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RE: "For The People" (poem) >>> The Law, For It Whom?

in #poetry7 years ago (edited)

A form of tyranny has replaced the old one, you're right. But you're wrong about there being any experiment with communism in South Africa. Mandela's regime saw to it that an elite would benefit from the same old system, while the government talked social recon-everything under the sun, but none of it happened. The current president Ramaphosa worked closely with Mandela until turning to business. As a shareholder of Lonmin mine, when workers went on strike, he ordered the police to fire on them, killing close to 100 34 and injuring 78 striking miners. Socialism would have addressed the great disparities, but what has emerged is race being used as a football to placate the poor with cosmetic changes and promises that didn't materialise. What is happening now is Mandela's party is caving in to a wave of popular socialist nationalism, in a desperate effort to cling to power and continue it's system of rule by patronage. None of it good.

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I once heard the situation in South Africa described thusly:

Imagine you have been part of a football game whereby the other team had been allowed to cheat. It is now half time and you are losing 46-0. It has been announced that the game is now going to be played fairly.

So, do you simply start playing the game fairly; or do you let the team that has been cheated catch up?

At the moment, we are in the catching up phase.

Pretty powerful words in my opinion; and very hard to come up with a fair argument against it.

Over to you gentlemen :-)

Cg

I think the analogy you shared pretty much sums up the 'new dispensation' - it is the unstated roadmap given for a process of change in the 'new South Africa'. I believe South Africans have all-but accepted this dispensation, and that is at the root of our problem. It is based on an unsound analysis of our situation, it is one which was ushered in by compromises.

The ANC has always embraced the idea that our problem was a racial one and that non-racialism (the new jargon for the old idea of 'breaking the colour-bar') was the panacea to our problem. They are in an alliance of convenience with Trade Unions and the Communist Party, but in essence the ANC and it's alliance are hard-core capitalist and Nationalist. Ramaphosa himself, (a former trade unionist/'socialist'/capitalist).

If any person wonders about the South African 'wonder' - how there no bloodshed during the revolution, the answer is 'because there was no revolution'.

You see, @cryptogee - the idea of revolution in our situation is not to end up with two teams, but one team. It is only then that an individual can grow up feeling he or she is part of a nation. The teams I think the analogy makes reference to is black and white. That idea has it that when we see more people of color in the elite group/playing in the match, then we have achieved change and nationhood perhaps. This is non-racialism. It is not going to suffice because the real teams are the 70% of the nation that is landless, poor, and insecure vs the 30% enjoying varying degrees of security which are way better than the 70%. If those are the teams we are examining, the score is still 46-0 after more than 20 years of a new dispensation. The gap is widening, while the security and employment, education, health, etc.

You see, for me, the analogy is accurate but it describes a terrible situation; one where we are accepting an argument which to me is unacceptable viz. that to rectify the wrongs of the past, we should continue doing what the culprits did in the past. The game has to change, not just the players. (my apologies for the lengthy comment).

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@cryptogee,

Excellent metaphor. But he's got an excellent rejoinder too.

@trumanity,

Excellent comment. Well-written, ideas well-articulated and ... edited. I'm out-of-my-depth respecting the details you articulate about current South African politics, so, I demur.

I quick correction: I did not mean to infer that South Africa had experimented with communism.

In South Africa, like so many other African countries, one form of tyranny replaced another. Ditto the French Revolution. Ditto every experiment with Communism. Once the revolutionaries were in power, they became as bad, or worse, than that which they had overthrown.

I was drawing a comparison with other world revolutions, and the subsequent behavior of the revolutionaries, once they took power. My reference to "communism" was in reference to the Soviet Union, China, East-Bloc countries, etc.

Sir, thank you for your compliment which I think are not due to me for my error in interpreting your initial response - after reading your first response a second time, I realised that I had misread it quite seriously. You were not suggesting South Africa is an example of a communist revolution.

On further consideration, it seems less relevant that a revolution was violent one or bloodless, led by nationalism with or without socialist leanings, with an effort to insert constitutional checks and balances, etc. does it? It may be true that every revolution is led with the best of intentions, but what is it that allows the ideal to go so wrong? I am still pretty much a dialectical materialist when it comes to answering this question. The struggle never ends and if we think it has, it may be then that the greed and corruption starts to set in. Mandela in a few of his statements indicated that people ought to remain vigilant. Having some constitutional framework, a strong independent judiciary, goes some distance hopefully, to shortening that Long walk to freedom. Let's wait and see what happens in South Africa.

@trumanity,

No problem about the misread ... it happens.

Dialectical Materialist, huh? That's the heart of Marxist thought and it has proved pretty unsuccessful at predicting social or political development anywhere.

The problem with Marxism and related philosophies is that they simply can't get good with the realities of humanity. They try to reason their way into utopia using metaphors that simply don't apply to human psychology.

The ancient Greeks talked about the metaphor of the phase transformation of water from liquid to gas. You heat it, heat it, heat it with no change ... but then, PRESTO, at some critical moment, it transforms into a gas, the same molecule but with radically different properties. Marx. and the communist regimes that would adopt his ideas, loved using this metaphor to explain how societies could suddenly transform from "base capitalists" into "socialist utopias."

And yet it never happened. Anywhere.

Humans are humans and they have a stubborn tendency to "revert to the mean" (to biological imperatives) ... that's why "history never repeats, but it rhymes."

There are universal human characteristics that are hard-wired and this limits the degree to which we can change.

Leftists hate this. Their worldview is based upon viewing human beings "as they could be" rather than human beings "as they are."

You can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear.

Thanks for the reply - I see we start from diverse points of view. Yours, perhaps idealism and determinism - mine, historical materialism. I don't believe we are born as sows ears, our conditions turn us into that and can equally have us become silk. I have reached this conclusion from seeing how those born into privilege are all-but-guaranteed to live lives of comfort, while those born into poverty are condemned to stay there regardless of how hard they attempt to get out. It is these conditions which lead to revolution - ask the Americans living under British rule about that - it become insufferable, they revolted - Revolution isn't a bad word for me, but each revolution can be judged in terms of history and the gains which were achieved for the society as a whole.

I have really enjoyed the exchanges, SIr - and look I forward to many more.

@trumanity,

I am a Canadian (so still part of the British Commonwealth) and so I learned a different perspective on the causes of the American Revolution ... although to be fair, Americans scholars have become a lot more honest in the past 30 years.

Americans WERE NOT living in intolerable conditions under the British. Even the famous "Tea Tax" that helped spark the Revolution, left Americans paying less for Tea than Londoners.

What drove Americans nuts, and rightly so, was lack of direct political representation in the British Parliament. In this sense, they were "second-class citizens."

To be fair to the British, the logistical nightmare of having direct political representation for colonies 2-3 weeks (in the best-case-scenario) away by sailing ship, would have been insoluble.

Mercantilism also played a big part. By restricting Americans from trading with non-British entities severely inhibited their economy ... leading to dramatically different economic interests and massive law-breaking (smuggling).

With respect to the "cow's ear" thing, let's be careful about making moral inferences based upon singular analogies.

I do not believe humans are born being "sow's ears." I believe human beings are born being human beings ... and that entails a lot of hard-wired biology that cannot be overcome with political platitudes.

People work harder for their own self-interests than they do for some nebulous concept of the State. "Power Corrupts, and Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely." If you accept these premises about human beings, as I do, you design a dramatically different society than that envisioned by Marx.