by Mputhumi Ntabeni

G21 AFRICA Staff Writer

To read this article in Deutsch, Francaise, Italiano, Portuguese, Espanol, Korean, Japanese, Chinese and Russian, copy and paste the complete URL ("http://www.g21.net/africa58.html") and enter it in the box after you click through.

Mputhumi
Ntabeni

QUEENSTOWN, SOUTH AFRICA - The beginning of the century saw most communists recovering from the humiliating defeat of their dogma. They're mostly still bruised and full of self-commiseration but are now able to hold their heads up in public. The faux pas of the present US government after Sep11 had something to do with these awakenings of the communists from an exhausted, guilt-ridden and accommodating slumber. My uncle is one of these indefatigable communists who insist communism was not defeated by the insight of capitalism but rather by ignorance, ignorance driven by greed.

I grew up in a South African Black township in the 'seventies and 'eighties. For us communism was not an adventure but a way of life. We were raised on its ethos in much the same way some children would be raised on religious belief. When I was growing up, my uncle was a father figure for me. Even today he remains convinced of communist dogma. He still believes Marxist materialism to be the only educated outlook towards life. For him [these beliefs] came as a reaction to the humiliations of apartheid. The Marxist doctrine gave [him and those like him a] means to express their grievances while offering a better sense of dignity than what they saw as the exaggerated religious sense of their parents, 'the opium of the people,' according to the Marxist parlance

When my uncle looks back to what he calls his 'revolution days,' he always does so with such amazing credulity that you'd think nothing happened in nineteen eighty-nine when the Berlin Wall came down. His staunchness is the more amazing when you know how alert he is to the inflated and the absurd which most people now associate with communist politics.

When we were growing up, communist leaders had a way of exciting us out of boredom, of inciting us into the bravery to face up to the tragedies of growing up in the township. Most of them had an ability of channelling the mayhem that was supposed to be the 'Liberation Movement' of our township into a politics of sheer personal vitalism. They made us want to march to Robben Island "to free Mandela at four o'clock in the morning," as the political song we loved to chant use to go. Their candour had a way of arousing our social anger.

	"The writer thanked the producers for the lovely paycheck. Then he shot them." writelikegod.com
	When is the last time you talked politics with your dog' dogshatebush.com

I'll never forget the day we went to a rural town in Transkei called Comfimvaba, for supposed sport activities; instead we were treated to a political meeting where we were lectured by the likes of bra Chris (Hani), the communist leader whose assassination by white right-wingers in 1993 nearly sent our country into civil turmoil. We chanted that day until our voices became hoarse. I made up my mind to go to Lusaka to join the ANC (African National Congress) underground forces that day. Our names were duly collected; alas, nothing ever came of it. I was fifteen years old then.

We grew up admiring Communism as a cultural phenomenon and a political vehicle of our liberation. We idolised the likes of Chris Hani and Palo Jordan, another communist who is now a Member of Parliament, as our heroes. These leaders had an impatient disdain for the culture of business that excited us. As a result, we too grew up regarding business as collaborators of the apartheid regime. Later on, when we attended liberal universities through Transkian government scholarships, we were compelled to grow up and recognize the utility of business. To at least acknowledge that business makes the world go around even if we didn't fully subscribe to its ethos. After that, too, we still had a low opinion of business, only tolerating its mechanics as an inescapable occupational burden.

At varsity, I was politically non-usurious when most of my friends involved themselves deeper and deeper into politics. I suffered from a traumatic incidence that saw a girl I grew up with being burnt alive. The carelessness of some of our political comrades in our township became unsettling. Political organisation fell into the wrong hands; people who were generally known for their dubious records in the township -- but not by the machinery of political leadership that mostly operated from outside the country. We feared and hated the hell out of them for the power they had over our lives for being 'comrades,' active leaders in the political struggle. They made me suspicious of political hordes or any other crowds for that matter. I've never been able to recover from that. The distrust for the fickleness of the mob is too deep in my system.

Even though I accepted the need for radical social reforms in our country, you'd not see me signing petitions or pamphleteering with front groups. Despite these reservations, my respect for communists remained a life long feeling.

When I later discovered that the Catholic Church's social teachings suited my psychological make-up, I followed that path. To my satisfaction, I also came to realize that, if you disregard the materialist outlook of Marxism, the two had a lot in common. This further drew me closer to socialists, whom I had by then learnt to differentiate from hard-core communists.

I was not at all surprised when prominent Marxists in the West turned to Christianity for inspiration and revision after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I hear Terry Eagleton has reclaimed his Catholic past and now exhorts his comrades to read theology. Also that others, like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, are invoking St. Francis as a model of 'the future life of communist militancy.' Even Alain Badiou, arguably France's foremost Marxist, has upheld St. Paul as the pre-secular augur of revolutionary universalism.

Things didn't look this good only a decade ago for communism to me. I first felt the communist plot was lost when, round about 1999, I attended a Khulata memorial lecture at Vista University (Port Elizabeth Branch) by Palo Jordan. I cannot describe my sense of disappointment, of blank consternation, that day. Jordan, with his characteristic candour, spoke words to this effect:

"Comrades since we came to power we had to be realistic and play according to the world order so we may gain the ability to sustain our freedom and create working opportunities for our people..."

He spoke at length about adopting the middle road, which, to me, came across as a strange mixture of tempered pessimism with active opportunism towards neo-liberal economics. Like both running with the hare and hunting with the hounds.

During the days of my youth, my uncle taught me that the meaning of pragmatism in politics is confused opportunism. He made me understand pragmatism as an improvised solution born from a bankruptcy of ideas, a replacement of principles by expedience. Jordan at the lecture was telling me pragmatism excites and vitalises 'the pluralism of inspired common sense'.

Since I was just fresh out of varsity, I got confused.

I've since then understood our government's idea of pragmatism as a series of social and economic adventures, now called NEPAD (New Economic Plan for African Development). These adventures look to me more and more like what my uncle told me, an attempt to fill the void that is created by the permanent crisis that is the condition of our era. It looks like he understood pragmatism better as the lack of decisive leadership.

Still, before Jordan's lecture, I thought communism was just undergoing an identity crisis. That its leaders were forming new strategies before coming forward with a convincing plan to take the philosophy to the next stage of socialist egalitarianism. It took a communist, Jordan, to convince me that -- in fact -- communism had collapsed. Since that day at Vista I've had occasion to observe communist states, like China, being more capitalistic than most capitalist countries. In fact, as I speak--paradox of all paradoxes -- I'm told anything good and giving stability to global capital markets is China. Should I then repent in confusion with my hand in my mouth? Again my uncle comes to the rescue.

My uncle tells me the capitalist system of production has always been important to Marx and Engels as a vehicle of ushering in a complete communist state. He quotes the Communist Manifesto to support his argument. Marx and Engels, he says, anticipated and celebrated Globalisation by admiring the universality of Capitalism, "The constant revolution of production and the endless disturbance of all social conditions." The "everlasting uncertainty" where everything "fixed and frozen ... all that is solid melts into air ... swept away." He shows me passages where Marx and Engels were bewildered by "constant expansion of markets, the daily destruction of old established industries." What they called "the intercourse in every direction" that leads to "universal interdependence of nations" and the nail-biting need for solutions for new emerging wants.

For our generation, who were brought up on the socialist ethos, when the communist experiment collapsed we took to modelling ourselves on the values of freedom, democracy and economic independence; the so-called 'American Dream.' For those of us who grew in the township chaos this, in practical terms, translated to a chance of living quiet, unmolested lives, escaping our neighbourhoods of hell, substance abuse, intimidation, vandalism, thuggery and so forth.

If anything, the fall of communism taught us that great legislators, who manufacture the consent of people by [using the] mesmerizing powers of personality, lead to collectivism, which in turn leads to leader worship and eventually war and concentration camps. As a result, we became wary of leaders who came in a nationalist tone, the remnants of which are the likes of Robert Mugabe who has now managed to turn democracy into a tyranny by the masses. Those type of African leaders have made democracy into a vehicle for rising demagogues who're skilled at manipulating people's frustrations by deceit, chicanery, and great rhetorical skills to promote their version of personal greed.

Little did we know the worst was yet to come.

The US government, after September 11, 2001, thought us it is also possible to manipulate people's anger for a different kind of greed -- the greed for imperialistic wealth and control. It is actually the US's version that stung most of us to thought. The US is demonstrating, by one faux pas after another, that when democracy falls in the hands of corrupt capitalists it is just as bad as Totalitarianism. It has taught us that democracy is not automatically by the vote of the majority, and that it has no future unless it reforms its structures.

Nothing has made our generation more highly sceptical of politics and pushed us into a growing revolt against the elitist capital class. Most of us, after Iraq, when the voice of the majority clearly didn't make any difference in the ears of the major Western democracies -- the hopes of a new world dashed by the US and England -- opted for living in avoidance of collective cant, automatic language and such ready-made sentiment.

Reality showed that the world was under ransom by neo-liberal economic theories that favour the rich and that there is very little ordinary people can do about it. The Project For The New American Century took the American gloves off and was not shy to even engage in violence for control and increase of its vested interests. It no longer spoke of the new (American) imperialism in whispered corners, but in bold idealistic statements. Things looked bleak, and were getting tenser the world over, severing the harmony of trust between the continents, the governments and their people on the ground. People lost trust in politicians.

Then the Spanish people came to the scene. The message they chose to send after the pain replenished the hope of free people the world over.

Now it seems to many that we have to start, from scratch, to rediscover the true political soul of the free world. The only road before us seems to pass through our early years of intellectual development, when we thought about the human strands of morality; intelligence and practicality converge in socialism. Perhaps now socialism has learnt to avoid the paralysis it fell into due to its adherence to political lines. Perhaps it'll never again promulgate the subornation of the individual to the society, the enslaving of personal by state power that eventually became communism. And perhaps it'll have more respect for the activities that involve personal freedom like religion, art, philosophy, science and so forth.

The guilty fear of criticism that robbed socialists of much of their potency during the fall of the Berlin Wall has not completely lost its grip. This is a good thing. It makes them more humble and sincere, unlike the bourgeoning capitalist elitists of Busharites.

After all, the fear and hatred of Communism in the West during the Cold War was not from the crimes of Stalin, deportation camps, forced labour and framed-up trials. All that came later as justification, as an advocacy campaign of how socialism did not work. Western capitalist phobia is for anything that shows bias against the psychology of acquisition. It was communism yesteryear, today its Islamism; tomorrow it'll be the burgeoning Socialist Forum.

I doubt anyone who watches the shenanigans of the Bush II administration can dispute the fact that totalitarian ideas have now taken their root in capitalist attitudes.

We remember also that we have been warned about the vanguard for the capitalist advancement in the West, which seems to always have its logical conclusions in the sadistic exaltation of Fascism or Nazism. That the ease by which the Western imagination is arrested by the threat of the "not like us" is a source of much misery is Occidental history.

Most people interpreted the communists' silence in the past few decades as some form of public penance, or a piestic vanity patiently waiting for opportunity to ambush. Communism, thanks to McCarthyism from the US, has been suspected and defamed as unpatriotic. The marmoreal astuteness of staunch communists is often quoted as unrealistic obduracy hanging on unrealistic hopes of a messianic last communist stage that's suppose to come around due to internal contradictions of capitalism. That was before September 11.

That irredentist fascist, who abuses Islamic religion, Osama bin Laden, and his gangs brought their fear for decadence, their cultish worship and love of a mechanical civilization -- as opposed to the "organic" society -- into the present tragic clash with similar fears and predispositions in the West. The part of the West that's always all too ready to counterpoise by the use of legalized violence against the "not like us".

These belligerents went back to finding common interests once again in the greed of reciprocated dishonesty and specious religious piety. They gathered war clouds in the name of Mammon, becoming bolder in their need for control, setting the blood-dimmed tide loose... The world once more thrilled to violence and authority and fanaticism. The Medieval fever flared through society, as if world history had suddenly been erased in people's minds. Another Yeats needs to be born to reveal again the intensity of the nightmarish hiatus between our civilisations. The Spanish people have shown us the path to re-claim our sanity in order to put power back to the people.

Ordinary people should use elections as a time for reckoning.

Spain has not cowered under the fear of terrorists but has shown her heightened resentment at the government of Aznar's seeming willingness to mislead the public in order to exploit an act of terror for political advantage.

They've categorically stated that, despite their abhorrence for terrorist acts, they'll not allow terrorists to bring the rest of us to their level. Terrorists' acts should not end our belief in the politics of negotiation and concession. Even as we fight them by legitimate means, we've delegated to our democratic governments a responsibility. It is up to those who feel their governments betrayed them to follow the Spanish example. As Thomas Mann saw it long ago, "In our times the destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms." Let us utilize these awakenings.