Where oh Where Will Our Hope Come From?

Yesterday`s march in Pretoria, besides the less than spectacular turnout, was marked by a separation between the people and the VIP`s I am told. The stage was separate from the people and some "bigwigs" were walking around with VIP passes hanging around their necks.

Have we learnt nothing?

It is in the first instance this division between the "masses" and their leaders that births the mistaken notion that the leadership is somehow more intelligent, more equal and more deserving than the masses. It is this separation that passes power to a leadership that becomes so removed from the people they are meant to represent, that they instead become the antithesis of democracy.

Democracy, or rather the lack thereof and corruption are deeply interlinked as I pointed out previously.

This unholy fascination with VIP`s and elites, even within the movements of the left are essentially a part of what Karl Marx calls “the democratic swindle”. The democratic swindle, both by the state and party political left formations, is a swindle not insofar as it is democratic but on the contrary, to quote Hal Draper in his first volume of State and Bureaucracy, “insofar as it utilizes democratic forms to frustrate genuine democratic control from below”

Engels was correct in his characterisation of the state (but we can extend this to civil society as well) when he warns that the persons appointed for the purpose of managing the common affairs of society form a “new branch of the division of labour within society, [which] gives them particular interests, distinct from the interests of those who empowered them”.  Democracy should not be about handing power to an organised faction that then uses the power to disenfranchise the very people who placed them into positions of authority and power. Democracy should always be about people governing themselves.

 This makes a mockery of the call to end corruption when the foundational corruption of the separation between leaders and the people is entrenched at what should be a fundamental act of reclaiming democracy.

If this is the response to corruption, then we have truly learnt nothing and the pretence of fighting corruption is nothing but a facade aimed at deceiving the "masses" in a Machiavellian swindle for personal gain and prestige.

 The call for an end to corruption, without locating the causes of corruption is not only facile but deceptive.

It is for this reason that we should approach the cult of leadership (Vavi, Jim, Heywood, Malema etc) with more than a hint of caution. It is in this same mythology of great leaders, that the very same seeds of the social division are embedded.

There can be little doubt that leaders are often charismatic, insightful and politically astute. But the same can be said for any despot. So the criteria referred to above, is not a useful place to start in characterising the value of leadership, or the role they play SA politics.

Rather, coming from a perspective which values the fundamental principle of democracy, one would need to consider to what extent the leadership is embedded in democratic praxis rather than to what is officially presented as the ideological dogma which would inevitably include democracy.

The EFF for example has its own version of democratic centralism which is based on a stultified dogma left over from the Stalinist era. The cult like reverence for Malema among some on the left is emblematic of the “democratic swindle” that Marx warned us about.

The left in South Africa, as before them in Europe for example, where after the Second World War, the left became deeply implicated in the consolidation of what remained of empire, have been happy to accept the bourgeois version of democracy that we inherited after the failure of the global left in the 1990`s. The democracy that the left has accepted and which they have become deeply complicit in, is one in which democracy is fundamentally exercised under the condition that power is the prerogative of an elite.

The clarion warning of Engels when he asserts; “[b]ut what democracy! Not that of the French revolution whose antithesis was the monarchy and feudalism, but that democracy whose antithesis is the middle class and property”.

In the same vain we might ask today, but what democracy? Not that of the Anti-Aparthied revolution whose antithesis was white supremacy and disenfranchisement, but that democracy whose antithesis is monopoly capital and state corruption.

In continuing to echo Engels and Hal Draper on this question; “but mere democracy is unable to remedy social evils. Democratic equality is a chimera; the struggle of the poor against the rich cannot be fought on the ground of democracy or politics in general”. Democracy that stops with governmental forms and does not extend to the social question, to the democratisation of socio economic life, is “merely political democracy”.

In other words progressive organisations should in practice and rhetoric, favour a democracy that gives new social (class) content through popular control from below, which in turn entails “extending the application of democratic forms out of the merely political sphere into the organisation of the whole society”

This fundamental division of power within society is one which Marx wrote passionately about and one which he had identified as a necessary step to political emancipation. He writes that; " Only when the real, individual man(woman)...has recognised and organised his "forces propes" [his own power] as social power and hence social power is no longer divided within itself in the form of political power, only then is human emancipation consummated".

So this is my dilemma, there is no clear articulation, other than rhetorical, on the fundamental challenge that Marx`s warning holds for us today. Instead, political parties and social movements, formed on the basis of the centralisation of political power rather than the socialisation of political power, have accepted that the seizure of and engagement with the state, without challenging its current relations with society and especially with the working classes, is the only viable way forward.

As the ANC, and many other political parties have come to understand, the sins of incumbency becomes a sin too great to bear, without strong democratic bottom up democratic practice, and is the surest route to co-option, surrender and protection of the status quo.

In the case of the UAC march and/or movement, as for most organisations on the left, the revolutionary practice seems never to be a praxis of the now....always a vision of the future. This offers society nothing different to the status quo. It offers only a rearrangement of power over people in favour of the status quo.

Marx, was well aware that change would have to be driven by people. He was clear that it was ultimately people who would have to engage in the process of change. People, who do not stand above society or separate from it, people who are part of society. People, who learn and assimilate values as they engage in the practise of organising and acting politically. 

If the values we are practicing includes VIP`s and the separation of our leaders from the masses, then we are not offering society an alternative much less advancing as a society.

Marx understood that the "coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice...One learns to revolutionize society even as one revolutionizes oneself; one learns to revolutionize oneself by trying to revolutionize society".

The UAC march did not suggest any revolutionary practice, only revolutionary rhetoric.

At best, its one saving grace must surely be that at the very least it advances democratic values of public participation.

At worst it is complicit in the "democratic swindle" and falls into the trap of trying to convince the people that they were participating in a progressive project while making no claims on the democratic forms.

Let me channel Karl Marks in closing; we do not want a state that is free, but rather a state that is completely subordinate to society. We do not want a society that is leaderless but rather a leadership that is subordinate to society.

“Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it, and today, too, the forms of the state are more or less free to the extent that they restrict the freedom of the state”  Karl Marx. Critique of the Gotha Program.