Army at Parliament class war of an older sort
The 20th century was dominated by two political doctrines: Karl Marx’s dialectical materialism, which reduced all politics to an economic struggle between the classes, and liberal democracy, which Francis Fukuyama held would end the debate about politics as historical progress.
Communism fell with the Berlin Wall. The 2008 financial crisis finally showed that global markets cannot be tamed by local governments — and the gap between rich and poor grew in the aftermath.
Into this limbo stepped Oxford historian David Priestland with a novel approach, a return to the Dark Ages, when people were classified in accordance with their daily activities and not their economic power.
In his book, Merchant, Soldier, Sage, A New History of Power, he uses an old-fashioned lens to peer at the past, when there were only three classes of people. Some prayed most of the time (oratores), some liked to fight (bellatores) and the rest worked (laboratores). To these, Priestland adds tradesmen, who in medieval times were regarded as worse than beggars and were rather not mentioned.
On the face of it, Priestland’s scheme appears to be too much of a simplification for today’s hypercomplexity. But he uses a range of texts from ancient cultures to show how political architectures built on his scheme have lasted to this day in several societies – from the rigid Confucian classifications of six or seven levels in China, to India with its caste system.
In the West, the prayer lovers have expanded to what he tags as “sages”, which today includes professional politicians, poets and journalists.
To the bellatores, he has added the aristocracies, who until the First World War had been the commanders of the military whose values of honour and obedience they shared. Under workers, Priestman counts engineers and farmers.
Today, of course, traders are at the top of the pile — look no further than Donald Trump or multinational companies shunting governments around in free trade agreements.
Priestland analyses social complexities as strategic alliances between these classes. Flanders in 1024, for instance, was in chaos due to wanton plunder by knights, with the Duke of Flanders letting things be as long as he was plied with tribute. Then Catholic Bishop Gerard struck a deal with him to institute a “peace of God”, which restricted knights to raids and rape from Monday to Wednesday.
This alliance became a model for church-state relations, Priestland writes, but its dominance eventually led to abuses such as the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition. Only with the Reformation did the “laboratores” get enough power to cast off the stranglehold of the aristocratic soldiery and the priests.
Priestland sets a rule of thumb from this: if two or three of the classes overlap too much, relegating the others to the bottom, political dysfunction will follow.
The word caste comes from the Portuguese for “pure”, and in India, the belief still holds among many that harmony depends on the various castes knowing their place and keeping to it.
This is also the foundation of Confucianism, which has survived for thousands of years and, after being briefly banned in China, is being resurrected by its capitalist communists.
The alliance that began to dominate the West from the 17th century was between the aristocracy-soldiery and the tradesmen. Daniel Defoe describes it best in his manual, The Complete English Tradesman, also the basis for his Robinson Crusoe myth.
COLONISATION TEMPLATE
Shipwrecked on his island, Crusoe at first is the model of industry and innovation and is tolerant towards the natives, especially his servant Friday, whom he converts to his lifestyle. But when his little colony is threatened by cannibals, the merciless warrior emerges and they are all extinguished. Back in British society, he reverts to trade.
That, says Priestland, was the British template for colonisation. In SA, the alliance was incarnated in the ice-cream seller Cecil John Rhodes, who became the quintessential imperialist – the billionaire who imposed his will through his highly paid mercenary soldiers. This state of affairs lasted for almost 100 years, until the late 1970s and the demise of Rhodesia.
Until the 1980s, black people in SA were subdued by militaristic police and pass laws and forced into one class, labourers. A revolt by another kind of “laboratore”, the Dutch peasants of the Boer Republics, was suppressed with the aid of the century’s first concentration camps.
Following Priestland’s scheme, one might venture that the tradesmen with their neoliberalist ideology and consumerism are still at the top, in alliance with the sages, the two classes forming the basis of the knowledge economy.
In the Middle East, the battle is for control of the alliance, between the sages of Islam and those of the US Christians, which former US president George W Bush famously said were part of a new Crusade.
Priestland’s scheme is full of holes, but for South Africans, allows a thought experiment that recasts what is perhaps the greatest tragedy of the disaster that was colonialism and its offshoot, apartheid.
Black people, socially engineered into the labourer class, struck an alliance with the sages that led to the 1994 miracle, which was facilitated by the military aristocracy of Afrikanerdom standing down and the inability of Umkhonto weSizwe to stake any power claim.
Because the suffering of black masses consisted overwhelmingly in performing menial labour in near-slavery conditions, probably the most significant crime of colonialism/ apartheid went largely unacknowledged and understated: the relentless decades-long campaign against a black merchant class gaining any power.
The communists were the bridge between the labourers and the few sages on their side, but today, this alliance is preventing the merchant classes from gaining ascendancy and lifting the labourers from poverty through economic growth.
Instead, only the sage class is being expanded, as the vast bureaucracy is transformed into a patronage system for keeping the ideologues of the ANC and its political alliance partners at the helm of the state.
Meanwhile, the soldier class, after years of immobility due to castration by the Afrikaner sages’ destruction of their nuclear weapons, is becoming restive again. But still too incompetent to be a social force, this class can only find expression in carnivalesque self-parody, as in the red berets of the EFF .
Perhaps the show of force in the streets around Parliament last week will change all that.
TODAY, OF COURSE, TRADERS ARE AT THE TOP OF THE PILE — LOOK NO FURTHER THAN DONALD TRUMP