Leftists need to ask new questions about how Africa should function

Interrogating the suitability of a democratic model inherited from Europe could be key to moving us forward

Progressives today are united in their hostility towards capitalism and nationalism. The former they’ve got pegged as the primary source of global suffering, while the latter is reviled as a fiction and a scourge. There’s been unanimity on these issues for decades — but that hasn’t always been the case.

Progressivism is ultimately about fairness; a commitment to a better world in which there is less injustice and less avoidable suffering. Karl Marx spent a great deal of time and energy on the “science” of dialectical materialism, but his legacy was a simple idea of a classless (and therefore peaceful) society. Economics was the basic driver of all human affairs and it followed, on his reading, that when the “contradictions in the material base of society” were finally eliminated, phenomena such as racial and religious attachments would wither away.

Today, 140 years after Marx’s death, his philosophical heirs talk of “social constructs” (rather than “false consciousness”), but the essence remains the same. Marx himself, awkwardly, was an inveterate racist, but contemporary orthodoxy rejects any suggestion of group-level genetic variation or innate incompatibility. “There’s only one race and that’s the human race” is the modern leftist (and liberal) mantra. Cultural differences are recognised and even celebrated, but God forbid one suggests these reflect anything deeper than random historical choices and circumstances.

Marx’s own foibles, as a man of his time, are of no great moment. What is more challenging is that he numbered among his early colleagues and allies a man whose views on the subject of nationalism were radically opposed to his own (and to what is now regarded as axiomatic). According to the minor German philosopher Moses Hess, it is possible to be, at once, a revolutionary communist and a committed nationalist.

In his most important work, Rome and Jerusalem, Hess put forward the notion of a socialist state specifically for Jews. Convinced by his observation of the goings-on in 19th century Europe that assimilation was impossible, he came warily to the belief that “race is primary, class is secondary”.

Unsurprisingly, this analysis didn’t find favour with Marx himself, who was not big on heterodoxy — or Jews — and Hess soon fell into relative obscurity. The very fact, though, that he was willing to go public in this way is a pointer to his having operated in a more ideologically permissive time than ours, at least in this particular regard. Today views such as Hess’s are not just unfashionable, on the left they’re anathema.

There’s no definitive way of testing their validity, of course — not with our still limited understanding of economics, of genetics and of consciousness. What we can say fairly categorically, however, is the following:

● Marx’s big idea has not been vindicated by history. Communist parties flourished in the mid-19th century, and several industrialising European countries came close to collapse, as he had predicted. But what he hadn’t factored in was, ironically, the effect of his own (brilliant and prescient) work. The “bourgeois” governments responded to his provocations by introducing all manner of (broadly democratic) reforms, such as pension schemes, welfare programmes and organised collective bargaining, and these changed working life for the better.

Add in a few wars and a lot of new technologies and amusements, and the revolutionary spirit ebbed away quite quickly. It was only in semi-feudal Russia and China (and their satellites) that central planning was actually implemented, with largely unsatisfactory results.

● Forces other than class have proved extremely resilient, even in the face of increasing levels of education and prosperity. While I still dream of a Lennonesque Utopia — with no religions, tribes, borders or greed — almost all the real-life evidence suggests (most) people cannot live without the consolations these phenomena provide. Religions still have billions of adherents, many of them fervent, and as for ethnicity, one only needs to alphabetically catalogue the murderous contests that have scarred the world in the decades after the 1939-45 apocalypse.

The link between material wealth and human happiness is a fairly tenuous one. No one doubts that poverty is awful, but according to recent research, the correlation between increasing wealth and increasing happiness ends at the $5,000 per month level (which, while relatively rarified in Africa, is very common in the so-called First World). This might seem a puzzling paradox, but not if one thinks about the things that really matter to most of us — things such as companionship, music, walking, reading and sleeping; all of them either free or close to free.

I came across Rome and Jerusalem by accident, on a dreary winter’s day in England in 1984 (a watershed year in the struggle between, as I saw it, the honourable working people and the execrable Maggie Thatcher).

I found the analysis unsettling and morally challenging, but I didn’t mention it for the next 10 years or so, lest it were to provide succour or ammunition to the then Establishment in SA. At the time, I was immersed in anti-apartheid politics, and full of hope for a nonracial democratic future. I accordingly didn’t see the value in flagging a critique that seemed to legitimise the notion of separateness, provided it were fairly applied.

I’m sharing it now for two reasons. One, because the world context has changed profoundly in the intervening decades (with SA’s capitalism deracialised, Chinese capitalism ascendant and the idea of capitalism in crisis). And two, more significantly, because I’m hoping it will help enable a fresh, indigenous, taboo-free political discussion.

The point should be plain. If there is even some merit in Hess’s reading of history and the human condition, then it offers the possibility of a whole new political paradigm.

Since the 1950s, we have been living under the sway of an unreflective, unchecked, faux internationalism in terms of which national borders — including those (arbitrarily) drawn by colonialism — are implicitly valorised. This position works wonderfully for intellectuals in places such as London, New York and Sydney, in that they can flaunt their sympathies with abandon without having to worry about losing their (class or racial) privileges.

In SA, though, where the numbers are reversed, the picture could not be more different. Where the advent of nonracialism abroad presented a moral challenge to the (majority) whites, down here it was essentially a matter of might. Australians merely needed to cheer Cathy Freeman and master some new politesse, whereas FW de Klerk actually gave up temporal power — an act almost without precedent in human history.

The basic leftist view of SA, locally and abroad, was that the only thing standing in the way of it being a flourishing, “normal” democracy was the obduracy of the (supremacist) whites. Once you allow that things never were that simple — that ethnicity was and is more than just a cynical Verwoerdian contrivance — a raft of new questions suggest themselves.

First, is our model of democracy a suitable basis for political contestation and collective governance in SA or other radically divided countries? Recall John Stuart Mill’s belief that “free institutions are next to impossible in a society made up of different nationalities”.

Second, is it sensible, or fair, to have only a single distributive justice framework and one universal set of rules of socioeconomic engagement? Does the model that was built in Europe actually chime with not-European sensibilities and instincts? Is competitive, materialistic, intellectualist individualism really the highest state for all humans?

And third, are we not selling ourselves short by continuing with the fairy tale conceit of the “rainbow nation”? Would we not be better off if the 60-million of us (including the 6-million refugees) began to think of ourselves as active participants in a giant experiment in the mechanics of world government? We could start with a radical re-examination of our past and a reimagining of our future.

We got our idiotic borders from a series of historical follies and misadventures authored by long-dead foreigners. If, despite this deeply inauspicious background, we can frame a model for coexistence that actually works, however imperfectly, we’ll be writing the template for the messianic age.

My own formula involves higher taxes (applied transnationally), lower birth rates and a new (postnational) vision — but all I’m urging is a more measured and less sanctimonious analysis from the literate left. Reading Hess, the progressive who uncoupled class and race, is a good place to start.