Narendra Modi, a politician who combines a form of
hypercapitalism that produces fabulous wealth for some at the cost of ruination
for many others with a narrow and dangerously chauvinistic form of
hypernationalism, will soon take office as the new prime minister of India.
The results of the election that bought Modi into office
should give anyone who retains a naive faith that democratic processes will
always favour democrats – or that the assertion of nationalist sentiment from
those parts of the world trying to recover from colonial occupation is always a
reaching towards justice – cause for concern.
What we see in India is an attempt to contain an entrenched
social crisis through authoritarian and exclusionary means, rather than to
resolve it through democratic and inclusionary means.
When Nelson Mandela ascended to the presidency and apartheid
fell, there was considerable optimism about the prospect that democratisation
in South Africa would be an ongoing process. One of the sources of this
optimism was that nationalism, as an ideology, often assumes a collective and,
ultimately, redemptive destiny.
The power of nationalist sentiment to animate collective
resistance to national repression is undeniable. But it’s clear that
nationalism can also function to legitimate domination and exclusion.
In the colonised world, nationalism enabled people to
confront their oppressors with extraordinary collective courage and it has
sometimes, as in the Egyptian uprising in 2011, continued to do so in the
postcolonial world.
Yet, in the postcolonial world, nationalism has also often
enabled a conflation of the people as a whole with a part of the population
under the authority of the party and the leader in ways that have enabled new
forms of oppression. As we can see in India today, nationalism on its own
offers no guarantee of a democratic or progressive politics.
Another source of the optimism that was widely felt about
demo-cratisation as an ongoing process in the salad days of our democracy was
that, after the Cold War, there was a certain confidence in some quarters that
the political question had been essentially resolved in favour of liberal
democracy.
It was often thought that there was a broad move, from the
old Soviet Union to countries such as South Africa, Haiti and the Philippines,
towards a process of democratisation.
From East Berlin to Johannesburg, Port-au-Prince and Manila,
it was popular power that had posed the most direct threat to authoritarian
modes of rule, but the new consensus was that a politics of elite representation
would replace that of popular presentation, and that civil society – generally
assumed, in practice, to be made up of nongovernmental organisations – would,
along with the courts, counter the power of the state in the name of the
people.
In some respects the ANC, with its strong links to the now
lost world of the Soviet Union, was something of an anomaly in the new world
that seemed to be stretching its democratic wings in the wake of the Cold War.
It has been argued that in parts of the world, such as Porto
Alegre in Brazil or Kerala in India, the left imagination was breaking from
Soviet strictures and seeing civil society – understood as popular organisation
rather than NGOs – as a valuable way to diffuse power and to back states
against global capital and imperialism.
Soviet ideas about economics were abandoned in South Africa,
yet other ideas rooted in the Soviet experience and a reading of Lenin mediated
by Stalinism – such as the need for the party to exercise centralised control
over the forms of political expression of its constituency – were retained.
There was a strange but, for a time, effective confluence
between two very different types of politics: a Leninist desire for central
control and a liberal desire to restrict politics to elites. Both, in practice,
resolved to expel the people from the political stage.
Twenty years after South Africa’s first democratic elections,
optimism about democratisation as an unfolding process is over. It’s true that
if we compare our situation with that of most other postcolonial societies,
rather than to, say, the ringing declarations of the Freedom Charter or the
Constitution, we could be doing a lot worse.
But it’s equally true that from the mines around Rustenburg
to the shack settlements of Durban, the ANC is willing to use murder, along
with a set of ancillary practices such as torture, to contain popular struggle.
It’s also clear that the ANC is seeking to curtail rather
than extend the limited democracy that flourished in the elite public sphere
after apartheid. Decisions about, say, how to regulate the media, the judicial
system or the public broadcaster are clearly not being taken in a manner that
demonstrates any commitment to democratisation as an ongoing process of
expansion and deepening.
For the moment the ANC remains far beyond the reach of any
opposition at the polls. That will remain so unless a credible opposition
emerges that is well organised and rooted in the aspirations of the majority of
the people. Still, there should be no naivety about the character of an
effective electoral opposition still to come.
Now the only party with any credible claim to be the germ of
a potentially effective opposition is the Economic Freedom Fighters. Its
willingness to speak directly to the trauma at the heart of our experience is
admirable but, along with other problems, is not matched by any serious
commitment to a democratic resolution of our crisis.
We should remember that across the postcolonial world there
have been all kinds of alternatives to the corruption of former national
liberation movements – and to authoritarian political parties – that throw up
new problems.
In India, the Congress party, like the ANC, a former
liberation movement, has just been routed at the polls by a deeply reactionary
and, in some respects, even fascist alternative. In Algeria the alternative to
the Front de Libération Nationale was a ruthlessly authoritarian form of Islam.
In Zimbabwe the Movement for Democratic Change was captured by imperialism and
offered no credible social programme.
We have reached the point where naivety about a steady
advance towards the “national democratic revolution” under the wise guidance of
the ANC is inexcusable.
We have also reached the point where naivety about the
courts, the media and civil society, largely imagined as NGOs operating as
representatives of society and as a bulwark protecting society against the
state, is inexcusable.
As the latest scandal about the payments given to chief
executives has reminded us, we have also reached the point where naivety about
the social benefits of capitalism under the discipline of a democratic state is
equally inexcusable. In some respects capital has had more success in
transforming the ANC than the other way around.
Aspects of the kind of degeneration first seen in the ANC –
internal battles driven by competition for personal power rather than
principle, dishonest misuse of the media to further factional agendas, voting
according to slates and so on – are starting to appear in other political
organisations and to become general features of our politics.
If we cannot restore our democratic imagination, and ground
it in democratic practices open to all, our future will be limited to a choice
between authoritarian modes of containing our social crisis and authoritarian
modes of resolving it.
This challenge requires us to think of politics beyond the
electoral terrain. It also requires us to think of politics beyond the realm
of NGOs, the courts and the elite public sphere. It needs to be recognised that
this challenge is not automatically resolved by affirming a left politics. Left
organisations are not always democratic and there are alarmingly authoritarian
currents in the left in South Africa.
Moreover, some of the left assumes, incorrectly, that a
popular politics can be derived from an economic critique when this is plainly
not the case.
This kind of left politics can produce useful critiques but
is irrelevant as a political actor in its own right. At the same time there is
an ongoing naivety on the left about the NGO as a form of organisation, some of
it predicated on the hope that it will be a mechanism for political
enlightenment that will trickle down to the people as a whole.
A left that has real prospects for success will have to be
genuinely immersed in the lives and struggles of oppressed people and it is
here, in this cauldron and not in some NGO or university, that it will have to
form, test and revise its ideas and practices in a manner that is dialogical
rather than pedagogical.
At the moment that left does not exist on anything like the
scale required for it to be an effective political actor in the national drama.
If we want to hold out for a democratic resolution of our crisis, there is a
lot of work to be done.
