Freedom, Alienation and our Hollow Democracy

“Let me at the outset define what I mean by alienation. It is the cry of men who feel themselves the victims of blind economic forces beyond their control. It is the frustration of ordinary people excluded from the processes of decision making. The feeling of despair and hopelessness that pervades people who feel with justification that they have no real say in shaping or determining their own destinies…Many may not have rationalised it, may not even understand, may not be able to articulate it. But they feel it.”

Jimmy Reid, Clydesdale trade unionist, after being elected as rector of Glasgow University.

April 1994, that moment under the African sun, when South Africans, young and old, the healthy and the infirm, queued in seemingly endless lines at polling stations to cast their vote in a democratic process ,  a vote that would at long last, signal their enfranchisement, and the end of centuries of exploitation, oppression and disenfranchisement. In a word, it would be the symbolic exercise of our Freedom.

Twenty years later, the dream of a democratic and free society is being questioned, as parliament, political leaders and the political structures and institutions of government have grown increasingly distant and removed from the realities of the majority of South Africans, who are mainly unemployed and survive at the periphery of society. In a country where 23 million people, live in poverty and who survive on less than R620 per month, parliamentarians, their representatives, earn close to R80 000 per month, with ministers and ranking officials earning up to R175 000 per month. This excludes the perks that come with the office, such as housing allowances and free travel allowances, staff and offices and communication allowances.

Is it then any wonder that during the last elections, 13 million voters did not bother to cast their vote? The press, government, political parties and the IEC have all hailed the turnout of 18 million registered voters as a resounding success for democracy, but is this really a fair assessment in a country that has been coined the protest capital of the world? How is it that we somehow contrive to disconnect the increasing levels of protest to the increasing numbers of alienated voters? And what does this increased alienation of voters, specifically young people, together with the rise of what some commentators have called the “rebellion of the Poor”, mean for our fledgling democracy?

For many young people in South Africa today, freedom does not have the same meaning it does to the older generation who experienced apartheid. Freedom remains an alien concept. The Older generation lived through the worst excesses of both racial apartheid, but also the primitive accumulation of the capitalist classes that oversaw the land dispossession of the African majority, which was a central element in building a cheap labour force for mining, energy and industrial development. The African majority saw their disenfranchisement as the central point of their oppression and the framing of this demand through the Freedom Charter, which declared that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it”, encapsulated the euphoria which erupted after the first democratic elections in 1994. The notion that by simply voting in a black majority government, that all our problems would be solved, has proven to be the great divide between the older and younger generations.

The younger generations have come to “feel”, if not understand, that they are only free, in the notional sense. They are free to vote, but not free to change their collective reality. They realise that they are only free in so far as they are able to participate in the economy both as labour and as consumer. For this is the measure of our worth within our current political and economic system. For 23 million South Africans they are not able to fully participate in either. They are left on the margins, to survive on hand-outs and government grants, and it is in this condition that their alienation manifests in continuous and consistent protest.

The vast inequality of our society will inevitably test the limitations of democratic rule. In order for the government to guarantee a stable social consensus, it cannot help but find refuge, more and more often in coercion, as seen with the forceful display of state determination in Marikana in 2012 and the increasing number of deaths at police hands in the on-going “rebellion of the poor”.

It is in this challenge that the question of the universal franchise, an abstract formal political equality in a society that is fundamentally unequal, is brought into stark relief. The vast majority of South Africans, who struggled for the vote, imagined that challenging and overcoming unequal and exploitative relationships would be at the heart of parliamentary politics and would be a resource for social transformation.  Instead, our parliamentary system has morphed into a grand elitist ceremonial gathering of the political aristocracy.

The nature of society’s engagement with this austere legislative house was encapsulated in the way that the Amendments to the Mineral Petroleum Resources Development Act, was rushed through the NCOP and the provinces within 3 days during the closing session of the last parliament. Communities who had made submissions to the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee were completely excluded from the NCOP process and none of their submissions were included in the amended bill. Instead, most of the included amendments were proposed by business.

Alienation sets in. Exclusion from the process of decision making further alienates those who are the most alienated in the country, those who are most likely to be property-less, unemployed and who survive on grants and the kindness of family and friends. In this context, it is hard for them to imagine that their vote would actually count for anything. After all, it is the same persons or party they voted for that would exclude and disenfranchise them from political processes. It is the same democratic system which leaves them on the periphery while the purveyors of power experience the excesses of political office.

The governing parties mandate from one third of potential voters should thus be read in this context. We should not present the mandate as an overwhelming endorsement of the governing party or its policies, less this is construed as a licence to railroad and exclude communities and society from the democratic process. The reduced mandate (albeit relatively substantial) of the governing party should instead be held up as a glowing reminder of the need for our government to engage in much more inclusive and participatory democratic process. Reducing the gap between the democratic process and the society it serves will alleviate the alienation which is slowly pervading the silent majority and which has the potential to result in an escalation of the subaltern conflict plaguing South Africa.

Democracy, that is, real democracy in which the dimensions of alienation are considerably reduced, can act as a new resource of transformative power, despite the conventional wisdom of the media, entrenched political parties and business, that democracy as a representative form, while not adequate for the needs of running the business of government (most businesses would prefer a strong CEO with a mandate to maximise profits), is nonetheless the best that society has to offer. For a growing number of South Africans, it’s not good enough.

By allowing communities and social movements to actively engage in the democratic process and by allowing these struggles to reinforce the electoral mandate, we are able push back the limitations of a system which is dominated by vested interests. Democracy needs a system that will allow the vested interests of people, particularly marginalised people, to supersede or at the least, balance the interests of profit.