WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE AND FIGHT FOR A WHITE SOUTH AFRICA!
-- Slogan of the 1922 Rand Revolt
-- Ruth Schechter, Cape Coloured: A By-Product of Empire
RUN FOR YOUR LIFESTYLES!
BARBARIANS AT THE CREPES!
1
20 years after our messiahs successfully negotiated the modernisation of our continued exploitation and patted their backs in the erroneous belief that this constituted a 'settlement' of the social question in South Africa once and for all, blacks have begun to struggle against the dispossession at the root of their poverty in ways that demonstrate unequivocally that nothing has been settled, organising their actions with an intensity and extensity not seen since the days of formal apartheid. White supremacy, born from this dispossession and maintained by this poverty, is more threatened today than it has been since the height of the revolutionary movement. The 'negotiated settlement' that sought to sanctify black misery is being progressively demolished one shaky clause at a time by those who are no longer willing to accept the equation 'black person' = 'miserable condition' which the quislings and their herrenvolk overlords sought to 'enshrine' in 'the world's most liberal constitution'.
Today the political lackeys of capital -- the Zilles, Maimanes, Malemas, Zumas, Vavis, et al -- are more divided over how best to serve their master than they have been in twenty years. These good shepherds now scramble higgledy-piggledy in opposite directions chasing after flocks of unruly lambs who are increasingly refusing to bleat meekly for charity while having the wool pulled over their eyes. Their situation recalls that of the members of a 1934 state Commission of Enquiry into 'the position in the country's economic and social structure of the Cape Coloured population (including Cape Malays) in the various part of the Union' in the sense that 'one conviction and only one united them, though it is one to which they have not in so many words set their names. That is that the position of the Coloured People is hopeless, and that there is no help for it, though minor alleviations may be possible. It is hopeless, since in the interests of the country as a whole, a phrase which in South Africa means the interests of the whites, the development of the odd half million Cape Coloured cannot proceed along natural lines, either culturally or economically. That, of course, and for the same reasons, is also true of the far larger Native population. But as a whole the Natives have not yet proceeded far enough along the one-way street prescribed for them by their white rulers to beat their heads against the stones of the prison walls in which it ends.' Today, 80 years after Ruth Schechter made these observations, black people of every hue and heritage have dragged themselves all too far along the one-way street prescribed for them. They are beating vigorously against the prison wall in which it ends, no longer with their heads, but with fists, sticks, stones, hammers, molotov cocktails, metal pipes, and whatever else comes to hand. They are saving their heads for thinking, and their thoughts are inventing new weapons and tactics for their hands. The ferocity of their assault shakes the prison walls. The racket from the rattle storms the serene sleep of the wardens. The tremor troubles the foundations of the building. Its owners have sound reasons to tremble.
Today the political lackeys of capital -- the Zilles, Maimanes, Malemas, Zumas, Vavis, et al -- are more divided over how best to serve their master than they have been in twenty years. These good shepherds now scramble higgledy-piggledy in opposite directions chasing after flocks of unruly lambs who are increasingly refusing to bleat meekly for charity while having the wool pulled over their eyes. Their situation recalls that of the members of a 1934 state Commission of Enquiry into 'the position in the country's economic and social structure of the Cape Coloured population (including Cape Malays) in the various part of the Union' in the sense that 'one conviction and only one united them, though it is one to which they have not in so many words set their names. That is that the position of the Coloured People is hopeless, and that there is no help for it, though minor alleviations may be possible. It is hopeless, since in the interests of the country as a whole, a phrase which in South Africa means the interests of the whites, the development of the odd half million Cape Coloured cannot proceed along natural lines, either culturally or economically. That, of course, and for the same reasons, is also true of the far larger Native population. But as a whole the Natives have not yet proceeded far enough along the one-way street prescribed for them by their white rulers to beat their heads against the stones of the prison walls in which it ends.' Today, 80 years after Ruth Schechter made these observations, black people of every hue and heritage have dragged themselves all too far along the one-way street prescribed for them. They are beating vigorously against the prison wall in which it ends, no longer with their heads, but with fists, sticks, stones, hammers, molotov cocktails, metal pipes, and whatever else comes to hand. They are saving their heads for thinking, and their thoughts are inventing new weapons and tactics for their hands. The ferocity of their assault shakes the prison walls. The racket from the rattle storms the serene sleep of the wardens. The tremor troubles the foundations of the building. Its owners have sound reasons to tremble.
Today the voice of white enlightenment, which since the rise of St. Desmond Tutu and Lord Nelson Mandealer has expressed itself in terms of reconciliation (meaning resignation to continued black poverty) and forgiveness (meaning forgetfulness of continued black dispossession), increasingly expresses itself as horror and fear at the threat of barbarian invasion on the one hand, and in terms of self-righteous indignation at the ungrateful rejection of their benevolent civilisation on the other.
The combatants of the social war at the heart of darkest South Africa today have little use for white enlightenment. The pretensions of the phoney social contract so dear to the white inventors of the modern South African state are increasingly disregarded by both the black bourgeoisie, which is naturally content to resort to brute repression, as well as by the black proletarians who are naturally compelled to defy the bourgeois laws that function as so many boots in their faces, pressing their backs deeper into the shit and the mud of a world grown fat on their boredom and misery.
Just as, in world history, the philosophy of the Enlightenment was adopted by the progressive bourgeoisie as it struggled for supremacy against the reactionary feudal order, only to be discarded for the traditional tools of authoritarian rule once the capitalist class seized control of the state, so too the magnanimous enlightenment adopted by the progressive partisans of white supremacy as they struggled to impose their liberal social contract on both the outdated reactionaries amongst themselves and the outmanoeuvred revolutionaries among the dispossessed is increasingly revealed for what it always was: the voice of white enlightenment is the voice of white entitlement.
2
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| A Dutch woman |
Eventually, however, as article after article consistently provoked such comments, with not one single dissenting voice among whites themselves, the hypothesis that these mainstream news websites represented some strange attractor at which the lunatic fringe of white supremacy mysteriously congregated became increasingly untenable. I was forced to conclude that the views here expressed are representative of the majority of white South Africans who are 1) reasonably informed about current events in the country 2) care enough to comment. How relatively numerous this section of the white population is I don't know. It's possible, even likely, that most whites are simply too ignorant or too indifferent about the state of the nation to voice themselves in this forum. Considering what passes for news in this country these days, I wouldn't blame them. Even so, it seems overly charitable to assume that the voice of reason would be found among the ignorant and the indifferent if only they had the interest and ability to express it.
The professional critics of 'whiteness' and their disciples are generally content with pointing all this out and condemning it in moral terms. Those who want not merely to reproduce moralistic denunciations of racism but to get rid of the universal social relations on which it is based will have to do better. For me, what is significant in this sordid little business is the fact that the voice of white enlightenment only expresses the logic, carried to its final conclusions, of all those proponents of 'civil society' (including those black Friends of the People who make their careers in progressive NGOs, trade unions and political parties) who put forward the notion that the proletariat could (and therefore should) wage its practical struggle against the bourgeois economic, social and political order in forms other than the barbaric uncivilized form of revolutionary class struggle. The voice of white enlightenment -- with its demand that black proletarians passively accept its imaginary utopia of equal citizens united under a common Social Contract, of abstract rights without concrete consequences, of peace without justice -- is only the particular South African form of the voice of bourgeois civil society, which demands the same thing of all the wretched of the earth. 'Under apartheid, we faced daily battles for the right to gather, to protest and to march. Now that these rights are enshrined in our law, we abuse them. When we march, we demand, we destroy and we loot. We care not whether our demands are reasonable, or what actions we take.' (Tutu speaks on Marikana massacre, iol.co.za, 21 August 2012) When Archbishop Tutu echoes the sentiments of white racists, slandering the victims of mass murder by stuffing these moronic words into their mouths; when Lord Nelson echoes the sentiments of Jeremy Bentham quoted below about the subordination of equality to 'an already settled and determined distribution' of property by saying 'We want Johannesburg to remain the beautiful and thriving city that it is now. Therefore, we are willing to maintain separate living until there are enough new employment opportunities and new homes to allow blacks to move into Johannesburg with dignity' (The organization of power in black and white, Sam Thompson & Norman Abraham, 1985); when uTata Madiba himself not only gives the arch-colonialist Rhodes his blessing by lending his name to the 'Mandela-Rhodes Foundation', but makes his whole life's work a project that would have had Rhodes' own blessing, as he himself stated: 'I am sure that Cecil John Rhodes would have given his approval to this effort to make the South African economy of the early 21st century appropriate and fit for its time'; when such black-faced mascots of liberal capitalism reveal their true colours they demonstrate precisely how bourgeois civil society -- its system of rights and laws based on conflicting interests balanced against one another for the sake of 'the general good' -- can only express the particular interests of those in power, can only subordinate the interests of the oppressed for the sake of the oppressors, can only defend the paltry privileges of a settled and determined hierarchy at the expense of the exploited. This fact is such an unquestioned platitude among those who fabricate 'public opinion' that when the ANC -- which came into being in order to fight against the devastating dispossession brought about by the Native Land Act of 1913 -- finally got into power and 'enshrined' this very dispossession in the new 'celebrated' constitution (section 25(7) of which is just another name for this very law) the glaring contradiction passes without comment. Similarly, when the ruling party blames the dismal failure of its pathetic attempts at redistribution on recalcitrant property owners, citing the limitations imposed on its actions by the 'willing seller, willing buyer' principle, despite the fact that this principle is nowhere mentioned in its own constitution, the brazen cant remains unchallenged.
The resolution of the social question always comes down to the question of how the wretched of the earth -- the class of individuals who, through legalised robbery in the interests of their masters, have been made homeless in the land of their birth and powerless in a world run on their own forced labour -- organise themselves in order to expropriate the expropriators. The voice of white enlightenment asserts that in the interests of present realities, which in South African means the in interests of the present exploitation of blacks, the robberies of the past must be forgiven and forgotten. To say expropriation must be accompanied by market-based compensation is to say it must not be done at all. If the poor, like the fools they are constantly taken for, are told they need to buy what rightfully belongs them, they are effectively being told to forget about ever possessing it, since by definition poor people do not have money to buy back the stolen goods claimed by the rich. As Dan Mokonyane, one of the very few to denounce this fraud as it was taking place, wrote in his 1994 book The Big Sell Out: 'This is just as crude as the spectacle of a rapist who comes to the scene of the devastation of his nefarious act to demand payment for loss of his semen and exertion.' Against the relentless aural assault perpetrated by this rapacious voice and its perpetual monologue in favour of the forces of law and order, it is necessary to say loud and clear: the liberation of everyday life is not civil affair.
Family holiday during the South African occupation of Namibia. Then as now, alienated leisure and social war go together like work and sabotage.
The means at the disposal of this monologue is not limited to a monopoly over the machinery of mass communication, but includes a monopoly over the definition of terms in which the debate of humanity over itself is conducted. The voice of white enlightenment certainly does silence all others because it owns all the microphones. An academic who studied all the reports of journalists in the weeks immediately following the Marikana massacre, for example, revealed that the voices of the victims were represented in only 3% of reports, as against 50% for the bosses and the remainder a mixture of government, police, unions and professional experts. But this is not its only, or even its most effective, weapon.
The medium is not the message, and as important as control over the mass media maybe, control over the message in the minds of the oppressed is always decisive. This was the greatest contribution made by the black consciousness movement both in the theories of its intellectuals and most importantly in the practice of millions whose actions provided its historical confirmation. This dictatorial control over the form and content of social debate is conducted through a totalitarian censorship which is so effective as to disarm the potentially explosive practical consequences of such a discussion entirely, replacing the volatile possibilities of dialogue with with the one-way transmission of decisions already taken and the opinions about them permitted by the decision-makers and their lackeys. Within the confines of this pseudo-communication 'freedom of speech' is tolerated precisely because within it the power of speech -- of language separated both from everyday life and from the means of translation into the realm of action -- has been practically defused.
Complete control over the media by the apartheid state was powerless to neutralise the forces of subversion at work in everybody's heads, thus the false message of that state was irrefutably contradicted by the lucid language of the streets. The illusions about the permanence and omnipotence of the established order relentlessly pedalled by the apartheid state was helpless to save the voice of white enlightenment. With its back against the wall, it was forced to collaborate with black struggle celebrities and their rackets in order to save itself with illusions about the transformation of the established order.
The on-going struggles that today continue to rage through the workplaces, classrooms and streets are the second offensive in the revolutionary era that began in 1976, and, just as the first offensive had made ridiculous all the illusions of the apartheid era and its non-existent stability, this second wave makes ridiculous all the illusions about the democratic era and its non-existent radical transformation. The role of the ANC at the head of the 'national democratic revolution', the leading role of the Communist Party and the COSATU unions in the organisation of working-class struggle, the role of the 'tripartite alliance' formed by these three rackets in building 'a better life for all': who, these days, besides the lackeys of the authorities, sees such twaddle as anything other than a bad joke?
Unfortunately illusions, though no longer alive, continue to weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living; their corpses litter the soil and smother new growth until they are ploughed into the earth where their sickening rot is changed into nourishing compost. As Feurbach pointed out, 'It often happens that in actual practice we have long ago freed ourselves from a particular thing, a doctrine, or an idea, but we are far from being free from it in the mind. It has ceased to have any truth for our actual being -- perhaps it never had -- but it still continues to be a theoretical truth; that is, a limit on our mind. The mind is the last thing to become free, because it takes things more thoroughly.' An examination of these old illusions, and their origins -- as a prelude to their thorough exorcism -- remains an unpleasant necessity.
4
The historical roots of these illusions lie in the revolutionary movement that overthrew all previous social formations and replaced them with the global system of commodity-production and wage-slavery that dominates the planet today.
The most influential tendency within this revolutionary movement, not merely due to the role it played in the rise of capitalist domination but more importantly the way it was to leave such lamentable birthmarks on the revolutionary struggle to overthrow capital, was Jacobinism. The history of Haiti, from the heroic abolition of chattel-slavery by the slaves themselves, famously described by CLR James in The Black Jacobins, to the incomparably miserable conditions that have relentlessly hounded the Haitian people to this day, demonstrates something of the importance this ideology and practice has had for black people around the world.
Jacobinism is the triumph of revolution as pure appearance. It is the means by which the image of revolution strangles the real thing.
From Haiti up to the present day there has been no true revolutionary movement anywhere in the world that was not eventually destroyed by Jacobinism, in the form of a dictatorship by a ruling party over the masses of people who are brutally exploited in the name of their own murdered revolution. From the saintly icon Lord Nelson Mandealer whose portrait graces the banknotes of a country whose people are kept in servitude under the rule of his heroic party, to the dashing halo of Ernesto Sha(dy) Guevara whose benevolent glare adorns the walls of an island whose people have been exploited by the bureaucratic dictatorship of his comrades, the dreams of liberation that have driven the wretched of the earth to rise with courage and determination against their oppression have always been forcibly kept in the realm of religious fantasies, represented by the pictures of holy prophets worshipped by the billions who, compelled to remain on their knees by the blows of rifle-butts to their backs, naturally tend to grovel at the feet of the powerful.
Behind the leader of every political party and every 'liberation movement', stands the real or potential grave-digger of the revolution. Behind every Lord Nelson lurks Napoleon. The idea that the state is something to be conquered by an elite in the name of the masses, that a political circus performed in the hallways of power by qualified specialists is an effective means to abolish the misery and powerlessness that confronts everyone every day -- these quaint notions are the children of the Jacobin revolution. They have demonstrated an astonishing resilience.
Time and again disillusion and disgust sets in at the lies, atrocities and moral bankruptcy of politicians, not only the ruling ones but all those who loudly claim to oppose them only to act exactly the same the second they snatch a few scraps of power for themselves. Time and again this healthy attitude expresses itself in powerful social movements that shake these societies to their foundations with the slogan popularised in the 2001 Argentinian crises: que se vayan todos! -- they must all go! One way or another, however, people are convinced that they can't change anything by and for themselves, that some professional liars must in fact stay and pretend to change everything for them, and that they have to choose the least bad choice available to them. The voice of white enlightenment is the voice of the least bad choice. It is the voice of the Jacobin who channels revolutionary sentiment into the familiar dead-end of the familiar misery through the pretension of leading those unqualified to do so themselves into the promised land.
In moments of extreme crisis, when ordinary people have gone so far along the path of creating their own history that the conventional ideology of revolutionary Capital proves unsuccessful, an anti-capitalist version of Jacobinism is tasked with securing the safety of commodity production and wage-slavery. Such was the case during the Russian Revolution, and such was the vigour of the radical transformation taking place throughout the country that the political party tasked with smothering it could not succeed with simple anti-capitalism, but even had to resort to anti-Jacobinism. Lenin was the last possible salvation for the Jacobin tradition. His radical innovation, a two-fold deception that disguised capitalism as communism and dictatorship as liberation, lent a new lease on life to the ideology of the revolutionary bourgeoisie to such an extent that it has been able to defuse every popular uprising from then until now with one or another variant of the same operation.
Like all politicians, Lenin's job was the making and breaking of empty promises. Five years after impressing the revolutionary workers, soldiers and peasants of his country with a programme that promised the abolition of the army, the police, the government bureaucracy and the institutions of wage-slavery and feudal land-appropriation -- without which his party would never have become popular enough to seize power for themselves -- he reversed himself without blinking an eyelid, openly admitting that he never had any intention of carrying out anything he originally claimed.
“Until now we wrote programs and kept on promising. At one time that was much of a necessity. We had to present a program and to promise a world revolution. If the White guards [those he labels reactionary] inveigh against us on that score, this shows only that [they] never had any notion of how revolutions are made. We could not have started in any other way”.
As Gregory Maximoff, a former soldier in the Red Army and lifelong revolutionist, demonstrates with excruciating detail in the astonishing book The Guillotine At Work, Marxism-Leninism was from the start a means of installing a regime of state-capitalism through a combination of ideological imposture and terror the likes of which were never before seen in history.
Unsurprisingly, it has also been convincingly demonstrated that Lenin (Robespierre to Mussolini's Napoleon), immediately prior to the outbreak of the revolution in which an excess of spontaneous expropriations by the soviets scuppered his plans, advocated the kind of totalitarian corporatism put into practice by Il Duce. The only universally canonised saint of Bolshevism was, as Maximoff points out, 'the first theoretician of fascism'.
At this point in our story, we can turn to our humble little corner of the earth where this deadly cocktail was administered for the last time in this particular form, producing effects more remarkable than any that had ever hitherto been attained. Nowhere else in the world has the Bolshevik myth produced a politician considered a hero by the presidents of both Cuba and the USA. In the person of Lord Nelson -- and the 'tripartite alliance' between Nationalists, Stalinists and Unionists he led -- the Jacobean tradition, in its particular 20th century variant which seamlessly blended vaporous proletarian rhetoric with authoritarian repression, reached its apotheosis.
The era of revolution as pure image had come of age. Prefacing an article published in Searchlight South Africa on the torture-camps where the revolutionary children of 1976 were sent to languish and die by Mandealer's friends, Paul Trewhela outlines the elements of the profound victory that could be claimed by this modern-day Holy Alliance.
"This regime of terror, extending beyond the gates of the ANC/SACP "Buchenwald" of Quadro, was a necessary element in the total practice of repression and deception which made the Anti-Apartheid Movement [AAM] the most successful Popular Front lobby for Stalinism anywhere in the world. No international Stalinist-run public organization has ever had such an influence and shown such stability, reaching into so many major countries, for so long.
In its thirty years' existence, the AAM put international collaborative organisations of the period of the Spanish Civil War and of the Stalin-Roosevelt-Churchill alliance to shame. Extending to the press, the churches, the bourgeois political parties, the trade unions and the radical, even the ‘trotskyist' left, the AAM has been an outstanding success for Stalinism, as the review of Victoria Brittain's book in this issue shows. Material presented by her as fact, without supporting evidence, cannot be taken on trust, for example this classic statement on South Africa:
'The promotion of far-left divisive splinter groups [AZAPO, PAC, etc] was also a CIA tactic.'
What can one say? The real question is not Ms Brittain. Rather, the concern is the quality of the media organs which publish her work. This kind of journalism informs the mainstream of left/liberal opinion. It is hard to imagine that there is any other region on earth, outside of southern Africa, towards which the orthodoxy of 1990 upholds so devoutly the sentiments and methodology of the Moscow Trials. Ms Brittain is its faithful exponent. O brave new world, that has such people in't."
Vital to the continued practical domination of these old the illusions about revolution has been a practice of open and covert censorship, as detailed fully in the article quoted above, which continue to this day. My own text, Whiteout, details aspects of this censorship as expressed regarding social contestation in South Africa today, and the text written by my comrade and I on responses to Lord Nelson's death by self-described revolutionaries condemns this sort of censorship regarding recent history. 'Whenever it reaches the truth, whenever it becomes the truth, science ceases to be science and becomes an object for the police -- the police are the boundary between truth and science.' As Feuerbach, who made this observation, knew all too well, there are many different kinds of cops in this world, and not all of them wear badges and uniforms.
Like all the other dominant delusions of this civilisation, the downfall of the Jacobin myth begins when people start to take literally the promises dangled in front of them, and refuse to stop when ordered to do so by those who would police the practice of truth in the service of a despicable dirty lie.
In both cases the significance obviously does not lie in the destruction itself, but in the rebelliousness which could potentially develop into a positive project going to the point of reconverting the infrastructure and machinery of production and consumption in a way that increases people’s real power over their lives. In order to progress in this positive direction, strikers will have to recognise their own activity for what it already is, follow its implications to their logical conclusions, and make their rebellion more rebellious still by making it public. Without this public consciousness of their own practice on the part of black proletarians in the streets and workplaces of South Africa, the content of the movement unfolding now before our eyes will remain trapped within the confines of 'the colonial world of land appropriation, servitude and "crimes"' defended by liberalism even as its participants continue to invent exemplary forms of action and relation well beyond the boundaries of white enlightenment. Liberal democracy is inadequate, say the rebellious proletarians of today, 'for us'; their judgement is a subjective one, for they do not yet feel the need to drag the irrational foundations of the liberal state before the forum of reason. And yet this is precisely the job of the revolutionary movement born from the rebellion of proletarians. The concern of modern revolution is nothing other than to elevate the subjective judgement of the oppressed into a theoretical and objective judgement, to transform the indirect, unconscious, and negative negation of an as-yet extremely partial (in both senses of the word) revolt into a direct, positive, and conscious negation.
As the producer of the Dialectical Delinquents website wrote in the entry for 9 March 2015 on his News of Opposition page regarding an incident in the Eastern Cape where a cop was shot, cars stoned, a road blocked, and shops (including a KFC) were vandalised during a taxi driver protest demanding tarred roads:
'In enormous amounts of movements and protests (and certainly not just in South Africa) people are angry about so much and are willing to subvert dominant normality in loads of ways, but the explicit reasons are often quite trivial. It seems that people are, on the one hand, so colonised by the need to present an apparently “reasonable” demand realisable within the logic of this illogical world that they just don’t know how to express demands outside of some often minor grievance and yet, on the other hand, their actions have nothing to do with what this society considers “reasonable”. This contradiction is fundamental, and unless an explicit class consciousness develops alongside the more obviously practical expressions of class war, each struggle is doomed to be seen as something utterly separate, and will remain incapable of communicating its real desires in a language of revolt expressing the rationality behind its actions.'
It is therefore essential not only to critique the content of a dominant order whose forms defend particular social hierarchies (be they racial, patriarchal, or whatever) but to grasp in theory and practice how the same liberal logic embodies, on the one hand:
A universal organisation of appearances which expresses a conception of freedom indistinguishable from totalitarian dictatorship
and, on the other:
A universal hierarchy of desires which expresses a conception of human life reduced to the level of an absurdly embellished but still radically impoverished survival.
Around the time of the French Revolution the most lucid and representative spokesman for the logic of liberalism, Jeremy Bentham, in his Theory of Legislation, candidly admitted that 'equality of rights' was compatible with neither law and order nor with private property:
His solution to this problem is the same as that adopted by every partisan of white enlightenment ever since: blatant hypocrisy and equivocation. Unlike almost all such people, Bentham was honest enough to admit that anybody who wants to maintain any form of authoritarian subordination and at the same time speak of 'equality' are liars. Being one such person himself, he was anxious to avoid the danger that the dispossessed might begin to take the liars literally. To prevent the possibility of unintentionally provoking the unwashed masses into realising the true implications of the liberal bourgeoisie's high-toned phrases, it was necessary to introduce a systematic estrangement of the senses -- a universally organised separation between the apparent sense of any given concept, institution or word, and the actual sense:
"To say that all men, that is, all human beings, have equal rights is to say that there is no such thing as subordination... All this is fully implied in 'equality of rights': it means either this or nothing at all. I am, of course, aware that those who maintain the doctrine, not being themselves either madmen or idiots, have no intention of establishing this absolute equality: they have in their minds various restrictions, modifications, and explanations. But, if they do not know how to express themselves sensibly and intelligibly, will the blind and ignorant multitude be likely to understand them better than they seem to understand themselves? If they are thought to proclaim licence and freedom from all control, it is but too sure that they will get a hearing."
As one of the founders of classical political-economy, Bentham could clearly explain in theory the social lie which most other servants of capital can only half-consciously practice. In The Political Economy of Things, S.Artesian describes this division of labour in relation to the recent electoral success of Syrzia, an EFF-style populist political party in Greece: 'The bourgeoisie have made a near-science of confusion. They've made a near-art of dressing the confusion in language of profound superficiality. We know when they're doing it, and they do it all the time. The near-science, of course, is political economy... The near-art, of course, is spin.' Yet the scope of the science put in the service of capitalist confusion is by no means limited to the narrow coffins of political-economy. Rather, as Feuerbach observed in his Preface to the Second Edition of the Essence of Christianity, which remains painfully accurate today: 'The normal and current tone of the times, the tone of "polite society", the neutral, anaemic tone of conventional illusions and untruths is the tone in which not only political matters -- this is quite obvious -- but also religious and scientific matters, that is, the evils of the age, are discussed. Semblance is the essence of the age; semblance, our science. In our age, however, truth is not only immoral, but also unscientific; it is the limit of science. Truth is man and not reason in abstracto; it is life and not thought that remains confined to paper. Hence, those thoughts that pass straight from the pen into the blood or from reason into the heart of man are no longer scientific truths, because science is essentially a harmless -- but also useless -- toy tool of reason turned lazy; it consists in being occupied with things that are indifferent to life and man; or even granting that it does not occupy itself with indifferent things, the fact remains that it is so useless an activity that no one will bother with it. These days, the necessary qualifications for a genuine, commendable and "kosher" scholar -- at least for a scholar whose science necessarily brings him in contact with delicate questions of our age -- are a confused head, inactive heart, unconcern for truth, and spiritlessness. [1]' Furthermore, the real practice for which this science of the false expresses the theory is far broader than mere spin, and was much better encompassed by the Situationists with the term spectacle. Newspeak does indeed occupy a primary place in the modern spectacle, but, as is well illustrated by the novel in which this term was first coined, the deliberate distortion of language only functions as one element of the regime. Doublethink, of which liberal ideology is a supreme example, also plays a primary role, as do all the other measures of political dictatorship detailed in Orwell's 1984 -- and much more besides.
The spectacle, as the material unfolding of commodity logic (which in fact is the basis of liberal logic), the real organisation of unreal appearances in the social world, involves both a political and an economic practice. The way in which both liberal as well as totalitarian politics form an inseparable unity within the economic dictatorship of the commodity was well summarised by one of the most sympathetic liberals of one of the most totalitarian-ridden continents, who adopted the voice of the Caudillo with the same eloquence by which Machiavelli adopted the voice of the Prince:
'Since there are constitutional provisions that guarantee everyone his rights, and I can not violate them, I invoke the system of "preserving the form."[2] If the constitution declares: "Thought is free," I add: "within the limits established by law"- and since the law referred to is not the constitutional provision but one that was issued afterwards, I inscribe in it the exceptions of Figaro. "Thought is free," but there can be no discussion of dogma or exposition of systems that attack morality. And who is to judge? A commission or jury named in the last analysis by the authorities. And we have the colonial "censorship" re-established under the guise of the freest institution of all, the jury. The electoral power is the only power exercised by the "sovereign people," and it exercises this power not to make the laws but to select the persons who will make them. Very well. The majority vote, then is the expression . . . of the popular will.
"The domicile is inviolable," but I violate it, adding: "save in the cases determined by law." And the "cases" are determined in the last analysis by the party in power.
"The death penalty in political cases is abolished," but I shoot prisoners because I consider that these are not "political cases" [3]; and since I am the infallible authority I declare that these political prisoners are bandits, and "the form has been preserved."
"The guarantees established by this constitution cannot be suspended." But if I have the power to declare a province or the Republic in a state of siege, authorized to do so by a "Council of State" appointed by the President, what security can a citizen have? There is discussion, the press is free; citizens come together, for they have the right of assembly; an enlightened public opinion almost unanimously clamors for reforms; preparations are made for elections that will bring to power representatives of the reform movement; and then the Executive Power declares the province or the Republic in a state of siege, and the suspended guarantees soar over the abyss of "legal" dictatorship and constitutional despotism!
We have seen that our republican constitutions bear in themselves the germ of "legal despotism," a monstrous association of words that well describes the prostitution of the law. And since despotism, being "legal," is vindicated, the result is that the sentiment of justice is erased from the consciences of men. Its place is taken by sophistry, duplicity, and intrigue, used to win power at all cost, for power legitimizes everything...'
In the above extract from America In Danger, Francisco Bilboa decries the process by which bourgeois democracy is transformed into dictatorship by the very constitutional checks and balances meant to guard against it: a denunciation which describes precisely how the bourgeoisie implemented in practice the 'restrictions, modifications, and explanations' by which Bentham sixty years earlier proposed 'equal rights' be reduced to a political form empty of all substantial social content so as to pre-empt any possibility of the unwashed masses translating such spiritless concepts from paper into reality. In a few telling phrases, these two 19th century intellectuals encapsulate neatly almost the whole spectacle of modern politics, its methods, goals and results. Conversely, the Situationists a century later described just what happens when proletarians shatter the spectacle by taking it at its word. In The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy, they outlined the meaning of black revolt in America in terms which might very well be applied to South Africa today:
'By wanting to participate really and immediately in the affluence that is the official value of every American, they are really demanding the egalitarian actualization of the American spectacle of everyday life — they are demanding that the half-heavenly, half-earthly values of the spectacle be put to the test. But it is in the nature of the spectacle that it cannot be actualized either immediately or equally, not even for the whites. (The blacks in fact function as a perfect spectacular object-lesson: the threat of falling into such wretchedness spurs others on in the rat-race.) In taking the capitalist spectacle at its face value, the blacks are already rejecting the spectacle itself. The spectacle is a drug for slaves. It is designed not to be taken literally, but to be followed from just out of reach; when this separation is eliminated, the hoax is revealed. In the United States today the whites are enslaved to the commodity while the blacks are negating it. The blacks are asking for more than the whites — this is the core of a problem that has no solution except the dissolution of the white social system. This is why those whites who want to escape their own slavery must first of all rally to the black revolt — not, obviously, in racial solidarity, but in a joint global rejection of the commodity and of the state.'
In the 20th century the Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt would synthesise the insights of the above 19th century intellectuals; unhindered by their liberal ideology, however, he could go further than them by taking their arguments to their rational conclusion. Schmitt agreed with Bentham that if the liberal slogans of 'democracy, liberty and equality', were taken seriously rather than made into empty phrases, they would be radically incompatible with both bourgeois property and bourgeois democracy. In order to guard against the dangers inherent in this contradiction between reality and appearance, dangers described by the Situationists above and demonstrated on an alarming scale in the revolutionary upheavals that threatened to overthrow Capitalism in post-war Germany at the time Schmitt was developing his theories, he advocated abolishing the pretensions and promises of liberalism altogether by pushing the process described by Bilboa to the extreme (the liberal constitution of Germany was never formally abolished by Hitler, merely suspended continually through a permanent State of Emergency). As with Bentham, Schmitt described accurately in theory what his party applied in practice.
As if to provide concrete confirmation of this purpose, the South African state used a repeated outbreak of racist 'xenophobic' pogroms in April this year as an excuse to deploy the army on the streets of the townships, many of which have effectively operated under martial law since then. The purpose and scope of this deployment immediately expanded from prevention of further pogroms to a generalised military occupation of working-class areas, with regular door-to-door raids, stop-and-search patrols, roadblocks, deportations, confiscations of weapons, drugs, and undocumented persons, and the other tasks of bureaucratic repression ordinarily allotted to the police. The length of the deployment, which was initially to have ended on 30 June 2015, has been extended to July 2016. There is every indication that this extension will be repeated on some new pretext considering President Zuma's candid remark to a group of students during an address on the judicial commission of inquiry into the Marikana massacre: "Remember you are young people … you should lead by example and not use violence to resolve problems. Otherwise the culture of apartheid that used violence to suppress people will have to be looked at again..."
Behind the contradictory voice of white enlightenment drones the frank monotone of the consistent fascist.
Bentham also codified in theory precisely that subordination of life for the sake of survival which a triumphant political-economy so dramatically began to enforce in practice.
The economic dictatorship of the commodity is just as totalitarian as the political dictatorship of the caudillo or the Party, and has historically tended to emerge in its most developed form precisely in those areas where capital-accumulation found political dictatorship no longer economical: the bourgeois revolutions that established parliamentary regimes throughout Europe and the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries, as well as the liberal-democratic ideologies which accompanied them, are early results of this dictatorship. The products of its more mature years, such as the societies that emerged from the collapse of bureaucratic collectivism in the USSR and the fall of official apartheid in South Africa at the end of the 20th century, followed the growing tendency of the most advanced economies by integrating aspects of political totalitarianism within an increasingly dogmatic free-market system. The hierarchy of desires by which this economic dictatorship subordinates human life to animal survival was, however, expressed most clearly at the very beginning, again in the ominous words of Bentham:
"Now, at the first glance, it is plain that 'subsistence' and 'security' rise together to the same height; while 'abundance' and 'equality' manifestly stand at a lower level. Indeed, without security, equality could not endure for a day; and without subsistence, abundance would obviously be an impossibility. The first two objects are life itself; the last two serve, so to speak, as the embellishment of life..."
The table-turning illogic that reduced what was hitherto always considered the meaning of life into a mere 'embellishment' while elevating what were previously regarded as merely preconditions for life into its objects only expresses the everyday reality of an already actually settled and determined social order in which human beings no longer eat to live, but live to eat. And eat they do, so copiously that in the most advanced economies obesity and its corollaries have become a far greater threat to the health of the poor than starvation. The profligate possession of junk, whether it be food or toys, qualifications or 'experiences', does not surgically excise the heart of poverty from the existence of the poor. On the contrary, it can accomplish nothing more than mere cosmetic surgery. Their appetites (culinary and cultural, soporific and sensual) have in fact risen in direct proportion to their poverty. Their poverty has increased precisely to the extent that the logic of survival, which is the logic of capital and the commodity, has colonised areas of their everyday lives which previously existed outside of it. The abundance they are permitted consists in nothing other than surplus subsistence. As more and more activities which once escaped the domination of work-money fall under the onslaught of the cash-nexus, they become themselves a means of subsistence for the beneficiaries of bourgeois 'security'. What was done for pre-capitalist purposes is now done for profit; activities once animated by a superior (albeit mystified) logic opposed to the logic of survival are now annexed by it; what were once excesses foreign to the world of alienated production are now the excesses of a world that has become wholly foreign to its producers. In the tautological economy of capital and its spectacle, survival is abundantly embellished by its own surplus, just as the answer to the political question 'who will guard the guards' is always 'more guards'.
The passage between a more or less gluttonously embellished biological survival and a fully human life -- the moment when what is 'already actually settled and determined' is changed -- the insecure emergence of novelty into an existence dominated by determinism -- the moment of revolt through which the here and now rejects the authority of the there and then -- is precisely what produces the meaning of things. "So, fundamentally," wrote the producers of Modern Teleology, "life is a quality, not exactly of things, but of meaning. Through life, this sparkle of things, through this ephemeral transcendence, through this negation of survival as the imperative necessity, the meaning of the things that bear life takes shape. By living so, by creating, by transcending, appears the meaning, not only of the things that bear life, but the meaning of totality."
Life is what gives meaning; it is the process by which meaning is born to things. Meaning does not depend on life, but on the goal -- the object -- which is itself created and proposed at the heart of life. Yet life is what “gives life” to the goal in things. This is one of its deepest differences from survival, which not only does not give life to any object, but negates and annihilates the object. 'Up till now surviving has prevented us from living.' The demands of subsistence and security chain all organisms, whether brainless bacteria or human treasure, to the uniform level of the monotonous automaton; whilst the free association of individuals, and abundance unbound from all considerations of security, raises those organisms who are able to produce them to a unique and, in the history of living things, altogether novel level. Life will produce its meaning and discover its goal in the process of revolt against an existence dominated by activities in which everything is already actually settled and determined: the miserable world of work and pastimes, capital and toys, where the monotonous production of profitable abundance permits the enjoyment of nothing but abundant monotony. The leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom will be accomplished by precisely that uncivilised explosion of practical debate by humanity on itself in which nothing is already settled and determined. This moment when the unruly assembly of singular voices takes itself as its object, when the totality and the universal, rather than the fragmentary and the particular, become the object of history: this eruption of rapture in the misery of everyday life, this joyful shower of unbridled incandescence which the voice of white enlightenment is always meant to silence: this multicoloured multitudinous discussion, this rupture with everything that exists, this existential leap propelled by the violent intrusion of the totality into history, is precisely what was meant by all those, past and present, who laugh defiantly in the face of 'death on the instalment plan' and roar before the firing squads, on the platforms of the guillotines and scaffolds, in the electric chairs, the prison cells, the psychiatric wards, the immigrant detention centres, the gas chambers and gulags: Vive La Commune! Long live the world revolution!
[1] Such are the qualifications inflicted by today's universities on today's the man without qualities: "Spiritlessness may possess the whole content of spirit, but mark well, not as spirit but as the haunting of ghosts, as gibberish, as a slogan, etc. It may possess the truth, but mark well, not as truth but as rumor and old wives’ tales. Spiritlessness can say exactly the same thing that the richest spirit has said, but it does not say it by virtue of spirit. Man qualified as spiritless has become a talking machine and can repeat by rote a confession of faith or a political recitative." (Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety)
[2] The Movement for a Democracy of Content, whose main theorist Josef Weber made some of the most valuable contributions to the revolutionary literature of his era (see, Josef Weber and Contemporary Issues by Ken Knabb) and whose South African section was active in keeping the 1957 Alexandria bus boycott within the control of the daily popular assemblies, based its theory precisely on resistance to this empty formalism.
The resolution of the social question always comes down to the question of how the wretched of the earth -- the class of individuals who, through legalised robbery in the interests of their masters, have been made homeless in the land of their birth and powerless in a world run on their own forced labour -- organise themselves in order to expropriate the expropriators. The voice of white enlightenment asserts that in the interests of present realities, which in South African means the in interests of the present exploitation of blacks, the robberies of the past must be forgiven and forgotten. To say expropriation must be accompanied by market-based compensation is to say it must not be done at all. If the poor, like the fools they are constantly taken for, are told they need to buy what rightfully belongs them, they are effectively being told to forget about ever possessing it, since by definition poor people do not have money to buy back the stolen goods claimed by the rich. As Dan Mokonyane, one of the very few to denounce this fraud as it was taking place, wrote in his 1994 book The Big Sell Out: 'This is just as crude as the spectacle of a rapist who comes to the scene of the devastation of his nefarious act to demand payment for loss of his semen and exertion.' Against the relentless aural assault perpetrated by this rapacious voice and its perpetual monologue in favour of the forces of law and order, it is necessary to say loud and clear: the liberation of everyday life is not civil affair.
3
The medium is not the message, and as important as control over the mass media maybe, control over the message in the minds of the oppressed is always decisive. This was the greatest contribution made by the black consciousness movement both in the theories of its intellectuals and most importantly in the practice of millions whose actions provided its historical confirmation. This dictatorial control over the form and content of social debate is conducted through a totalitarian censorship which is so effective as to disarm the potentially explosive practical consequences of such a discussion entirely, replacing the volatile possibilities of dialogue with with the one-way transmission of decisions already taken and the opinions about them permitted by the decision-makers and their lackeys. Within the confines of this pseudo-communication 'freedom of speech' is tolerated precisely because within it the power of speech -- of language separated both from everyday life and from the means of translation into the realm of action -- has been practically defused.
Complete control over the media by the apartheid state was powerless to neutralise the forces of subversion at work in everybody's heads, thus the false message of that state was irrefutably contradicted by the lucid language of the streets. The illusions about the permanence and omnipotence of the established order relentlessly pedalled by the apartheid state was helpless to save the voice of white enlightenment. With its back against the wall, it was forced to collaborate with black struggle celebrities and their rackets in order to save itself with illusions about the transformation of the established order.
The on-going struggles that today continue to rage through the workplaces, classrooms and streets are the second offensive in the revolutionary era that began in 1976, and, just as the first offensive had made ridiculous all the illusions of the apartheid era and its non-existent stability, this second wave makes ridiculous all the illusions about the democratic era and its non-existent radical transformation. The role of the ANC at the head of the 'national democratic revolution', the leading role of the Communist Party and the COSATU unions in the organisation of working-class struggle, the role of the 'tripartite alliance' formed by these three rackets in building 'a better life for all': who, these days, besides the lackeys of the authorities, sees such twaddle as anything other than a bad joke?
Unfortunately illusions, though no longer alive, continue to weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living; their corpses litter the soil and smother new growth until they are ploughed into the earth where their sickening rot is changed into nourishing compost. As Feurbach pointed out, 'It often happens that in actual practice we have long ago freed ourselves from a particular thing, a doctrine, or an idea, but we are far from being free from it in the mind. It has ceased to have any truth for our actual being -- perhaps it never had -- but it still continues to be a theoretical truth; that is, a limit on our mind. The mind is the last thing to become free, because it takes things more thoroughly.' An examination of these old illusions, and their origins -- as a prelude to their thorough exorcism -- remains an unpleasant necessity.
4
The historical roots of these illusions lie in the revolutionary movement that overthrew all previous social formations and replaced them with the global system of commodity-production and wage-slavery that dominates the planet today.
The most influential tendency within this revolutionary movement, not merely due to the role it played in the rise of capitalist domination but more importantly the way it was to leave such lamentable birthmarks on the revolutionary struggle to overthrow capital, was Jacobinism. The history of Haiti, from the heroic abolition of chattel-slavery by the slaves themselves, famously described by CLR James in The Black Jacobins, to the incomparably miserable conditions that have relentlessly hounded the Haitian people to this day, demonstrates something of the importance this ideology and practice has had for black people around the world.
Jacobinism is the triumph of revolution as pure appearance. It is the means by which the image of revolution strangles the real thing.
5
Behind the leader of every political party and every 'liberation movement', stands the real or potential grave-digger of the revolution. Behind every Lord Nelson lurks Napoleon. The idea that the state is something to be conquered by an elite in the name of the masses, that a political circus performed in the hallways of power by qualified specialists is an effective means to abolish the misery and powerlessness that confronts everyone every day -- these quaint notions are the children of the Jacobin revolution. They have demonstrated an astonishing resilience.Time and again disillusion and disgust sets in at the lies, atrocities and moral bankruptcy of politicians, not only the ruling ones but all those who loudly claim to oppose them only to act exactly the same the second they snatch a few scraps of power for themselves. Time and again this healthy attitude expresses itself in powerful social movements that shake these societies to their foundations with the slogan popularised in the 2001 Argentinian crises: que se vayan todos! -- they must all go! One way or another, however, people are convinced that they can't change anything by and for themselves, that some professional liars must in fact stay and pretend to change everything for them, and that they have to choose the least bad choice available to them. The voice of white enlightenment is the voice of the least bad choice. It is the voice of the Jacobin who channels revolutionary sentiment into the familiar dead-end of the familiar misery through the pretension of leading those unqualified to do so themselves into the promised land.
In moments of extreme crisis, when ordinary people have gone so far along the path of creating their own history that the conventional ideology of revolutionary Capital proves unsuccessful, an anti-capitalist version of Jacobinism is tasked with securing the safety of commodity production and wage-slavery. Such was the case during the Russian Revolution, and such was the vigour of the radical transformation taking place throughout the country that the political party tasked with smothering it could not succeed with simple anti-capitalism, but even had to resort to anti-Jacobinism. Lenin was the last possible salvation for the Jacobin tradition. His radical innovation, a two-fold deception that disguised capitalism as communism and dictatorship as liberation, lent a new lease on life to the ideology of the revolutionary bourgeoisie to such an extent that it has been able to defuse every popular uprising from then until now with one or another variant of the same operation.
Like all politicians, Lenin's job was the making and breaking of empty promises. Five years after impressing the revolutionary workers, soldiers and peasants of his country with a programme that promised the abolition of the army, the police, the government bureaucracy and the institutions of wage-slavery and feudal land-appropriation -- without which his party would never have become popular enough to seize power for themselves -- he reversed himself without blinking an eyelid, openly admitting that he never had any intention of carrying out anything he originally claimed.
“Until now we wrote programs and kept on promising. At one time that was much of a necessity. We had to present a program and to promise a world revolution. If the White guards [those he labels reactionary] inveigh against us on that score, this shows only that [they] never had any notion of how revolutions are made. We could not have started in any other way”.
As Gregory Maximoff, a former soldier in the Red Army and lifelong revolutionist, demonstrates with excruciating detail in the astonishing book The Guillotine At Work, Marxism-Leninism was from the start a means of installing a regime of state-capitalism through a combination of ideological imposture and terror the likes of which were never before seen in history.
Unsurprisingly, it has also been convincingly demonstrated that Lenin (Robespierre to Mussolini's Napoleon), immediately prior to the outbreak of the revolution in which an excess of spontaneous expropriations by the soviets scuppered his plans, advocated the kind of totalitarian corporatism put into practice by Il Duce. The only universally canonised saint of Bolshevism was, as Maximoff points out, 'the first theoretician of fascism'.
6
The era of revolution as pure image had come of age. Prefacing an article published in Searchlight South Africa on the torture-camps where the revolutionary children of 1976 were sent to languish and die by Mandealer's friends, Paul Trewhela outlines the elements of the profound victory that could be claimed by this modern-day Holy Alliance.
"This regime of terror, extending beyond the gates of the ANC/SACP "Buchenwald" of Quadro, was a necessary element in the total practice of repression and deception which made the Anti-Apartheid Movement [AAM] the most successful Popular Front lobby for Stalinism anywhere in the world. No international Stalinist-run public organization has ever had such an influence and shown such stability, reaching into so many major countries, for so long.
In its thirty years' existence, the AAM put international collaborative organisations of the period of the Spanish Civil War and of the Stalin-Roosevelt-Churchill alliance to shame. Extending to the press, the churches, the bourgeois political parties, the trade unions and the radical, even the ‘trotskyist' left, the AAM has been an outstanding success for Stalinism, as the review of Victoria Brittain's book in this issue shows. Material presented by her as fact, without supporting evidence, cannot be taken on trust, for example this classic statement on South Africa:
'The promotion of far-left divisive splinter groups [AZAPO, PAC, etc] was also a CIA tactic.'
What can one say? The real question is not Ms Brittain. Rather, the concern is the quality of the media organs which publish her work. This kind of journalism informs the mainstream of left/liberal opinion. It is hard to imagine that there is any other region on earth, outside of southern Africa, towards which the orthodoxy of 1990 upholds so devoutly the sentiments and methodology of the Moscow Trials. Ms Brittain is its faithful exponent. O brave new world, that has such people in't."
Vital to the continued practical domination of these old the illusions about revolution has been a practice of open and covert censorship, as detailed fully in the article quoted above, which continue to this day. My own text, Whiteout, details aspects of this censorship as expressed regarding social contestation in South Africa today, and the text written by my comrade and I on responses to Lord Nelson's death by self-described revolutionaries condemns this sort of censorship regarding recent history. 'Whenever it reaches the truth, whenever it becomes the truth, science ceases to be science and becomes an object for the police -- the police are the boundary between truth and science.' As Feuerbach, who made this observation, knew all too well, there are many different kinds of cops in this world, and not all of them wear badges and uniforms.
Like all the other dominant delusions of this civilisation, the downfall of the Jacobin myth begins when people start to take literally the promises dangled in front of them, and refuse to stop when ordered to do so by those who would police the practice of truth in the service of a despicable dirty lie.
7
The only law that matters is the one inside your head.
– Popular Zulu proverb from the district of Msinga
Just as the emancipation of workers from the tyranny of a production that reduces them to the appendages of machines necessarily begins with destructive sabotage, attacks on machinery and buildings, the forcible suspension of commodity production, and will have to progress through a series of steps whereby the organisation of protest against capitalist production and the relations which rule it becomes the basis for the organisation of an anti-capitalist production based on the creative transformation of whatever machinery and technology can be salvaged for the purposes of a new productive play, so too the emancipation of proletarians from the tyranny of a consumption that reduces their existence to the role of passive spectators with no control over the basic conditions of their own lives necessarily begins with destructive sabotage directed against the infrastructure and machinery of consumption, the forcible suspension of commodity circulation, and will have to progress hand in hand with the revolt against work if it is not to die the familiar death of repression and recuperation. Destruction here acts as a necessary aspect of a new creative organisation in the same way the strike, the refusal of work, is a necessary part of the process by which useless toil turns into productive play. In the streets and in the workplace, the beginnings of this process actually involve a special kind of strike. The most advanced forms of sabotage -- which involve a considerable degree of creative and playful collective self-activity on the part of workers -- aim at destroying a mode of production that deprives people of control over their work, and are designated by the term 'striking on the job'. With the wave of 'service delivery protests' now sweeping throughout the country -- which are generally not protests in favour of 'service delivery' but against the hierarchical system of miserable half-measures imposed by technocrats on powerless proletarians in the name of 'service delivery' (The Service Delivery Myth, Richard Pithouse) -- the widespread vandalism against a mode of consumption that just as certainly deprives people of control over their lives is designated by the term 'social strike'.In both cases the significance obviously does not lie in the destruction itself, but in the rebelliousness which could potentially develop into a positive project going to the point of reconverting the infrastructure and machinery of production and consumption in a way that increases people’s real power over their lives. In order to progress in this positive direction, strikers will have to recognise their own activity for what it already is, follow its implications to their logical conclusions, and make their rebellion more rebellious still by making it public. Without this public consciousness of their own practice on the part of black proletarians in the streets and workplaces of South Africa, the content of the movement unfolding now before our eyes will remain trapped within the confines of 'the colonial world of land appropriation, servitude and "crimes"' defended by liberalism even as its participants continue to invent exemplary forms of action and relation well beyond the boundaries of white enlightenment. Liberal democracy is inadequate, say the rebellious proletarians of today, 'for us'; their judgement is a subjective one, for they do not yet feel the need to drag the irrational foundations of the liberal state before the forum of reason. And yet this is precisely the job of the revolutionary movement born from the rebellion of proletarians. The concern of modern revolution is nothing other than to elevate the subjective judgement of the oppressed into a theoretical and objective judgement, to transform the indirect, unconscious, and negative negation of an as-yet extremely partial (in both senses of the word) revolt into a direct, positive, and conscious negation.
As the producer of the Dialectical Delinquents website wrote in the entry for 9 March 2015 on his News of Opposition page regarding an incident in the Eastern Cape where a cop was shot, cars stoned, a road blocked, and shops (including a KFC) were vandalised during a taxi driver protest demanding tarred roads:
'In enormous amounts of movements and protests (and certainly not just in South Africa) people are angry about so much and are willing to subvert dominant normality in loads of ways, but the explicit reasons are often quite trivial. It seems that people are, on the one hand, so colonised by the need to present an apparently “reasonable” demand realisable within the logic of this illogical world that they just don’t know how to express demands outside of some often minor grievance and yet, on the other hand, their actions have nothing to do with what this society considers “reasonable”. This contradiction is fundamental, and unless an explicit class consciousness develops alongside the more obviously practical expressions of class war, each struggle is doomed to be seen as something utterly separate, and will remain incapable of communicating its real desires in a language of revolt expressing the rationality behind its actions.'
It is therefore essential not only to critique the content of a dominant order whose forms defend particular social hierarchies (be they racial, patriarchal, or whatever) but to grasp in theory and practice how the same liberal logic embodies, on the one hand:
A universal organisation of appearances which expresses a conception of freedom indistinguishable from totalitarian dictatorship
and, on the other:
A universal hierarchy of desires which expresses a conception of human life reduced to the level of an absurdly embellished but still radically impoverished survival.
ANC Youth League deputy president Desmond Moela with women showing off their branded underwear
8
We are always accommodating to whatever has happened in the past and acknowledge the necessity of all the changes and revolutions that have occurred, but we resist with all the means at our disposal to take the same attitude to the present situation.
-- Ludwig Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future
"A single mistake in extending 'equality' too far may overthrow the social order and dissolve the bonds of society... For example, 'equality' might require such a distribution of property as would be incompatible with 'security'. Equality ought not to be favoured, except when it does not injuriously affect security, nor disappoint expectations aroused by the law itself, nor disturb a distribution already actually settled and determined... If we were to lay down as a principle that all men ought to enjoy 'equal rights' we should thereby and of necessity render legislation impossible: for the law is ever establishing inequalities..."
His solution to this problem is the same as that adopted by every partisan of white enlightenment ever since: blatant hypocrisy and equivocation. Unlike almost all such people, Bentham was honest enough to admit that anybody who wants to maintain any form of authoritarian subordination and at the same time speak of 'equality' are liars. Being one such person himself, he was anxious to avoid the danger that the dispossessed might begin to take the liars literally. To prevent the possibility of unintentionally provoking the unwashed masses into realising the true implications of the liberal bourgeoisie's high-toned phrases, it was necessary to introduce a systematic estrangement of the senses -- a universally organised separation between the apparent sense of any given concept, institution or word, and the actual sense:
 |
The proletariat, a notoriously sleepy giant caught repeatedly off-guard,
is hit in the jaw by a treacherous left jab at the hands of its own leadership.
Momentarily dazed but not yet knocked out for the count;
it sways unsteadily, reels against the ropes, sees stars,
leans forward as if to follow them but suddenly steadies itself,
turns to face the opponent, propels a gob of bloody saliva at the floor and laughs:
'I spit on all revolutionary vanguards of this planet!'
|
As one of the founders of classical political-economy, Bentham could clearly explain in theory the social lie which most other servants of capital can only half-consciously practice. In The Political Economy of Things, S.Artesian describes this division of labour in relation to the recent electoral success of Syrzia, an EFF-style populist political party in Greece: 'The bourgeoisie have made a near-science of confusion. They've made a near-art of dressing the confusion in language of profound superficiality. We know when they're doing it, and they do it all the time. The near-science, of course, is political economy... The near-art, of course, is spin.' Yet the scope of the science put in the service of capitalist confusion is by no means limited to the narrow coffins of political-economy. Rather, as Feuerbach observed in his Preface to the Second Edition of the Essence of Christianity, which remains painfully accurate today: 'The normal and current tone of the times, the tone of "polite society", the neutral, anaemic tone of conventional illusions and untruths is the tone in which not only political matters -- this is quite obvious -- but also religious and scientific matters, that is, the evils of the age, are discussed. Semblance is the essence of the age; semblance, our science. In our age, however, truth is not only immoral, but also unscientific; it is the limit of science. Truth is man and not reason in abstracto; it is life and not thought that remains confined to paper. Hence, those thoughts that pass straight from the pen into the blood or from reason into the heart of man are no longer scientific truths, because science is essentially a harmless -- but also useless -- toy tool of reason turned lazy; it consists in being occupied with things that are indifferent to life and man; or even granting that it does not occupy itself with indifferent things, the fact remains that it is so useless an activity that no one will bother with it. These days, the necessary qualifications for a genuine, commendable and "kosher" scholar -- at least for a scholar whose science necessarily brings him in contact with delicate questions of our age -- are a confused head, inactive heart, unconcern for truth, and spiritlessness. [1]' Furthermore, the real practice for which this science of the false expresses the theory is far broader than mere spin, and was much better encompassed by the Situationists with the term spectacle. Newspeak does indeed occupy a primary place in the modern spectacle, but, as is well illustrated by the novel in which this term was first coined, the deliberate distortion of language only functions as one element of the regime. Doublethink, of which liberal ideology is a supreme example, also plays a primary role, as do all the other measures of political dictatorship detailed in Orwell's 1984 -- and much more besides.
10
The spectacle, as the material unfolding of commodity logic (which in fact is the basis of liberal logic), the real organisation of unreal appearances in the social world, involves both a political and an economic practice. The way in which both liberal as well as totalitarian politics form an inseparable unity within the economic dictatorship of the commodity was well summarised by one of the most sympathetic liberals of one of the most totalitarian-ridden continents, who adopted the voice of the Caudillo with the same eloquence by which Machiavelli adopted the voice of the Prince:
'Since there are constitutional provisions that guarantee everyone his rights, and I can not violate them, I invoke the system of "preserving the form."[2] If the constitution declares: "Thought is free," I add: "within the limits established by law"- and since the law referred to is not the constitutional provision but one that was issued afterwards, I inscribe in it the exceptions of Figaro. "Thought is free," but there can be no discussion of dogma or exposition of systems that attack morality. And who is to judge? A commission or jury named in the last analysis by the authorities. And we have the colonial "censorship" re-established under the guise of the freest institution of all, the jury. The electoral power is the only power exercised by the "sovereign people," and it exercises this power not to make the laws but to select the persons who will make them. Very well. The majority vote, then is the expression . . . of the popular will.
"The death penalty in political cases is abolished," but I shoot prisoners because I consider that these are not "political cases" [3]; and since I am the infallible authority I declare that these political prisoners are bandits, and "the form has been preserved."
"The guarantees established by this constitution cannot be suspended." But if I have the power to declare a province or the Republic in a state of siege, authorized to do so by a "Council of State" appointed by the President, what security can a citizen have? There is discussion, the press is free; citizens come together, for they have the right of assembly; an enlightened public opinion almost unanimously clamors for reforms; preparations are made for elections that will bring to power representatives of the reform movement; and then the Executive Power declares the province or the Republic in a state of siege, and the suspended guarantees soar over the abyss of "legal" dictatorship and constitutional despotism!
We have seen that our republican constitutions bear in themselves the germ of "legal despotism," a monstrous association of words that well describes the prostitution of the law. And since despotism, being "legal," is vindicated, the result is that the sentiment of justice is erased from the consciences of men. Its place is taken by sophistry, duplicity, and intrigue, used to win power at all cost, for power legitimizes everything...'
In the above extract from America In Danger, Francisco Bilboa decries the process by which bourgeois democracy is transformed into dictatorship by the very constitutional checks and balances meant to guard against it: a denunciation which describes precisely how the bourgeoisie implemented in practice the 'restrictions, modifications, and explanations' by which Bentham sixty years earlier proposed 'equal rights' be reduced to a political form empty of all substantial social content so as to pre-empt any possibility of the unwashed masses translating such spiritless concepts from paper into reality. In a few telling phrases, these two 19th century intellectuals encapsulate neatly almost the whole spectacle of modern politics, its methods, goals and results. Conversely, the Situationists a century later described just what happens when proletarians shatter the spectacle by taking it at its word. In The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy, they outlined the meaning of black revolt in America in terms which might very well be applied to South Africa today:
'By wanting to participate really and immediately in the affluence that is the official value of every American, they are really demanding the egalitarian actualization of the American spectacle of everyday life — they are demanding that the half-heavenly, half-earthly values of the spectacle be put to the test. But it is in the nature of the spectacle that it cannot be actualized either immediately or equally, not even for the whites. (The blacks in fact function as a perfect spectacular object-lesson: the threat of falling into such wretchedness spurs others on in the rat-race.) In taking the capitalist spectacle at its face value, the blacks are already rejecting the spectacle itself. The spectacle is a drug for slaves. It is designed not to be taken literally, but to be followed from just out of reach; when this separation is eliminated, the hoax is revealed. In the United States today the whites are enslaved to the commodity while the blacks are negating it. The blacks are asking for more than the whites — this is the core of a problem that has no solution except the dissolution of the white social system. This is why those whites who want to escape their own slavery must first of all rally to the black revolt — not, obviously, in racial solidarity, but in a joint global rejection of the commodity and of the state.'
In the 20th century the Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt would synthesise the insights of the above 19th century intellectuals; unhindered by their liberal ideology, however, he could go further than them by taking their arguments to their rational conclusion. Schmitt agreed with Bentham that if the liberal slogans of 'democracy, liberty and equality', were taken seriously rather than made into empty phrases, they would be radically incompatible with both bourgeois property and bourgeois democracy. In order to guard against the dangers inherent in this contradiction between reality and appearance, dangers described by the Situationists above and demonstrated on an alarming scale in the revolutionary upheavals that threatened to overthrow Capitalism in post-war Germany at the time Schmitt was developing his theories, he advocated abolishing the pretensions and promises of liberalism altogether by pushing the process described by Bilboa to the extreme (the liberal constitution of Germany was never formally abolished by Hitler, merely suspended continually through a permanent State of Emergency). As with Bentham, Schmitt described accurately in theory what his party applied in practice.
As if to provide concrete confirmation of this purpose, the South African state used a repeated outbreak of racist 'xenophobic' pogroms in April this year as an excuse to deploy the army on the streets of the townships, many of which have effectively operated under martial law since then. The purpose and scope of this deployment immediately expanded from prevention of further pogroms to a generalised military occupation of working-class areas, with regular door-to-door raids, stop-and-search patrols, roadblocks, deportations, confiscations of weapons, drugs, and undocumented persons, and the other tasks of bureaucratic repression ordinarily allotted to the police. The length of the deployment, which was initially to have ended on 30 June 2015, has been extended to July 2016. There is every indication that this extension will be repeated on some new pretext considering President Zuma's candid remark to a group of students during an address on the judicial commission of inquiry into the Marikana massacre: "Remember you are young people … you should lead by example and not use violence to resolve problems. Otherwise the culture of apartheid that used violence to suppress people will have to be looked at again..."
Behind the contradictory voice of white enlightenment drones the frank monotone of the consistent fascist.
11
The economic dictatorship of the commodity is just as totalitarian as the political dictatorship of the caudillo or the Party, and has historically tended to emerge in its most developed form precisely in those areas where capital-accumulation found political dictatorship no longer economical: the bourgeois revolutions that established parliamentary regimes throughout Europe and the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries, as well as the liberal-democratic ideologies which accompanied them, are early results of this dictatorship. The products of its more mature years, such as the societies that emerged from the collapse of bureaucratic collectivism in the USSR and the fall of official apartheid in South Africa at the end of the 20th century, followed the growing tendency of the most advanced economies by integrating aspects of political totalitarianism within an increasingly dogmatic free-market system. The hierarchy of desires by which this economic dictatorship subordinates human life to animal survival was, however, expressed most clearly at the very beginning, again in the ominous words of Bentham:
"Now, at the first glance, it is plain that 'subsistence' and 'security' rise together to the same height; while 'abundance' and 'equality' manifestly stand at a lower level. Indeed, without security, equality could not endure for a day; and without subsistence, abundance would obviously be an impossibility. The first two objects are life itself; the last two serve, so to speak, as the embellishment of life..."
The table-turning illogic that reduced what was hitherto always considered the meaning of life into a mere 'embellishment' while elevating what were previously regarded as merely preconditions for life into its objects only expresses the everyday reality of an already actually settled and determined social order in which human beings no longer eat to live, but live to eat. And eat they do, so copiously that in the most advanced economies obesity and its corollaries have become a far greater threat to the health of the poor than starvation. The profligate possession of junk, whether it be food or toys, qualifications or 'experiences', does not surgically excise the heart of poverty from the existence of the poor. On the contrary, it can accomplish nothing more than mere cosmetic surgery. Their appetites (culinary and cultural, soporific and sensual) have in fact risen in direct proportion to their poverty. Their poverty has increased precisely to the extent that the logic of survival, which is the logic of capital and the commodity, has colonised areas of their everyday lives which previously existed outside of it. The abundance they are permitted consists in nothing other than surplus subsistence. As more and more activities which once escaped the domination of work-money fall under the onslaught of the cash-nexus, they become themselves a means of subsistence for the beneficiaries of bourgeois 'security'. What was done for pre-capitalist purposes is now done for profit; activities once animated by a superior (albeit mystified) logic opposed to the logic of survival are now annexed by it; what were once excesses foreign to the world of alienated production are now the excesses of a world that has become wholly foreign to its producers. In the tautological economy of capital and its spectacle, survival is abundantly embellished by its own surplus, just as the answer to the political question 'who will guard the guards' is always 'more guards'.
The passage between a more or less gluttonously embellished biological survival and a fully human life -- the moment when what is 'already actually settled and determined' is changed -- the insecure emergence of novelty into an existence dominated by determinism -- the moment of revolt through which the here and now rejects the authority of the there and then -- is precisely what produces the meaning of things. "So, fundamentally," wrote the producers of Modern Teleology, "life is a quality, not exactly of things, but of meaning. Through life, this sparkle of things, through this ephemeral transcendence, through this negation of survival as the imperative necessity, the meaning of the things that bear life takes shape. By living so, by creating, by transcending, appears the meaning, not only of the things that bear life, but the meaning of totality."
Life is what gives meaning; it is the process by which meaning is born to things. Meaning does not depend on life, but on the goal -- the object -- which is itself created and proposed at the heart of life. Yet life is what “gives life” to the goal in things. This is one of its deepest differences from survival, which not only does not give life to any object, but negates and annihilates the object. 'Up till now surviving has prevented us from living.' The demands of subsistence and security chain all organisms, whether brainless bacteria or human treasure, to the uniform level of the monotonous automaton; whilst the free association of individuals, and abundance unbound from all considerations of security, raises those organisms who are able to produce them to a unique and, in the history of living things, altogether novel level. Life will produce its meaning and discover its goal in the process of revolt against an existence dominated by activities in which everything is already actually settled and determined: the miserable world of work and pastimes, capital and toys, where the monotonous production of profitable abundance permits the enjoyment of nothing but abundant monotony. The leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom will be accomplished by precisely that uncivilised explosion of practical debate by humanity on itself in which nothing is already settled and determined. This moment when the unruly assembly of singular voices takes itself as its object, when the totality and the universal, rather than the fragmentary and the particular, become the object of history: this eruption of rapture in the misery of everyday life, this joyful shower of unbridled incandescence which the voice of white enlightenment is always meant to silence: this multicoloured multitudinous discussion, this rupture with everything that exists, this existential leap propelled by the violent intrusion of the totality into history, is precisely what was meant by all those, past and present, who laugh defiantly in the face of 'death on the instalment plan' and roar before the firing squads, on the platforms of the guillotines and scaffolds, in the electric chairs, the prison cells, the psychiatric wards, the immigrant detention centres, the gas chambers and gulags: Vive La Commune! Long live the world revolution!
[1] Such are the qualifications inflicted by today's universities on today's the man without qualities: "Spiritlessness may possess the whole content of spirit, but mark well, not as spirit but as the haunting of ghosts, as gibberish, as a slogan, etc. It may possess the truth, but mark well, not as truth but as rumor and old wives’ tales. Spiritlessness can say exactly the same thing that the richest spirit has said, but it does not say it by virtue of spirit. Man qualified as spiritless has become a talking machine and can repeat by rote a confession of faith or a political recitative." (Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety)
[2] The Movement for a Democracy of Content, whose main theorist Josef Weber made some of the most valuable contributions to the revolutionary literature of his era (see, Josef Weber and Contemporary Issues by Ken Knabb) and whose South African section was active in keeping the 1957 Alexandria bus boycott within the control of the daily popular assemblies, based its theory precisely on resistance to this empty formalism.
[3] Trotsky and Lenin, long before Stalin erected his sophisticated system on the back of their crude beginnings, justified the murder and imprisonment of revolutionary working-class critics of the Bolshevik regime precisely in this way.
