Free Market Capitalism and Imprisoned Nations

“The first terrain of struggle is, from this point of view, the universal right to move, work and learn on the whole global surface”

Antonio Negri

South Africa is a nation-state, a member in good standing of the African Union and the United Nations and a participant in the world global economy based on free market capitalist economics and “the rule of law”. It is, in the parlance of international politics, a sovereign state, that is, in almost everything except in its ability to exclude itself from the global economy. Its economy is required to be open to free market activity in which capital is able to enter and exit its markets with unhindered certainty. But not People.

South Africa as we know it today was born into a post-cold-war world, in which the end of history was proclaimed and the unfettered emergence of global capitalism was it future. The ANC, having been nurtured and fed on a diet of ideology which characterised the South African reality as one in which the “nation” was colonised by a coloniser that was not based in the metropolitan centre of Europe, but instead was present internally as a constituent, albeit illegitimate, power. 

Within this reading of the Apartheid system, the oppressed nation was defined as blacks in general and Africans in particular. The white nation, as inhabitants of many generations in the country had formed an illegitimate minority government aided by European colonisers, but, they were however recognised as part of the nation and the Freedom Charter declared that the Country belonged to all who lived in it. This interpretation set the scene for the eventual negotiations which saw the almost seamless transfer of power from a white minority government to a black majority government and the “rainbow nation”.

Embedded in this “miracle” birth of the “rainbow nation and its state, was the fault lines of race and class which would explode in many varied ways over the next 21 years.

The new state, besides having to foster the growth of this new rainbow nation also had to integrate into the world global system. The new leaders, suddenly converted to pragmatic” real politik”, were enthusiastic to ditch cold-war era ideologies in favour of what to them appeared as a new phantasmagorical world of wealth and purpose, after all it is in with the new and out with the old. Socialism had lost and history had ended, all that mattered now was the urgent priority of global integration and growth.

Although nation-state-based systems of power are rapidly being surpassed by the growing menace of plutocracy and the unfettered powers of Trans National Corporations of world capitalism, globalization cannot be understood as a simple process of de-regulating markets. Far from withering away, regulations today proliferate and interlock to form an ever tighter network of control and order which Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call Empire.

They provide a succinct definition of the term as “a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers.”

At least that is what it appears to be on the outside. Embedded within the global apparatus of rule is the continued challenge of the nation-state to maintain its authority and relevance in the face of the growing control exerted by global corporations, both through its own lobbying activities and the coercion in favour of global apparatus of control and rule by the dominant nations of the world, namely the United States and the European Union.

This need to maintain control of the political entity of the nation, saw the ANC increasingly resort to co-opting colonial systems of control.  At first the incorporation and accommodation of Apartheid appointed traditional leaders into the negotiation around a new nation, was premised on the need to include the broadest sections of society in the face of raging violence by conservative Apartheid warlords, such as King Zwelintini.

But it soon became apparent to those in power, that the system of control over the masses, both in terms of general social control and votes at the polling booths, was more than useful in maintaining its own hegemony over society. 

In a slow creep, it centralised the payments of traditional leaders, thus exerting and creating a client patron relationship. It further ensued that it maintained apartheid era legislation which ensured that the state was the ultimate arbiter over the legitimacy of a traditional leader and later expanded the scope and powers of traditional leaders over rural communities by championing controversial legislation such as the Traditional Courts Bill, Land Restitution Bill and the Minerals Resources Petroleum Development Act which further consolidated the power and prestige of traditional leaders at the expense of a rural population which still lives in poverty and is still excluded from the benefits of the minerals that is extracted in great quantities from their lands and which are generally expatriated to Europe. 

Traditional Leaders are allowed by law to sign lucrative deals with mining companies on behalf of communities and often benefit greatly while communities remain stuck in poverty and destitution. 

Traditional courts remain bastions of patriarchy and the legal support for increasing patriarchal control of society has contributed in no small measure to the ongoing violence perpetrated against women on a daily basis.

This attempts to maintain political control of the “nation” in apparent contradiction of its progressive “non-racial” policies pre-1994, is what Rosa Luxemburg cautioned progressive forces about when she warned of the ‘emerging nationalism’ of the workers movement of her time in which she saw that from a truly democratic standpoint, ‘nation’ really meant ‘dictatorship‘.

Hardt and Negri agree that the special case of `subaltern nationalism‘, in which the nation is employed as a tool of resistance against a dominant power, is not considered an ultimate source of legitimacy, even if it served important progressive functions... February never leads to October‘, but rather to the development of a Compradore bourgeoisie and participation in the world market.

The concept of the Rainbow Nation, flawed and contradictory,  and spurred on by the dangerous ideological foundation of "Colonialism of a Special Type", struggled to contain the plurality of South African society or to draw it into a non-racial project against colonial exploitation. 

This plurality was seized upon by opportunistic politicians to consolidate their power and to claim power where no legitimate power existed. The increasing polarisation of society into a politics based on identity, fostered by apartheid and colonialism to be sure, was embraced as an easy way to control and manipulate society. Until it all started to fall apart, the centre could not hold.

Empire “seeks directly to rule over human nature” in order to create a :homogenous, dominated group". In the process of creating a “homogenous dominated group”, the ruling party instead sort to create subaltern homogenous groups that could be dominated through colonial structures of control using traditional authorities as an easily controllable client.

But what happens when the client becomes so powerful that he can use his contrived authority to challenge the patron or when the Patron is reluctant to challenge the client, lest the whole house of cards come tumbling down?

Immigration challenges the naturalised assumptions of sovereign identity within a nation-state.

 In a modern understanding of the nation-state, it may have been possible to simply exclude the immigrant from political reality – to deport or imprison the immigrant and clearly define the proper “national” identity. However, in today’s age of Empire, such exclusion becomes increasingly difficult because there can be no outside of Empire, no place to section off the unwanted non-citizen.

 Achile Mbembe so wisely states in the African context; “No African is a foreigner in Africa! No African is a migrant in Africa! Africa is where we all belong, notwithstanding the foolishness of our boundaries”.

Efforts to exclude and maintain nation states are ultimately efforts to maintain “homogenous dominated groups” and which is antithetical to democracy, and freedom. Mobility and mass worker movements always express a refusal to be dominated and a search for liberation. It is in the final analysis a progressive action.

The multitude must be able to decide if, when and where it moves. It must have the right also to stay still and enjoy one place rather than being forced to be constantly on the move. The general right to control its own movement is the multitude’s ultimate demand for global citizenship. This demand is radical insofar as it challenges the fundamental apparatus of imperial control over the production and life of the multitude (Hardt and Negri)

As we contemplate the way forward in the face of an anger that is a direct result of the inequality and elite accumulation of wealth in the face of driving poverty, it would do well to consider resisting the urge to seek answers in the chauvinistic platitudes of "the nation". 

Our responses must not be limited by identity, must not be dictated by Empire, but must be premised on justice and human liberation.