From a Failed Revolution to a Political Revolution with a Social Soul
“The ANC wants to get back this province, because they know what needs
to be done”[1] ,
goes the call to action of the ANC President Jacob Zuma as he walks the streets
of the working class in Cape Town ahead of the 103rd celebration of
the ANC`s formation.
Behind this brief and seemingly innocuous and innocent
comment, lies two decades of failed revolution.
Revolutions, as we have come to know and understand them,
starting with the American and French revolutions in the 18th
Century, have essentially sort to address two central and interlinked demands, the right to participate in the affairs of
the state and the right to be free of poverty and misery or in the words of
Frederick Engels in Anti-During; “ equality must not be merely apparent, must
not apply merely to the sphere of the state, but must also be real, must extend
to the social economic sphere.” Neither of these rights were realised
in the South African revolution, save for the “representatives” of the people
and by default the rulers of the people.
This failure is not unique to South Africa and has taken on
different but similar forms across the centuries since the American and French
revolutions. At the heart of this failure sits the turn away from the essence of
democracy and public participation in the affairs of state (which at the time
of the American and French Revolution and which has remained so ever since, was
the foundation stone of the turn from Totalitarianism to Freedom.) The right to
participate in the public affairs has always been integrally and naturally
bound up with the welfare of community.
Just like many
revolutions before it, the South African experience and its leaders, very
quickly discarded the revolutionary spirit (by this I mean the manner in which self-governing
structures had organically mushroomed across the country) which had developed
in the run up to 1990. The rise of street committees and a budding new
revolutionary democratic mode of public participation in the affairs of state
were discarded on the rubbish heap of the revolution in favour of a much more
absolutist and aristocratic mode of governance with all its pomp and ceremony,
and which effectively reconstituted the old regime with new actors. In essence,
and in relation to the original question of public participation, nothing changed.
The leaders of the “revolution”, as did most historical
leaders of revolutions, whether they knew it or not, soon looked to the words
of people like Benjamin Rush, one of the founding fathers of the American Revolution
who famously proposed that “all power is derived from the people; they
possess it only on the days of their elections. After this it is the property
of their rulers”
Lost in the rush to claim power, was the founding
realisation expressed by Pixely Ka Seme at the founding of the ANC in 1912 that
“The
white people of this country have formed what is known as the Union of South
Africa - a union in which we have no voice in the making of laws and no part in
their administration. We have called you, therefore, to this conference, so
that we can together devise ways and means of forming our national union for
the purpose of creating national unity and defending our rights and
privileges.” Lost too was the commitment set out in the Freedom Charter
in 1956 that “The People Shall Govern”.
Once more, the business of government has become the
privilege of the few. And, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, “the people sink into lethargy, the
forerunner of death to the public liberty.”
The message of “We have a good story to tell” and
which is common to all political parties, contains a subtle and mostly hidden
narrative of a ruling elite who will benignly bestow the gifts of largesse upon
its helpless and ignorant subjects and insists upon the lethargy of the people.
For when the leader of the party casually remarks that we are the only party
that “knows” what needs to be done, it invokes the fundamental
question of all revolutions: public participation in the affairs of state.
The ANC in its attempt to reclaim some of the lost ground
conceded to the democratic forces of the left and the EFF has committed the
January 8th message of the ANC to reclaiming the Freedom Charter and
has in 2012 produced an internal discussion document entitled Organisational Renewal : Building the ANC as
a Movement for Transformation and a Strategic Centre of Power .
However, In practise , Gwede Mantashe and the ANC as a
political party, continues to obliterate the essence of this democratic
document which underpins the democratic
nature of the progressive forces seeking a new dispensation in which the
people shall govern, when he glibly, alongside “the gleaming poolside of the
four-star President Hotel in Sea Point” boldly declares that “we will be giving the country content on
the Freedom Charter…We will be reminding people of their history… they don’t
know the journey and the complexity of the journey…”
The separation between the ruling party and the state from
the people has become “common sense” and the new discourse of politics within
the ANC. Ministers regularly remind us, as Lindiwe Sisulu recently did when
questioned about a disgruntled pensioner who accosted Jacob Zuma on his
walkabout, that “the widow was receiving a state pension and lived in a house provided
by government”. The benevolent dictatorship cloaked as a democratic
government.
The modern party system is in conflict with what Hannah
Arendt calls “revolutionary organs of self-government” such as the street committees
that developed in the Anti-Apartheid struggle. That is why the development of
the United Front holds the potential to reignite the lost essence and spirit of
the failed revolution. It is in the townships, communities and shopfloors that
the true expression of the people can best be articulated and expressed. A
democracy that ensures that civil society (by this I mean all society other
than the state) is actively engaged in the business of the state is best placed
to confront the contradiction of a state that stands “above and outside of society.”
The ANC in its discussion document of 2012 prescribes that “Our movement must always be at the centre of
civil society groups and social movements that are genuinely taking up issues
affecting the motive force and give political and ideological leadership …and
to embed the organisation in grassroots "daily struggles for a better
life" through "development
activism". Furthermore,, it calls for "the creation of organs of
people's power" as the primary organisational form for organising
community involvement in transformation and development work”
While this is a mouthful and contains a range of assertions
that can best be described as wishful thinking, the sentiments are nonetheless
worthy albeit constrained within what Gillian Hart in her book, Rethinking the South African Crises (2013),
describes as “the cracks and fissures” that accompanied what John Saul(Cry for
the Beloved Country-2001), calls “the ANC`s effort to build it hegemonic
project on the altar of the market place”, and the coming together of “multiply scaled forces and relations”
which she calls “movement beyond
movements”. Hart argues that in Marikana these forces assumed a form that
is extreme but not exceptional but at the same time all these “revolts of the poor’, have its own
specificity, which escape the power of those who would contain and control
them, and that these are not always “progressive”.
Leonard Gentle goes further and argues that “By
definition a movement is heterogeneous, comprising such a range of experiences
and organisational forms that no party or single organisation can encompass
that range” and that “the
Marikana massacre ... freed activists from any further illusions of
transforming the ANC into the movement it was in the 1980s. It meant that all
the local struggles in communities of the past 15 years and all the workplace
struggles that broke out after Marikana no longer look to the ANC and its
allies for strength. They look to themselves”
This reading of the political landscape within which social
movements operate is completely different to the one the ANC envisages in its
document. The key differences being that the ANC sees itself as at the centre
of these movements while the left generally sees the ANC as “outside and above” these
movements. So what is the actually
existing nature of the ANC and social movements? In a word. None. But before we explore this further we should first
consider the role of the ANC as the governing party of the State.
The State, to paraphrase Marx, “is the concentrated and
organised force of society and in this sense the state is the summing up of the
bourgeois society and is the reflection of the economic needs of the Class
controlling production.” It is common cause that South Africa remains
an unequal society and the class which has undoubtedly benefited from the last
20 years has clearly been the class that controls the means of production. Hal
Draper in his work on Karl Marx`s Theory of Revolution, Volume 1, State and
Bureaucracy, contends that “ the class nature of the state is attested
not by the fact every act is necessarily, equally, and exclusively in the
direct interest of the ruling class only, but by the fact that all other
interests are regularly subordinated to the interests of the ruling class, that
the acts of the state are decisively shaped by what the ruling class and its
representatives conceive its interests to be , and take place only within the
framework of those interests.”
He goes on to succinctly articulate the
dilemma facing the ANC and progressive forces today. The nature of the
bourgeois state is such that “no matter how class neutral in origin or
intention, the needs of society cannot be met without passing through the
political institutions set up by a class-conditioned society, and it is in the
course of being processed through these channels that they are shaped, sifted,
skewed, moulded, modelled and modulated to fit within the framework
established by the ruling interests and ideas. This is how the class nature of
the state and society asserts itself, even without malevolent purposes and
sinister plots”
The EFF`s hasty foray into parliamentary politics, besides
the entertainment value it offered the nation, is equally bound by the nature
of the bourgeois state. It cannot escape the processes which ultimately model
interventions within the paradigm of the ruling classes. The manner, in which
it soon forgot its electoral promises of austere politics once they received
the first promises of large sums of money, is a case in point. “For
no matter how successful a party may ally itself with the masses in the street
and turn against the parliamentary system, once it has decided to seize power
…remains a body whose approach to the people is from without and from above.”
Arendt.
So too, the ANC finds
itself wrapped up in a paradigm of bourgeois liberal democracy in which
representative democracy is the only expression of democracy that matters, even
if the ANC rhetoric of participatory democracy is brought forth when engaging
in intellectual debates. The practical reality is that the ANC has distanced
itself from legitimate social movements starting with the disbandment of the
UDF in the 1990`s. The ANC has subsequently not formed any meaningful partnerships
with social movements over the last two decades and any relation with social
movements has largely been confrontational and dismissive. This is consistent
with what Gramsci and subsequently Gillian Hart, Vishwas Satgar and Hein Marais
has called the process of “de-nationalisation
and re-nationalisation” and which has centred on the building of ANC hegemony as opposed to class
hegemony.
Thus the ANC rhetoric of building “organs of peoples” power
has proven to be a utopian distraction to the vicissitudes of intra elite
violence aimed at political control and access to resources at the local level.
Karl von Holdt and others in their paper “The
smoke that calls Insurgent citizenship, collective violence and the struggle
for a place in the new South Africa, in which they consider eight case studies of
community protest and xenophobic violence note that the general pattern in the case studies of protest movements is that
these did not lead to the formation of autonomous organisations in civil
society. The local organisational elite, from which the protest leadership is inevitably
drawn, is clearly focused on the nexus of power, status and resources, which is
constituted by the local town councils, and dominated by the ANC. The ANC
itself has sufficiently far-reaching legitimacy to simultaneously present
itself as the governing authority within the town councils and as a popular
movement outside the state, able at times to represent popular pressure on the
state. In this capacity it presents itself as the incarnation of the noble
legacy of the liberation struggle, and this, it seems, is a greater source of popular
legitimacy than its control of the state, with many protesters drawing a
distinction between their support for the ANC and their hostility to the
current incumbents of the local state.This
leaves little space for the emergence of a genuinely autonomous movement in
civil society, as the ANC absorbs the protest leadership, leaving the subaltern
classes without a durable organisation.”
As I have previously
indicated, this pattern of absorption is consistent with the building of ANC
hegemony at the expense of a class hegemony in which all power is located in
the ANC as opposed to with the people.
The antithesis to a bourgeois state is not the capture of
the state by a political party confined within the “rules of engagement” of a
state who is modelled in favour of the bourgeois and elites, but rather a
revolutionary return to a democracy in which the people shall govern as opposed
to the ANC`s conception of banal rhetoric and contests of capturing resources
at the local level by the local elites, using subaltern groups as foot
soldiers.
This entails taking
the road less travelled. Yet, the road less travelled is nonetheless a road
which instinctively emerges at the outset of all revolutions. From the Communes
of Paris and the Soviets of Russia to our very own Street Committees of South
Africa, the instinctive response to both the social and economic question has
always been the collective participation of the people in the affairs of state.
This requires more than rhetoric and representative democracy. It requires
autonomous grassroots organisations who are able to not only hold the local government
and state to account, but who through solidarity networks are able to act with
others in pursuit of national objectives as well.
It was Robespierre who insisted (that is before he
assumed power and changed his insistence) that “the clubs and societies were
the only places in society where this freedom could actually show itself and be
exercised by the citizens and hence, they were the true” pillars of the constitution”,
not merely because from their midst has come “a very great number of men who
once will replace us”, but also because they constituted the very “foundations
of freedom” and Marx who contended that “ to
be sure, we have long been of the opinion that parliamentary freedom( that
is freedom through representative democracy) stands only at the beginning of its
beginning…a truly political assembly blossoms out only under the great
protectorate of the public spirit.
But says Hegel, the direct participation of everyone in
deliberations and decisions on general affairs of state injects “the
democratic element lacking all rational form into the organism of the state”. Marx, however, argues the opposite view: all should participate, for “general affairs of state” are by nature
the concern of all. “The striving of
civil society to transform itself into political society
or to make political society the actual society manifests itself as a striving
for the most fully possible universal participation in legislative power.”
It is thus in this moment that the United Front of
grassroots movements and organised labour represents a germinal idea that first
found its expressions in the street committees of the 1980`s and which, though
decimated in the 20 year interregnum, remains alive in the spirit of the
Rebellion of the Poor which saw the State using its monopoly on violence, to
mow down striking workers in Marikana, and the unprecedented uprising of farm
workers in the Cape. These spontaneous uprisings, to quote Arendt, “make
their appearance in every genuine revolution throughout the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. Each time they appeared, they sprang up as the spontaneous
organs of the people, not only outside of all revolutionary parties but
entirely unexpected by them and their leaders.”
The point here is not to suggest that we are in the midst of
a revolution or to “dogmatically anticipate the world”, but rather to “find
the new world” through “criticism of the old”.
Peter Alexander and Peter Pfaffe in their paper “Social
Relationships to the Means and Ends of Protest in South Africa’s Ongoing Rebellion
of the Poor: The Balfour Insurrections” argue that while there is
social distance between workers and the poor, there is too much intermingling,
family loyalty, life style fluidity and shared experience for it to be helpful
to explain this distinction, or something proximate, through a theory of class
separation.
They note that “here
and there we find moments of genuine solidarity between workers and the poor.
In Balfour, SAMWU members backed the uprising; in 2010, in Standerton, less
than 40 km from Balfour, we came across a community march to a workers’ picket line
and workers solidarity with a community protest; in 2011, in Ficksburg, Free
State, the police union deplored the killing of a protest leader by a fellow
officer; and in 2012 there was considerable community solidarity with platinum
miners’ strikes in the district around Rustenburg, Northwest, with workers and
youth building barricades together on one occasion and women backing their
partners after the Marikana massacre (Alexander, 2010, p. 36; POPCRU, 2011). We
are reminded; too, of the scale shift that emerged in fits and starts through
the 1970s and 1980s. This was a period in which ‘ways of organising’ became less a ‘stumbling block’ and more a division
of labour. Behind the trenches there were then, and are now, family and
community networks and shared interests, and, ahead of them, there is a
possibility, though only a possibility, that the hinge will close and, as Castells
might put it, allies become comrades.”
At the heart of the idea of the united front is a “democratic
and egalitarian society”. To some extent it is true that a top-down
NUMSA led process is exactly what the process should not be, but this criticism
ignores the spontaneous and organic developments of grassroots movements over
the last decade or more. The criticism also ignores the important lessons that
grassroots movements have learnt over this period and the fervent manner in
which their autonomy has been placed at the centre of developing a United
Front.
It is indeed the case that these lessons about the autonomy of social
movements should be treasured and protected and that as soon as the movement
veers to a more autocratic tendency, that the ideal of a “democratic and equalitarian
society” would have been lost.
For it is in the very nature of the localised democratic structures of
the public spirit, that the foundations of Freedom are moulded and where democracy
resides.
The key question that remains to be resolved is how this
movement will express itself within the political discourse and does it
ultimately offer an alternative to the status quo.
If like Syriza (a radical left coalition rooted in the
movements resisting austerity in Greece and which has become the main
opposition party in Greece), it is able to navigate the fine and sometimes
messy line between political party and social movement, then perhaps there
exists the possibility that the united front could develop into an important
alternative paradigm to existing political parties which, like Gwede and Zuma,
believe that they are the all-knowing, well-meaning instruments of political
society.
So what has Syriza done that is so different that it
requires our attention? As a burgeoning coalition in 2008 it was constantly
criticised for its lack of a programme. Much as NUMSA is and will be criticised.
But instead of rushing in the experts and formulating what Marx calls a dogmatically anticipated programme, it
engaged in a lengthy process of open discussion with many groups and which drew
together inputs from different points of view. While in the words of Aristides
Baltas, one of the founders, “we did not present the view in the sense of a
theory predisposing us to take power by an uprising or by a general strike,
instead we followed the social movements as it developed and we tried to
participate in the movement and present our views and at the same time learning
from it and following its objective rhythms.” Baltas goes on to quote the Spanish poet
Antonio Machado who captures the essence of the Syriza approach: “don’t
ask what the road is; you make the road while you walk it. “
Syriza and its form
of organisation, which to be sure is amorphous, presents according to Baltas three
key tasks of a new kind of political approach to the problem of bourgeois
democracy;
these are:
A)
Immerse the political party in the social
movements to promote the values of socialism, help organise solidarity
networks, develop its programme in open dialogue with society and by so doing
to formulate the agenda of a government of the left.
B)
Transform itself into the political expression
and the organisational backbone of the diverse social movements without
trespassing on their autonomy.
C)
Organise itself as an official opposition
prefiguring the new kind of state organisation that it will implement if and
when it comes to power.
It is important to note however that Syriza does not provide
a template to apply elsewhere but it does present a new type of political
organisation in the making. The most distinctive feature of Syriza is not that
it sees itself as a means of political representation for movements, rather
that it is involved practically in building the movements.
This is
in stark contrast to the EFF for example, who had initially tried to fashion
themselves as the political representation for movements and to the ANC who
have articulated similar sentiments but has failed to move past the rhetoric and
is still committed to a central organisation which sees social movements as
secondary and submissive to the democratic centralism of the ANC, and whose
local politics is underpinned by a contestation of local elites for access to
resources.
Syriza has allocated much of its parliamentary resources to
fund solidarity networks. Of the five staff allocated to MP`s two will work for
the MP directly one for Policy committees and two will be employed by the party
to work in the movements and neighbourhoods.
Such a new kind of Party requires specific organisational
forms that will anchor it in a counter movement to the “flytrap of parliamentary
politics, with all its tendencies towards a separate political class”.
Examples of London and the Greater London Council (where the
radical left of the Labour Party governed London in 1982-86), Porto Alegro
(where the Brazilian Workers Party (PT) opened the decisions on municipal
investment to popular participation from 1989 to 2004) and South Africa, where
civil society in the form of the UDF was disbanded in favour of the party, have taught us that the inability of the three
parties to continue to build the presence of social movements and open up state
resources for social struggles lay in their failure to strengthen organised
links with society.
Thus, it is in the exercise of democracy that the distance
between the society and its rulers are most pronounced. A party that places
itself as the beneficent ruler, and fails to complete its commitment of
democracy and equality, will inevitably have to answer to its sovereign, the
people.
A revolution which is merely political is one that “necessarily
organises…a ruling sector in the society, at the expense of society”.
And: “Every revolution breaks up the old society; to that extent it is
social. Every revolution overthrows the old power; to that extent it is
political.” The coming
revolution has to be “a political revolution with a social soul”
Karl Marx.
The lessons are clear but the
path is not. “Don’t ask what the road is; you make the road while you walk it.
“
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