The Ruth First Lecture – Dismantling the Masters House.

According to South African History Online, Ruth First was a “Marxist with a wide internationalist perspective…She was central to debates within the Johannesburg Discussion Club, which led to the formation of the underground South African Communist Party (SACP) (of which First was a member). She had a brilliant intellect and did not suffer fools gladly. Her sharp criticism and her impatience with bluster earned her enemies, and she was often feared in political debate. However, she was not dogmatic. First’s willingness to take up a position which she considered to be just, was not always welcomed within the ANC or SACP.”

The Ruth First Memorial Lecture held last Monday at the University of Witwatersrand, aimed to “commemorate her contribution to critical, socially-engaged writing and research.” However, it was disturbing to see how this critical Marxist voice, who spoke out against the systemic inequalities that underpins the global system of capitalism, was turned into a self-congratulatory liberal (and here I use the word in its most vulgar manifestation of denying the structural causes of inequality) middle class event.

The contributors, including the moderator— dressed up as “militant coconuts” engaged in an embarrassing session of back-slapping, affirmation of middle class values and legitimising ‘house negro’ politics. It left me momentarily suspended in a surreal world in which 20 million black South Africans and their battle to put food on the table was reduced to nothingness.

We did not witness a critical, open engagement with the structural power that looms over the faltering dream of a ‘new South Africa’— one which Ruth First would have wanted to see,  but instead we were treated to the “bluster” of the personal dilemmas of the black middle class accessing institutions of white supremacy.

Many “coconuts”, I am sure, will take issue with my description of identity politics and the personalisation of those identities as “bluster”, but allow me to explain.

One cannot be sure what the authors of the SA History Online had in mind when describing First`s impatience with bluster, but in the context, one can safely assume that it alludes to loud, aggressive, or indignant talk with little effect.

The entire premise of the lecture was based on, much like a religious call to conversion, the mistaken notion that focusing on the inequality between individuals will and can lead to the disarming and dismantling of the structural system of inequality. The personal, besides limiting the horizon of possibility and what is ultimately required to dismantle a system, also risks hampering the battle against prejudice and discrimination that is the lived reality in the here and now.

For the same reason that apartheid as a political system could not be defeated by this type of reflection on individual relationships, so too, the extended reality of class, racial and gender privilege cannot realistically be undone by directing people away from the kind of social solidarity necessary to overcome oppression. 

It certainly has value as an exercise in personal reflection that helps the audience and reader engage with the question of oppression and privilege, but as a “critical socially engaged” reflection on the systemic inequalities that underpin the South African reality, it falls very short.

As Mattias Iser points out, if our expectations of being recognised are always contingent upon the social and historical context we live in, how is moral and political progress possible at all? Is it, in view of our basic dependency on the view of others, not more likely that our striving for recognition leads to uncritical conformity, instead of an emancipatory struggle for recognition?

In Rousseau's Second Discourse on Inequality, he argued that individuals lose themselves in vain pretence, because they deceptively attempt to please others. Building on this basic premise, Jean-Paul Sartre points out that individuals are reified by every kind of recognition, because even the affirmation of others freezes the subjects in their present state, thereby denying their potential for change. 

Struggles for recognition have the unfortunate potential of thrusting us even deeper into dependency on power relations, without ever helping us understand the construct which binds us.

Well known feminist writer Judith Butler, points out that norms of recognition never remain valid by themselves, but need constant reaffirmation. While the process of reaffirming dominant norms occurs in various forms— some as contestation, others as critical reflection, the danger is always that the paradigm of the master’s house remains intact and our struggle for recognition simply becomes a negotiation for accommodation within the masters house. This is what Audre Lorde meant when she wrote, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

While the search for recognition and the confirmation of identity is important and necessary, the concomitant freezing and protection of these identities can easily lead to social pathologies and sectarianism.

The Ruth First Lecture’s middle class bias, and denial of the lived reality and anger of those who do not meander in the hallowed halls of UCT, Wits and Harvard, is most probably the most searing slap in the face of the true bearers of racial and economic inequality.

As Patricia Hills Collins points out, “Each one of us derives varying amounts of penalty and privilege from multiple systems of oppression that shapes our lives”.  Acknowledging that these systemic and structural inequalities exist is important, but it is only the first step.  A discourse or an analysis that stops at this acknowledgement is incomplete, fundamentally inadequate, and unable to provide a “critical, socially engaged” platform worthy of First’s legacy. A critical engagement would move beyond seeking accommodation within the master’s house, to construct new paradigms that change the system and produce different results.

The question about the lecture that begs an answer, is less about the uncritical bluster; the divergence from the ethos of what First stood for; and the make-up of the panel and committee, but more about the purpose of the lecture.

To be true to First`s Marxist history, it would be appropriate to locate this question in a materialist conception of history and to quote Marx in trying to provide some perspective to the question of motive.

Marx, in describing the anti-Irish racism of the 19^th century is clear that; “This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And that class is fully aware of it.”

Today we might call this kind of analysis a conspiracy theory. Certainly this conspiracy claim is the product of a discourse that focuses primarily on the individual relationship of making privilege visible, rather than on the system that produces the relationship.

But if Marx is correct, then the vast effort to render the class and structural causes of privilege, and by extension exploitation and invisibility, serves not the cause of progress, but of the status quo.

What should we make then of the usurpation of First`s Marxist legacy or the subsequent 4000 word apologia by the moderator— Eusebius Mckaiser, if not an attempt by the ruling classes and the house negro`s to endow the public discourse with an “impotence” and a diversion from the real causes of inequality? 

Or is it a case of what Hannah Arendt calls, “founding a new Rome”? In remaining locked in the paradigm of the master’s house, are we not guilty of neglecting the fundamental requirement to “begin”?  As she so eloquently states; “The way the beginner starts whatever he intends to do, lays down the law of action for those who have joined him in order to partake in the enterprise and to bring about its accomplishment”.

To begin, we have to break free of the constraints which the master has put in place. This cannot come about if we are knowingly or unknowingly tethered to recognition of identities that are defined by the master`s house and kept alive by the set agenda of the ‘house nigger.’ 

The acts of “founding” and “beginning”, requires us not to found ‘South Africa anew’, but to found a ‘new South Africa’. In order to do that, our discourse must move from the shallow pools of race, the past and the status quo, to the open waters of emancipation, the future and toward a revolution.