RICHARD PITHOUSE: Capturing of political memory by militaristic struggle

Many of the recollections of Pravin Gordhan’s life have gone back to the time of the United Democratic Front (UDF) and the ANC underground, most notably Operation Vula.   

From the growth of the trade union movement after the Durban strikes in 1973 through to the community struggles that cohered around the UDF after its founding in Cape Town in 1983, the day-to-day work of organising was central to the growing popular confrontation with apartheid. Millions of people were brought into forms of political protagonism that anticipated a democratic future. This was distilled into slogans such as “Workers’ control” and “People’s Power”. 

Some people participated in both this work and the underground, where the highest levels of courage, discipline, discretion and trust were required. Both forms of struggle demanded astute tactical and strategic thinking. Both forms of struggle required serious people. 

But while underground work may be in the interests of a democracy to come, it cannot be carried out in a democratic manner. Organising and building popular democratic power is a very different mode of politics, one that requires — along with sustained dedication — engaging ordinary people in open processes rooted in respect. At their best these processes affirm dignity, equality and, consequently, democracy as an immediate principle and practice. The ethical and political foundations of a new society are built within and against the current order.

The UDF did not have a monopoly on the work of building popular power, and, especially as politics became increasingly dominated by young men, violent and sometimes millenarian in the latter part of the 1980s, democratic practices were often abandoned. There were serious abuses.

The Black Consciousness movement had its own history of community work and produced remarkably committed people such as Abu Baker Asvat, whose work as a community orientated doctor deserves much wider recognition.

Many people schooled in the long labour of building popular organisation and providing community service during the 1970s and 1980s went on to do the same in the new state with exemplary commitment. Some worked in policy formulation and others in implementation, both critical aspects of making a state work for its people.

However, the values and practices that marked the best of the political work in the 1970s and 1980s have often been elided in favour of a militarised memory of struggle. It is not uncommon for students to enter university with the idea that apartheid was defeated by uMkhonto we Sizwe.

Political memory was deliberately militarised, and masculinised, during Jacob Zuma’s rape trial. This process continued during his disastrous period in office. Zuma wanted to be a “big man”, claiming authority and demanding obedience. He wanted to speak in the name of the people with the authority of a revolutionary leader rather than to work to constitute the idea of people in democratic terms. Political memory was captured in the interests of an authoritarian project. 

Other understandings of the political that have developed in recent years also elide the value of organising the worst off. This is true, for instance, of the common substitution of NGOs, social media and shrill but tiny would-be socialist vanguards for the long and patient work of building popular democratic power. It is also true of the forms of electoral politics that demand obedience to authoritarian projects in the present in the name of a better future to come.

The idea — fashionable among some intellectuals and artists — that the true radical act is to disavow the labour of political work in the present and instead to wait for a moment of redemptive cataclysm, also spurns the painstaking work of organising. 

States do not achieve sustained gains for the people they govern when the people are weak. The people must at least be able to be constitute themselves as a public with political weight. In highly unequal societies, especially when inequality is mediated through and legitimated by pernicious ideas such as race and caste, sustained popular organisation is always required.

Without popular power to support and push them, even elected leaders with exceptional integrity, and accompanied by socially committed policy experts and state managers, will be unable to effectively confront political inertia, entrenched and aspirant interests and powerful international forces. The richness of popular democratic organisation in Brazil is one of the key reasons that country was able to make social progress during Lula da Silva’s first period in office.

Electoral campaigns not articulated to popular democratic organisation are unlikely to make significant and sustained gains for wider society in highly unequal societies, especially when they contain powerful authoritarian forces. Similarly, popular mobilisation without organisation can seldom make sustained progress. 

This was consistently demonstrated in the Arab spring. In Egypt, for instance, the courage of the people assembled in Tahrir Square deposed Hosni Mubarak’s vicious dictatorship but didn’t have the collective power to prevent another dictator, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, from taking and holding power. 

Both the MK party and the EFF are led by “big men” with evidently authoritarian personalities. Neither is a man of integrity. Neither of their parties has shown any serious interest in organising its own members into democratic branches that can take up people’s day-to-day issues, let alone building wider processes of popular organisation or respectfully and seriously collaborating with existing forms of popular organisation.

It is impossible to imagine either of these parties carefully developing and then implementing the sort of policies that could nurture social institutions, build an inclusive economy and substantially improve the lives of the masses of the people, prioritising the worst off.

The predatory, authoritarian and violent counter-elite in a formation that is, again, primarily centred on Zuma is animated by a form of radical nationalism that speaks in the name of the people but operates via an ideological manoeuvre that takes the form of a synecdoche — the part substitutes for the whole. This aspirant counter-elite has shown that it will ruthlessly appropriate the common wealth of the people collected into public funds for private enrichment and cynically wreck public institutions.

Its disregard for personal integrity, its attraction to crude forms of masculinist posturing, its authoritarianism, its disinhibition, cheap and often reckless talk, and its willingness to lie, and to do so shamelessly, are all assaults on democratic values and the prospects for creating a democratic conception of the public.

We would do well to restore the memory of the years of democratic organising that carried the struggle through the 1970s and 1980s to our political imagination. We also need to break out of our habitual parochialism and take on the lessons from the recent histories of countries like Brazil, among others.

A viable alternative to the failures of the present can only lie in a politics that summons the people into a democratic conception of the public and takes up the patient labour of organising. This requires a politics that meets people on the terrain of dignity as it works towards a dignified future for all. It must, of course, be articulated to credible electoral projects, rigorously researched policy formulation and principled and effective state management. 

This is a world apart from the debasement of politics into authoritarian projects marked by ahistorical misrepresentations spewed out in torrents of threats, slander and conspiracy. Unprincipled and avaricious peacetime pseudo-revolutionaries spitting on the best of our past can only take us into an ugly future, a future Frantz Fanon warned us about with steel-eyed clarity.

• Pithouse is a distinguished research fellow at the Global Centre for Advanced Studies in Dublin and New York, an international research scholar at the University of Connecticut, and an extraordinary professor at the University of the Western Cape.