Can we decolonise the dirty game?

THAT “politics is a dirty game” is a cliché that has endured for so long that it has made common sense of an anomaly.

The wrongheaded wisdom commits two capital crimes at once. It reduces the grand vocation of politics to a game and naturalises dirtiness that is, force and fraud, in politics.

It becomes a planetary paradox when politicians who are supposed to be dirty players of the dirty game the world over continue to be trusted with holding state power, ruling over populations and governing with the promise of making the world a better place for all.

In western thought and history, it is chiefly Thomas Hobbes and John Locke in the second half of the seventeenth century that are credited with coming up with theories of a contract government where rulers were to rule by the expressed consent of the ruled and not by claimed divine right.

Even as the theory of government by contract gained traction and ideas of representative and electoral democracy were fortified, and the state became a powerful dispenser of protection and all good, the idea of politics as an art and even a science of the dark princes continued to hold sway.

After the human calamity of 9/11 in the United States of America humanist Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben concluded that even in the modern times “we can say politics secretly works towards the production” and not as expected the prevention “of emergences” and disasters. Agamben detected a systematic politics of dependence between American state politics and terrorism where terror and the war against terror had come to need each other for mutual continuity and survival.

An expansion of the Agambean idea shows that the world over states and governments politically justify their existence by claiming that they are there to protect citizens and populations from this disaster and that calamity. Without calamities, large scale disasters and massive human misfortunes states and governments might have political trouble explaining their presence and their collection of rent from citizens.

In a strong way, for states and their governments to exist there must be present and potential disasters to be tackled or prevented. It is thinkable therefore that the need for political survival and continuity compels states and their governments to invent problems in order to justify their importance.

The state that Thomas Hobbes described that was supposed to provide human security and abolish fear tends to gravitate towards being the source of insecurity and a dispenser of fear. It is for that sad but good reason that Agamben insists that the true war against terror in the world involves those powerful states and governments that claim to fight terror, defeating themselves first and overcoming their own political and economic systems and tendencies that produce terror and terrorists in the world. If the world is to come right and achieve a break from politics that produces disasters and emergences, the thinking and practice of politics needs to be decolonised and recovered from its dirtiness.

A Tale of Two Paradigms of Politics a cunning Italian diplomat as the gospel of politics.

The belief that political opponents are essentially enemies that must be eliminated and dispensed with and not adversaries that should be engaged with has brought wars, terrorism, genocides and holocausts upon nations. As the “art of the possible” that Otto Von Bismarck described politics as where good and bad do not matter but power. As the “continuation of war by other means” that was theorised by Carl Von Clausewitz politics become a terrain of the warlike politician and soldier whose solution to problems is to assassinate enemies and annihilate opponents.

Believers in the political paradigm of war resist the idea of politics as the art and science of public persuasion and rhetorical gamesmanship in preference for military hardihood and cruelty, options that should be considered beastly and primitive in the present age.

The North American establishment, for instance, that prides itself with modernity, freedom and civility still parades the logic of “pre-emptive strikes,” country invasions and the toppling of other sovereign regimes. Throughout the world, political practices of assassinating opponents and annihilating dissenting groups and populations is here and there considered the political thing to do.

In other words politics gives respectability to murder and criminality.

Interestingly, in 1521 before his poisonous job application was published as a book in 1532, Machiavelli released his other classic, The Art of War in which he did not only describe war as the technic of power but also warned against the reliance on covert and overt violence in the negotiation of power.

Classically Machiavelli called for the consensual politics of private negotiations amongst disputants and persuasions of publics and masses. Violence, he noted “leads to the destruction of the commanders” and the exhaustion of their dreams and those of nations. Political competition without the threats of and the shedding of blood was the only way principalities and republics were going to achieve durability and lasting legacy in the world.

The super powers of the planet and those that have inherited their paradigm of politics in the present era are the ones that have engulfed the world in terrorism, fear and uncertainty. The masses of refugees and exiles that are flooding into the West as state-less and nation-less peoples are by-products of a global system of economics and politics that has not learnt the importance of the arts of negotiation and persuasion in jostling for and navigating power.

In 1925, Frederick Lewis Donaldson condemned, in a sermon, the seven social sins of a warlike approach to life and power. The tendency to hoard “wealth without work, pleasure without conscience” to practice “commerce without morality and science without humanity” which is like “worship without sacrifice” that belongs to those who claim “knowledge” when they have no “character” and are contractors to “politics without principle.”

In Africa, even before the colonial encounters and contrary to colonialists historiography war was not celebrated but discouraged. As warlike as Tshaka was his praise poets publicly mocked and satirised him for being a poor listener “isalakutshelwa” that resorted to war the way a wild fire consumes dry grass much to the disturbance and destruction of the nation.

The paradigm of politics as war, unlike the paradigm of politics as a science and an art of persuasion, leads to social sin and decay of the politicians, the political systems and forfeits national futures.

“Against war” has become a prominent catchy phrase and even a slogan in the worldwide decoloniality movement. Influentially, Puerto Rican theologian and philosopher Nelson MaldonadoTorres published Against War in 2008. The book boldly states its presentation of “views from the underside of modernity,” and its advocacy for the thinking of those who have suffered politics as war in the modern world system. This book details how the idea of politics as war has blinded the world and drives it towards a dark end.

Even the Jews that suffered anti-Semitism and endured a holocaust were driven by the paradigm of politics as war to practice extreme political cruelty against Palestine and Palestinians.

The world has been enveloped in a web of attacks and pursuant revenge where the end to disasters and calamities cannot easily be imagined. Importantly, the book notes that the idea of politics as war originates in the thinking of racist and imperial western philosophers and has been peddled across the world by Empire builders and colonial conquerors.

It is in Africa, Latin America and Asia that the paradigm of politics as persuasion should find its fortification, amongst those who have suffered the genocides of conquest, domination and control.

The paradigm of politics as war does not have the intellectual and political tools to recover the same world from war. The idea of politics as war in the Global South is an effectively colonial idea that states, governments, political parties and populations should resist.

Politics as spirited competition for economic resources and other furnitures of power will never stop being antagonistic and conflictual. Decoloniality argues that the conflict and antagonism can be kept at the level of brain power, persuasion and the human gift of negotiation.

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from South Africa: decoloniality2016@gmail.com