The right has not left and sometimes the left is not right
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IT WAS the poor who first realised that South Africa was heading into serious crisis.
In 2004, what University of Johannesburg’s Peter Alexander first termed “the rebellion of the poor” began to erupt. After that it was the miners at Marikana, and then the metal workers and the students. Now even the middle classes have taken to the streets.
In one of the most significant developments of recent times, the EFF decided to join the middle classes in their protests against Zuma. This decision has raised the real possibility of a powerful united front against kleptocracy. If the Communist Party, Cosatu, Numsa and Abahlali basemjondolo threw their weight behind this emerging coalition and built a real united front we would be sure to move forward. We would also see off the real risk of a collapse into dynastic politics that would result from the emerging presidential power struggle.
The idea of the united front is not new. It has been around for almost 100 years.
The great Vladimir Lenin was a strong proponent of the need to unite all progressive forces as early as the 1920s. It is one of many ideas from the left tradition that continue to be very useful to us in the present. But the world is always changing and the left has to take these changes into account.
The old Stalinist dogma that confused the nationalisation of banks, mines and industry with the socialist goal of worker control has long been discredited. We all know that SAA, Eskom, the SABC and other parastatals serve the interests of a predatory elite. No one in their right mind thinks that these organisations serve the interests of the working class and the poor.
For Malusi Gigaba’s new adviser, Chris Malikane, to suggest that nationalisation amounts to “radical economic transformation” is to replace serious radical analysis with gutter Marxism in its most crude and dogmatic form.
To place the banks and insurance companies in the hands of the state would be to place them in the hands of Zuma and the Guptas, and their minions such as Brian Molefe and Hlaudi Motsoeneng. It would be a disaster.
We just cannot afford the kind of intellectual laziness that replaces careful thought and analysis with crude and long-discredited dogma.
Not long ago the South African left were hugely supportive of Hugo Chavez. Now that Venzuela has collapsed into a Zimbabwe-style economic crisis there is a stunned silence in the ranks. Serious thought needs to be given to forms of radical economic change that can actually work.there needs to be serious and unflinching analysis of the failure of the socialist project in Venezuela.
There is a reason why migrants flow from Zimbabwe to South Africa and not the other way around. We also need to take this seriously. We need to find ways to build an alternative that will actually work.
We also need to understand that in the 21st century the ruling class operates in a very different manner to the times of Marx and Lenin. There was a time when one of the first acts of any revolutionary was to set up an underground printing press. The first act of any dictator was to destroy any independent printing press. Social media has changed all of that.
When social media first erupted on to the scene it was universally seen as a democratic force. The idea that anyone could write and publish seemed like a major democratic breakthrough.
As late as 2011 the Arab Spring and Occupy were often understood to be a result of social media rather than old-fashioned struggle, but that has changed.
Donald Trump used social media, and “alternative facts” and “fake news” to get elected. In Russia, Putin has an office block with workers dedicated to full-time online trolling. There is a very similar dynamic in India. Social media has become one of the main weapons of the new right.
In South Africa, the Guptas, initially with the support of the notorious British PR firm Bell Pottinger, have chosen the same route as Putin. Our public sphere was poisoned by Twitter bots, paid Twitter, bought and paid for commentators like Andile Mngxitama and Jimmy Manyi, and propagandistic media operations like The New Age, ANN7, Black Opinion and others.
Worryingly, mainstream media outfits have often run “fake news” stories designed to advance the interests of Zuma and the Guptas. The most notorious examples were the articles run in the Sunday Times making false allegations about various parts of the state that had resisted capture, such as Sars. To its credit the paper, under a new editor, has acknowledged the error. But the Sunday Times is not the only media operation to have been played in this way.
Andile Mngxitama’s Black First Land First is part Gupta goon squad and part crude propaganda operation. Evidence has been presented linking it directly to Bell Pottinger. Yet a long list of media operations of various kinds have published articles by its members as if it was genuine commentary from an independent political organisation.
In 2017, naivety about fake political organisations, fake opinion, fake publications and fake news will pave the road to hell. It is of the utmost importance that we do all that we can to defend the public sphere against those who would poison it in the interests of a rightwing kleptocracy spinning itself as radical.
A crystal clear line must be drawn between people and publications striving to be accurate and honest and those who lie as a matter of course. We also need to draw a clear line between commentators and publications that do their best to challenge their readers with logical argument, proven fact and careful analysis and those that, like the Huffington Post, are willing to compromise standards in journalism in search of “click bait”.
Our country is not yet lost. But we face the real possibility of collapse into serious crisis. Against this great danger we must do all that we can to protect and support a democratic public sphere.
Imraan Buccus is senior research associate at ASRI, research fellow in the School of Social Sciences at UKZN and academic director of a university study abroad programme on political transformation.