of the terrain on which
elites conduct their battles and negotiations that explains why some of what
Blade Nzimande says about self-organised political action is no different to
what the business press says about it.
This is hardly unique to our time and place. Any cursory
study of the historical record reveals a tremendous wealth of examples of
people whose humanity and equal capacity for political thought and action was
denied by all the experts of the day but who, nonetheless, succeeded in
providing the most practical refutations of the irrationality of that
consensus. From the slave rebellion against ancient Rome led by Spartacus, to
the rebellion of the Zanj slaves in ninth century Iraq, the Peasant's Revolt in
fourteenth century England, the rebellion of Haitian slaves just over two
hundred years ago and the anti-colonial revolts people considered as sub-human,
as incapable of effective independent thought and action, have constantly
demonstrated that it is the various hypotheses of a graduated humanity, rather
than the people whose full humanity is denied, that are truly irrational. But
even in defeat elites have frequently been unwilling to accept the very
concrete evidence before them and have instead ascribed the material refutation
of their assumptions of superiority to conspiracy. And it has frequently been
assumed that conspiracy is animated by diabolical or irrational forces. There was,
it was said, Devil worship behind the peasants' revolt in England, evil African
rituals at the heart of the Haitian Revolution, religious outrage at gunpowder
cartridges greased with pig and cow fat that inspired the Indian Rebellion and
sinister rituals and manipulation rather than, say, the demand for land and
freedom, behind the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya.
The ANC's own history during the struggle is not, as it
likes to pretend, one of an enlightened political elite leading a nation to
freedom from above. On the contrary the party was frequently alienated from
popular initiative when it first emerged and, in fact, often hostile to it. In
many cases the party was only able to draw new sequences of popular dissent
into the fold, and to enable them to function as a source of renewal, after
they had already proved their power in action. This is broadly true of the
women's riot in Cato Manor in Durban in 1956, the Pondo Revolt in 1960, the
Durban strikes of 1973 and the Soweto uprising of 1976. But since it captured
the state the ANC has lost the capacity to be renewed by absorbing popular political
initiative, which it has consistently seen as illegitimate irrespective of the
degree to which it is lawful.
It is inevitable that all kinds of people are going to show
up in the wake of a successful mobilisation. They may range from demagogues to
activists, academics, journalists, NGOs and churches. Many will be opportunists
of various sorts looking for a constituency to conscript, materially or
discursively, into their own projects. Others will just want to make a quick
splash for themselves before moving on. But some will be genuinely interested
in understanding and perhaps communicating what is happening and some will be
genuinely interested in negotiating solidarity. What ever their intentions
people higher up the class hierarchy are likely to get more media attention
then the people whose political initiative they are responding to.
But the fact that people have shown up after a moment of
insurgent popular action hardly means that they orchestrated it. And if people
do decide to form alliances across the social divisions that usually mark our
society they have, irrespective of whether or not someone like Frans Baleni
approves, every right to do so in a democracy. The idea that it is
automatically dubious and even 'sinister' for workers and other poor people to
make their own decisions about who to form alliances with is, to say the least,
paternalistic, paranoid, anti-democratic and, in many cases, rooted in a barely
masked desire to keep oppressed people in their place. Of course popular
action, on its own or in alliance with other forces, may or may not take a
democratic or progressive form but that is a different question.
