The Left in SA is being left behind in the reinvigorated battle of ideas
In the US, UK and Brazil progressives have new confidence and energy
● The end of history, announced with so much fanfare by Francis Fukuyama at the end of the
Cold War, is well and truly over. From Brazil to the UK and the US, the battle of ideas is being waged with new vigour.
The release of Lula da Silva from prison, where he was kept on trumped-up charges, has energised and united the Brazilian Left. There is now a real chance that the far right-wing Jair Bolsonaro will be deposed in the next election. In the US, Bernie Sanders has energised the American Left, particularly young people, including many young intellectuals, in a way that gives real hope that there will be a humane alternative to Donald Trump in the next election.
The Left is also full of new confidence and vigour in the UK. Jeremy Corbyn, much like Bernie Sanders, has surrounded himself with brilliant, progressive policy experts and the hugely impressive new Labour manifesto has put concrete proposals for real change on the table. Suddenly the realm of political possibility has been radically expanded.
Corbyn’s carefully worked-out and costed manifesto proposes to reverse anti-trade union laws, increase the minimum wage, improve paternity, maternity and bereavement leave, outlaw zero-hour contracts, create a million climate jobs with the aim of making the economy carbon neutral by 2030, build thousands of council homes and roll out free broadband.
The UK has lived in the shadow of Thatcherism under both Labour and Conservative governments for more than 40 years. A whole generation has known nothing but the ruthless politics of a society dominated in every way by the logic of the market. The industries that once sustained the working class have been destroyed, infrastructure is crumbling and millions live in poverty.
Labour leaders like Tony Blair accepted the logic of Thatcherism and presented the idea that there was no alternative to the market as “modernisation”. Corbyn, like a rocket illuminating the night sky, has shattered that consensus and put social hope back on the table.
Social hope, and the possibility of an inclusive future beyond the horrors of the swing to the Right, is now thriving in Brazil, the US and the UK. But here in SA we have no political party in parliament that stands for a viable, progressive alternative. The kleptocrats in the EFF and the ANC offer nothing but a vision of horror. The neoliberals in the ANC and the DA offer their own version of a vision of horror, in the form of an economy that condemns millions to poverty.
We do have some very smart people working on alternatives to neoliberalism in NGOs and universities but, unlike in the UK, the US and Brazil, there is no political instrument through which our progressive experts can contribute to real change.
Ideas, especially when they represent the interests of the majority against those of the elite, don’t change anything on their own. This is especially so when, as in SA, there is an overwhelming commitment to now discredited neoliberal ideas among most commentators.
Ideas that have not been taken seriously in most of the world since the financial crisis of 2008 continue to flourish among elites in SA. Commentator after commentator tells us that to advance we must break the unions, privatise, and commit to fiscal austerity.
These policies have failed everywhere they have been tried and, in a number of countries, led voters to embrace dangerous forms of right-wing populism.
Public discussion in SA urgently needs to catch up with current developments and to stop pretending that the world has not changed since 2008. But the extraordinary backwardness of our national conversation isn’t just a matter of provincialism, although there is plenty of that. It is also a result of the fact that where we do have progressive intellectuals up to date with current evidence about economics and policy they are not connected to social movements, trade unions or a progressive political party.
Without a material force to advance progressive ideas they simply wither away in some poorly attended workshop or hardly read academic paper. If we are going to catch up to the US, the UK or Brazil, and recreate the conditions for real social hope, it is imperative that our progressive intellectuals reconnect to trade unions and social movements, and that we build a political instrument that can unite them.
In the 1980s SA was often seen as being at the cutting edge of progressive politics. The UDF and Cosatu worked closely together and drew in hundreds of progressive intellectuals. Of course, all that was lost when the ANC was unbanned, popular struggles demobilised and political debate crushed by the dead hand of the Stalinism of the SACP.
Now, in 2019, SA is way behind much of the world in terms of building the intellectual and political infrastructure for real alternatives to neoliberalism.
The ANC remains the only real possibility to win the next election, and the factional battles in the ruling party are between kleptocrats and neoliberals.
But we do have the largest urban social movement in the world, in the form of Abahlali baseMjondolo, large industrial trade unions like Numsa and others located in Saftu that are now independent of the ruling party, and some very good intellectuals in NGOs and universities.
Building a progressive alternative to kleptocracy and neoliberalism requires these three forces — social movements, trade unions and intellectuals — to be united behind a democratic political instrument that can build grassroots support, effectively engage in the battle of ideas and, ultimately, contest for power.