LEON LOUW: Definitions lose all meaning when in the service of dogma

Why are coherent definitions and ideology incompatible? Why are such vacuous slogans as "white monopoly capital" (WMC) and "radical economic transformation" taken seriously? Do such commonplace terms as "right wing", "left wing", "capitalism", "socialism", "fascism", "neoliberal" and "communism" have coherent meanings? Sloppy language has profound consequences. To legitimise the fascist ICT White Paper, for instance, telecoms minister Siyabonga Cwele denies that the transfer of private telecommunications assets to a single state-controlled monopoly is "expropriation" or "nationalisation".When the chattering classes say whites own, and they want to "redistribute", a stated percentage of land, they never say if they mean land by area (least important), number of properties, usage or value (most important), or if they want redistribution to government or black owners. Although the world’s new ideological frontier is "inequality", no-one defines the term coherently. Oxfam’s headline-gra...