[DEBATE] : Re: (Fwd) Roberts' rascally radicalism

[eharvey]

Patrick, DON'T waste your time and energy with one of South Africa's
most pretentious and ignorant "intellectuals". His grasp of Marxism 
generally and his understanding of current leftist trends is so poor that
you have to decide if it is worthwhile and necessary to respond to him. His
article is riddled with terrible misunderstandings, distortions and
misrepresentations of the 'left' and Marxism. In fact nothing serves to
reinforce his lapdog intellectual role more than his concluding sentence: 
"Instead of futile anger the ANC makes what Mbeki has called " the real fire
that cooks", when we know Mbeki's fire has been burning the black working
class since 1994 while big business (still overwhelmingly white) has had it
really good, which he conceded in his state of the nation address early this
year. Roberts has for a while been moving towards establishment "leftism" -
which is essentially a disguised neo-liberalism (disguised behind a
resurrecting black (in fact crude and narrow 'Africanist' majoritarian
chauvinism in which "coloureds"
and "Indians" too are not so welcome) nationalism (part of which is the
recently formed 
Native Club) to serve the purpose of obscuring the class-race dimensions of
his policies and its hideous effects, particularly in the most important
area of basic needs at the points or both production and reproductive
consumption, based on earlier promises. Well, this article will tell you
very clearly what we can expect from his book. Add to that his nauseating
arrogance and swaggering style and.... well, I think it is going to get
still worse..... 

e



-----Original Message-----
From: Patrick Bond [mailto:pbond at mail.ngo.za] 
Sent: Sunday, June 25, 2006 1:24 PM
To: debate: SA discussion list
Subject: [DEBATE] : (Fwd) Roberts' rascally radicalism

(The most devious analysis I've yet seen from Pretoria's Marxologists. 
Judging by this taste, Roberts' book promises to be an incomprehensible 
upside-down concoction digestible only by those whose intellectual 
palates formed in 1970s Moscow: the group Suttner has termed the ANC's 
"Brezhnevite-Marxists".)

www.mg.co.za

One step leftward, two steps right

Ronald Suresh Roberts: COMMENT

23 June 2006 12:59

When Venezuelan trade union officials attacked the "dictator", Hugo 
Chavez, his popularity leapt, as Thabo Mbeki's has now. Mbeki's 
attackers are, paradoxically, unpopular populists. Their attack already 
seems as curious as the Irish Times headline from 1934: "[FDR] Roosevelt 
Reports to Congress on his Dictatorship."

Was Congress of South African Trade Unions general secretary Zwelinzima 
Vavi's carnivalesque outburst, with its drum-beating "majorettes", 
perhaps a new front in the "class war" against a woman president? A 
majorette is, after all, "the female leader of a marching band, who 
often twirls a baton". And majorettes wear those ever so short, 
allegedly permission-giving, skirts.

Are some leaders of South Africa's historically progressive "left" 
entering a reactionary phase? Writer Richard Gott points out that the 
trade unions at the nationalised oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela, 
tried to topple Chavez long before the failed United States-backed coup. 
The South African Communist Party discussion document likewise expresses 
open contempt for the key figures of democratic sensibility, including 
Nelson Mandela. Just as Vavi seeks to cram his agenda down upon the 
National Union of Metalworkers, Chavez faced a Confederation of 
Venezuelan Workers that had been progressive since 1936, but whose 
leaders now defied intra-union and popular opinion to oppose Chavez.

The market-fundamentalist London Economist still applauds the bloody 
Pinochet "reforms" that killed 110 Chilean trade union leaders. Yet 18 
months ago, the same Economist articulated the Vavi thesis: "These 
[growth, employment and redistribution policy] reforms left opponents 
reeling. Those who wanted to see a state-dominated economy were barged 
aside," wrote the magazine. When the "left" shares a hymn-sheet with the 
Economist, global house organ of Chicago school free-marketeering, a 
very complex game is under way.

"It cannot be too strongly stressed," Franz Fanon wrote, "that in 
colonial territories the proletariat is the nucleus of the colonised 
population which has been most pampered by the colonial regime." 
Neocolonialism's divide and rule runs not only along tribal lines, but 
also between the employed urban proletariat and the less organised rural 
poor. Hence the nuanced blend of rural poverty alleviation and trade 
union solidarity in the recent ANC discussion document, developing what 
Mbeki said in January 2004: "We cannot afford to pay less attention to 
the peasant question, seeing these peasant masses as nothing more than 
voting cattle to return our parties to power, with no other role." 
Meanwhile the SACP document has only three insultingly casual 
occurrences of the word "rural".

Behind the cartoon imagery of "radical" Vavi and "conservative" African 
National Congress, what is Vavi's true claim to radicalism? That 
notorious skirt-wearer, the late Ruth First, explained that in her 
anti-apartheid commitments, she did not feel particularly South African: 
she was motivated by issues of global anti-imperialism.

Instead of modernising First's indispensable anti-imperialism, the SACP 
discussion document nostalgically pouts: "A socialist South Africa, to 
those who keep asking us what we mean by 'socialism' (as if we had 
forgotten what has been said for more than 150 years now) will be a 
South Africa in which, overwhelmingly, the ownership of the means of 
production -- factories, land, banks, shops, mines -- is socialised, and 
not in the hands of those whose prime motive is profit-taking."

Chavez's radical Venezuelan battle is not to "socialise" a private 
Venezuelan oil industry, but rather to rein in an already nationalised 
industry that had been (as Fanon predicted) hijacked by self-serving 
elites -- resembling, in fact, Maria Ramos's challenges at state-owned 
Transnet, where higher wage and salary bills would mean higher transport 
costs and reduced services for rural and remote areas.

Fanon warned against the degradation of nationalisation into the mere 
"transfer into native hands of those unfair advantages which are a 
legacy of the colonial period".

The strange conjuncture of Schabir Shaik and Zwelinzima Vavi (mediated 
through the floating signifier of Jacob Zuma) suddenly makes a lot of 
sense. It threatens the same uninterrupted transition from colonialism 
to state-backed klepto-cracy that destroyed Mobutu's Congo and the 
Soviet Union alike.

Oxford professor Robert JC Young cautions that "Marx offers no 
emancipatory programme specifically for colonial revolution in the mode 
of Lenin, Mao or Fanon". The SACP, stuck on the unreconstructed Marx of 
150 years ago, cannot explain the challenges faced by leaders such as 
Mbeki and Chavez, as predicted by Fanon. The SACP document never notices 
Lenin's key advance upon Marx: the decisive embrace of "the national 
movements against imperialism". Fanon warned that "the trade union 
officials ... have lost all contact with the peasantry" so that "there 
is a lack of proportion from the national point of view between the 
importance of the trade unions and the rest of the nation". A true 
radicalism must reinstate this sense of proportion. But the "left" 
instead narrowly privileges its antique texts. This inadvertently 
assists the most hedonistic reaches of the black nationalist 
bourgeoisie, who can easily discredit the SACP's unreconstructed Marxism 
of "more than 150 years now".

Radical anti-imperialism looks beyond Eurocentric Marxism to a later 
anti-colonial Marxism that is, as Anouar Abdel-Malek argued, "a dynamic 
movement rather than a fixed body of doctrine" and was, in itself, a 
"form of radical nationalism".

By offering little more than the Eurocentric Marxism of "150 years ago" 
plus the parochial family album of its own party history (and even that 
mis-stated), the SACP's latest document fails those of us who like what 
Lenin signalled in his article "Backward Europe and Advanced Asia" and 
in his later and better known anti-imperialist canon. Instead, a lazy 
SACP just stokes a little local "dictatorship" hysteria and trades in 
stereotypes ("Zanufication") that are as offensive from the self-styled 
left as from the usual pseudo-liberal quarters.

On the "dictatorship" issue, Tony Leon's Democratic Alliance has 
announced "complete agreement with the 'left' faction. Not, in this 
case, because they are 'left' but because they are in fact right." 
Leon's acknowledged ideologue, RW Johnson, wishfully sighted this 
consensus long ago: "The nationalist government has always argued that 
its liberal opponents are effectively communists," Johnson wrote, "[but] 
in fact it has been the other way around." This was manifest silliness 
in 1977, when Johnson wrote it. But now?

A true radicalism must earn and stand its ground in the spirit of 
Amilcar Cabral, claiming no easy victories. In a spirit more radical 
than romantic, Mbeki recently quoted Joseph Schumpeter: the "public 
finances are one of the best starting points for an investigation of 
society. The spirit of a people, its cultural level, its social 
structure, the deeds its policy may prepare -- all this and more, is 
written in its fiscal history." This is far more radical, for a 
liberation movement within a democracy, than what Moshoeshoe Monare has 
called "the cacophonous power" of the anti-ANC shouters.

Instead of futile anger, the ANC makes what Mbeki has called "the real 
fire that cooks".

Ronald Suresh Roberts is writing a book about Thabo Mbeki and his 
intellectual tradition