Whose narrative is it anyway?
THE political discourse both in South Africa and indeed globally has over the past three decades become increasingly plural in nature with a growing sense among most that everything is relative and that my truth is not necessarily your truth and vice versa.
This is significantly different from the Cold War era or during the apartheid years, when political and economic discourse was decidedly more binary and revolved around two great narratives of either the West or the East, either for apartheid or against apartheid.
After the Cold War ended the world’s leading philosophers, such as Francis Fukuyama, argued that the advent of Western liberal democracy may signal the endpoint of humanity’s sociocultural evolution and the final form of human government.
Since then, Western liberal democracy has indeed been on the ascent and the world’s “democracies” have broadly modelled their political economies on the Western conception of a liberal democratic state.
Despite the myriad ongoing political struggles against what many believed was a system that preferred, and indeed promoted, elite control of the political and economic spheres at the expense of working people, governments and elites unquestioningly bought into and sold the idea of Western liberal democracy as being the only option.
Or as Margaret Thatcher so famously declared: “There Is No Alternative” (Tina).
This historical moment of conquest for the Western liberal tradition would unfortunately come up against its own limitations when the Arab Spring first erupted and led to a growing movement of protest and rejection of the status quo.
The Arab Spring was followed by uprisings throughout Europe, most notably Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece and eventually spread to the US and the UK as the Occupy Movements spontaneously erupted.
These protests quickly spread across the globe as major protests erupted in the Ukraine, Turkey, Brazil, Mexico, Chile and Canada.
Mohammed Bamyeh, a Jordanian scholar at the University of Pittsburgh who has written extensively on the Social Movements and the Arab Spring, is quoted in a new publication, Southern Resistance in Critical Perspective, as suggesting that these global acts of resistance to the status quo share at least six features.
These are: opposition to the capture of the system by special interests and particularly the collusion of financial and political power; frustration that the interests of “ordinary” people are no longer represented; suspicion of political parties, formal organisations and leaders; insistence that alternatives do exist and that opposition to the status quo is possible; an intention to represent the people rather than a specific class or disadvantaged group; and demands that “exhibit an enticing vagueness, making resistance both less focused but also more accessible to people with a wide range of interests”.
Suffice to say, then, that the enthusiasm of Western scholars after the fall of the Berlin Wall has proven to be misplaced and the backlash from “ordinary people” has been profound.
In South Africa, a similar pattern has emerged, with a growing discontent with a “rebellion of the poor” bubbling under the surface and most recently culminating in extensive cross-cultural and class protests erupting in response to an increasing glut of information highlighting and exposing the systemic rot that is an integral part of statecraft.
What has been unique about the South African experience is, arguably, the extent to which the mainstream media, together with the mainstream political parties and formations, which include the private sector funded NGOs that have attempted to lead the protests and narratives around the anti-corruption protests, and academics, have maintained a very narrow focus on finding solutions that are firmly entrenched in the Western liberal democratic paradigm.
Within the hundreds of thousands of gigabytes of political and economic commentary on the challenges facing South Africa, very few, if any, of the well-promoted mainstream thought leaders have dared to venture beyond the received wisdom of the Western liberal paradigm.
Of course, the challenge of making sense of the many disparate narratives has not been made any easier by the deliberate introduction of “fake news” and quasi-legitimate concepts such as Radical Economic Transformation and White Monopoly Capital.
And yet, this is precisely the challenge for South Africa today.
We have to answer the question clearly as to whose narrative is it anyway?
The South African political discourse is by any definition dominated by mainstream liberal thinkers, who even when positing a claimed “radical” theory are nonetheless knowingly or inadvertently presenting solutions which are steeped in the very constructs that have arguably brought us and the world to the point of vehemently questioning the status quo.
One example of this is a recent conversation I had with an esteemed PhD who proposed the problem as one of either a preference for the markets or a preference for the state.
On face value this is fairly problematic, but on further inspection one realises that the question is deeply rooted in a paradigm which does not allow broader plurality of thought to penetrate the possible solution.
Allow me to explain. The central difficulty with the way in which the problem is presented suggests and consequently confines the discussion to the binary (either/or) posed. This creates a false dichotomy between the state and the market while consequently excluding other elements of society (such as “ordinary citizens”) as agents of change.
Such approaches, which are steeped in Western constructs of binaries, cannot take us to a solution as the very intellectual underpinnings of a Eurocentric world view preclude other considerations.
Instead, we need an holistic non-binary approach which values and incorporates various agents into constructing power and social discourse.
After all, the world is currently facing the biggest challenge to Western liberal democracy and its elite collusions and mass exclusions since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
But who decides what is Western and what is not, he retorted.
In order to answer that question we should first acknowledge that a decolonised mind is not an extension of Western epistemology, but indeed a unique and at times diametrically opposed world view.
To decolonise, or rather to find a new more inclusive path, we have to accept that Africa and many other colonised parts of the world suffered an epistemicide (a deliberate erasure of our indigenous ways of knowing), all the more so that our world view now seems completely alien to us and our epistemology and metaphysics of a holistic non-binary conception of the world is considered backward and irrelevant to modern capitalism.
But far from irrelevant, even Western science and, more broadly, philosophy itself has come to realise that its absolutism has failed to produce just outcomes in the world and the broad popular rejection of the status quo has made this point abundantly clear.
And this is how we know who will decide. It will and must be based on just outcomes and more specifically on the will of the people.
This is one of the fundamental differences between the Western individualistically competitive Darwinian view of the world, in which only the fittest will survive, and the African conception of a decolonised holistic and non-binary communal approach.
In the Western outlook, there is always a binary zero sum conception, where one’s gain is another’s loss, compared to a holistic non-binary and communal conception where; “I am because you are”.
The South African embrace of the Western liberal democratic form of state has not only led to a growing inequality which mirrors and indeed stands out as a particularly extreme example of the outcomes of Western liberal political economy, it has also hobbled our ability to call upon our indigenous ways of being to find a just inclusive alternative.
As long as we ignore the paradigm under which we operate and through which our thought leaders pose the problem, we face the risk of our society eventually imploding under the sheer weight of the inequality it engenders.
So in contrast to the Western paradigm that suggests we need grand and glorious leaders; perhaps we need fewer leaders and more inclusive processes.
Rutledge is the Natural Resources Manager for ActionAid South Africa. He writes in his personal capacity. Follow ActionAid South Africa (AASA) on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. AASA is a member of ActionAid International, a global movement of people working together to further human rights and eradicate poverty.