Stifling black entrepreneurial class the big SA crime
In the last year of his life, Karl Marx had his beard shaved off by a barber in Algiers. He couldn’t stand the African heat. But he made sure that a photograph was taken beforehand of him in his world famous hirsute visage — the last photo of him.
Keeping up appearances — that’s what history’s greatest dialectical materialist understood very well at that stage of his career as a revolutionary. Beards stood for bravery, manliness and, above all, wisdom.
Marx knew by then he was none the wiser after a lifetime of writing tomes — he had not yet begun the second phase of his investigation of political economy, had not yet thought through where the state fit in. Much as he revolutionised human thinking, he died before Freud discovered what really motivates us, before antitrust laws easily defeated monopolies and before John Maynard Keynes worked out what the state should do and not do to run an economy.
The pretence of wisdom had always animated Marxists and communists, the intellectual priesthood later called the advance guard, who would ensure the proletariat always had the right ideas when rising up against exploitation.
A century ago, Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik advance guard took the Russian Revolution by the scruff of the neck in October and submitted it to its Marxist ideology.
Class war and dialectical materialism was everything, and the tragedy of Russia was that the conditions created by the First World War briefly fitted Marxist analysis perfectly.
The Cheka, the secret police, saw to the rest — dividing the pure revolutionaries from the compromising socialists and laying the basis for the civil war that followed the world war.
At the heart of the tragedy was the lack of sufficient power of one of Marx’s prerequisite classes for a proper revolution — the bourgeoisie. Russia had a strong tradition of bourgeois dissent, but its members were always small in number.
When the Great War broke out, its numbers were further decimated by worker uprisings and the incompetence of Czar Nicholas’s army. Rapid urbanisation also ensured that the working classes were swelled by hungry peasants who only had the labour of their hands to offer. The Mensheviks inevitably bowed the knee to the Bolsheviks.
At the southernmost tip of Africa, something with many similarities was happening, albeit with a completely different outcome — not the emancipation of the working classes, but their virtual enslavement.
It was also a revolution, but a silent one compared to the Armageddon in Europe, that would lay the foundations for South African society for the next 100 years.
It started in 1913 with the promulgation of the Natives Land Act. Because of its name, it has always been thought that land dispossession was its aim, but the British and Dutch republican authorities had already seized most of the land of dozens of tribes across the interior in the final decades of the 19th century.
The act was ostensibly aimed at preventing black people from buying back their land, but its far more devious purpose was hidden in a subclause — it was meant to destroy the rising black bourgeoisie. Cecil John Rhodes was the social architect who worked out how to use strictures on land ownership to fulfil the far greater need of the new capitalist order he and his imperialist advance guard of Randlords were setting up: cheap, pliant labour.
His Glen Grey Act restricting black land ownership created the basic mechanism that was later perfected under apartheid that forced black people into lives of servitude for work just one step away from slavery. But many resourceful black peasants found a way around it, in the practice of sharecropping.
They worked the land of white farmers and gave them half the harvest. Sol Plaatje writes how they mingled socially, as the peasants adopted bourgeois ways, using cutlery and crockery and having their photographs taken in Victorian dress.
This was anathema to racists such as the Afrikaner politicians Piet Grobler and Christiaan de Wet, the Boer War hero who was the Eugene Terreblanche of his time. The subclause of the Land Act they drew up simply banned the practice of sharecropping. So revolutionary was this step, that some white farmers, according to Plaatje, threatened to call out commandos against Union policemen who went around evicting sharecroppers.
However, when it was explained that the idea was to turn black peasants into wage labourers, this resistance fizzled out. Having skilled black people work for “boroko” (broke, or nothing) was still the best model. Land was never the problem, and although new legislation was promulgated to extend its racist exclusions to Indians, the focus shifted to fine-tuning the application of existing labour laws.
A key one was the Master and Servants Law. In SA, it was used to turn whites into aristocrats, and black people into their servants, as Paul Sauer would put it in the 1920s.
There was resistance, but the tragedy for SA was that because there were hardly any members of the germinating black bourgeoisie left, black workers were the ones to be mobilised. When the left shucked off its racism after the 1922 revolt, the working class was fertile ground for Marxist or pseudo-Marxist ideas.
The Communist Party of SA played a foundational role in fostering nonracialism, but left intellectuals also cemented the ethos of the advance guard.
The idea that history unfolds along predetermined routes that could only be understood and followed by the select few who have the right revolutionary wisdom, has been at the heart of many ills in the tripartite alliance and in post-1994 SA.
Apart from the painfully vulgar Marxist contortions of alliance politicians trying to advance the national democratic revolution, it underlies cadre deployment, which is devastating SA’s bureaucracy; promotes a dismissive attitude towards corruption; and inculcates a knee-jerk disdain for business.
SA’s working class may be condemned to remaining in abject servitude forever. Instead of pulling out all the stops to restart the project of installing a black entrepreneurial class that was shattered after 1913, the ruling elite of the tripartite alliance has been content to set up a parasitic patronage system, in many respects similar to that in Russia today.