A few quick thoughts (I'm a dad now with a one-year-old at home alone) on this article by @ConCaracal in response to @ChrisRoper's article Link: https://www.businesslive.co.za/fm/features/2020-10-15-eff-and-afriforum-two-sides-of-a-coin/ https://twitter.com/FinancialMail/status/1319570370618363904

First off, it's notable that @Afriforum has new young intellectuals making the case for them. Afrikaner politics have been lacking intellectual heft for decades.

But (and here I agree with @ChrisRoper) they are in the thrall of American politics, (ironically like black SA). 2/

. @ConCaracal's assertion that SA's commentariat (and the government) ignores legitimate grievances, and that the Senekal protest was a result of that, I agree with.

But I was rolling my eyes so much it hurt, at his assertion that SA has experienced a lurch to the left. 3/

Way back in 2001, I remember a story, in the Cape Times, I think it was. It was not prominent, on page 2 I think. There had been xenophobic murders. It provided context that in 1998 year an NGO counted 27 xenophobic murders on the Cape Flats. People were thrown off trains. 4/

A few years later aBahlali Basemjondolo, a genuinely left organisation, that campaigned against poverty and ANC corruption in KwaZulu Natal, had some its leaders assassinated. If you have not heard of that, well it happened. 5/

South Africa has been described as the protest capital of the world.

Apparently, over 200 of them, per year, that are violent. And the vast majority of them are not covered by the media *at all*.

(To be continued - apols - will post the rest in one update!) 6/

My point? To the media & commentariat, who & what matters most in South Africa has shifted from the apartheid era's whites in general, Afrikaners in particular (but a broad geographic spread) - to those with some money, (particularly in the big cities). 7/

I agree with @ChrisRoper on another point. EFF and @Afriforum are in a sense a flip side of the same coin.

But what exactly that thing is they have in common, we probably don't agree on. (Side note: I already regret stepping into this debate, this is going to be looong.) 8/

To Chris they are "playing the same game, posturing for profit and pushing violence, that Viagra for the revolutionary who can’t get it up any other way."

Silly displays-of-guns-for-likes by non-members does not make @afriforum guilty of "pushing" violence. 9/

But what EFF and Afriforum do have in common is this I think:

Their supporters feel unseen and are craving dignity - that the new SA has failed to provide.

So what's the deal here with farmers and being unseen?

10/

The average farmer is not only more likely to be murdered than the average South African, but also more likely than the average member of the police.

Some argue like Chris does that this is just general crime born out of desperation. 11/

Farmers, after all, live isolated, many of them are old and easy prey for criminals. In many cases this no doubt is true.

I will return to this argument.

12/

But first the allegation by @ConCaracal (first articulated in the US) that South Africa has moved so dramatically to the "left" that reasonable people and nuanced positions, now are ostracised.

South Africa's race obsession has warped what left and right means.

13/

A defining and core element of left thinking is that class matters, race does not, particularly ideas that push race as some "fixed" and unchangable category.

14/

It is not, incidental, that the furthest left candidate in the US election, Bernie Sanders, did not get the same level of support from black voters as the centre-left Biden.

Sanders was explicitly accused of minimising the experience of black Americans, foregrounding class. 15/

Similarly, but less obviously, the Corbynites in the UK, were less concerned with diversity, than new Labour. What matters fundamentally, is the economy, not facile representation.

Get that right and the rest sorts itself out, is the idea.

16/

Meanwhile, it was David Cameron's Tory Party, that trumpeted diversity. The only major achievement was legalising gay marriage.

Not mentioned by @ConCaracal, but that's often pointed to: what about the impact of cultural studies, the Frankfurt school, 'cultural Marxism'?!

17/

Let's start with the Frankfurt school of critical theory fame. A diverse group of thinkers with various levels of loyalty to Marxist theory, they have this broadly in common. That Marx's theory failed to describe modern capitalism.

18/

Adorno, for example, criticised what he called the "culture industry" and music like jazz and pop which made capitalism seem acceptable. (He was right by the way. Without capitalism, we would have no jazz and rock. )

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Adorno argued that the low mass culture capitalism produced (think Jerry Springer), mass media, made it easy for the population to be manipulated and docile, no matter how bad their economic circumstances. It might lead to the US electing a fascist (kind of prescient).

20/

Walter Benjamin on the other hand wrote about fashion, arcades (shopping malls), city planning and aesthetics in general. Habermas, still alive, is concerned with the possibilities of rational deliberation in modern institutions. The so-called public sphere.

21/

The claim that is made, that in academia in particular, left theory is used to silence debate, made by people like Jordan Peterson, is not traceable in any discernable nevermind substantial way to the theories of the Frankfurt school.

22/

The funny thing is Marxist thinkers themselves are often the most critical of our obsession with identity.

In the dock is Cultural studies, from which critical race theory springs. It is a far more recent school of post-modern thought. Marxists hates postmodernism.

23/

Here is Marxist theorist Terry Eagleton:

"The discourse of cultural studies is itself strikingly exclusive: by and large, it deals in sexuality but not socialism, transgression but not revolution, difference but not justice, identity but not the culture of poverty."

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He goes on: "As Marx points out, no mode of production in human history has been as hybrid, diverse, inclusive and heterogeneous as capitalism, eroding boundaries, collapsing polarities, merging fixed categories and pitching a diversity of life-forms promiscuously together."

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It is, weirdly, one thing that classical Marxism and liberalism has in common.

To Marxists materialism - the economy - matters above all. To liberals, we are all disconnected individuals.

Questions of identity and culture do and should not matter for politics.

26/

But obviously, and Afriforum knows this more than most, culture and identity does matter a great deal. It shapes everything including the economy.

I'd argue that rather than see Rhodes must Fall, and "decolonisation" as a threat, it is, in fact, a kindred spirit.

(TBC)

27/

A few years ago some were no doubt scandalised that at Wits Ruth First lecture, the topic was decolonisation (First was a prominent Marxist). All three speakers that night did not speak about the economy, they spoke about identity. 28/

Speakers mentioned how by how aspiring to be coconuts (black outside white inside) how alienated they had become because they no longer could speak their mother tongues well. How uncomfortable they felt in 'white-spaces' like Wits and UCT. 29/

I remember the first time I went to UCT, even for an Afrikaner brought up in Durban, I felt like a duck out of water myself. It amazed me then, the Rhodes memorial proudly displayed at the university, I knew the history. What he had done to black AND Afrikaner South Africans. /30

Two years later, and Ugandan academic Mahmood Mamdani was asked to give the prestigious lecture at UCT, on the topic of decolonisation. It elicited gasps and laughter. Mamdani said this /31: https://twitter.com/wildebees/status/918396727182454784

To be continued.

My argument is making a “Kaapse draai”. Hopefully I manage to pull all these threads together at the end.

My point is that what @ConCaracal and @afriforum describes as a move to the left, is a phenomenon which transcends left and right, namely a struggle for recognition. /32

Some call this identity politics, or nationalism. It’s not about material wealth per se, but it’s often related to that. And it is something Afrikaners themselves have done a lot of in the past. In fact, many Afriforum members would not be relatively well off, without it. /33

There is no major “left” party in SA. If you look at what they do, rather than say, the ANC is not a classical movement of the “left”. To be sure, the actual South African left, Marxists like Patrick Bond, regularly accuse the ANC of being neoliberal. It’s not that either. /34

So what is it? The ANC is a classic organisation practising Neopatrimonialism. The ANC’s professed policy of a National Democratic Revolution is entirely malleable and reinterpreted to the exigencies of the particular time. So in 1994, with cadres (like Ramaphosa) in line to /35

...jump into bed with big business and get filthy rich, the NDR was interpreted to mean things like agreeing with the DP (DA forerunner) on an independent Reserve Bank (it wasn’t under the NP), loosening capital & trade controls, dropping taxes. /36

Two decades later, with business hurting and capital flight rife, and cadres installed in all levels of the state, the last remaining spigot is the state itself. Now that same NDR is being reinterpreted, dressed in left rhetoric to justify what’s plain theft. /37

Meanwhile, parts of the economy is kept private where it suits the looting, Stats SA no longer measures poverty, and large amounts of government worked are outsourced to private companies of cronies. Some left government this. (To be continued) /38

So I said I will return to this argument. A lot of the murders on farms are no doubt motivated by crime. But, if one bothers to read the details of some of them, the levels of sadistic violence and brutality belies that. /39. https://twitter.com/wildebees/status/1319858625565872128

But even without that aspect, it is worth noting the following. The vast majority of homicides in South Africa, the perpetrator and victim know each other. Farm murders, as I suspect is often the case with xenophobic murders, are outliers in this respect. 40/

Another useful way to look at this is to compare with what happens elsewhere. In the UK the leader of the opposition Labour party, Corbyn, was severely and continuously criticised for not vigorously stamping out anti-Semitism in the party. 41/

There has been a thorough investigation into allegations. And numerous instances were found where Jewish members of Labour received racial slurs online, some instances where insults were made at Labour Party meetings, as well as general pronouncements, said to be Anti-Semitic. 42

Yet there has not been one account of physical assault. The media none the less relentlessly reported about it, and called out instances where action was not swiftly taken against perpetrators. Corbyn's Labour was roundly condemned as anti-Semitic. 43

Britain is remarkable for its low levels of violence, and South Africa for the exact opposite reason.

But what's even more remarkable, is that the South African media does not energetically focus on the incendiary language about farmers and Boers by political leaders. 44/

No doubt, some of the xenophobic killings in South Africa also are at least part motivated by economic desperation. One rarely (perhaps too rarely) sees our media or commentariat making that case in public. 45/

There are other odd examples, where South Africa's otherwise progressively-minded media and academics have seeming inexplicable blind spots. The recent presidential advisory panel of land reform report is one such example. 47/

The report tries to sketch the historic context, as one should, as land marks emotive questions about identity and belonging like few other parts of the economy do. Yet it was so simplified that it erases much of Afrikaner history 48/ https://twitter.com/TheoDJager/status/1155470179398295553

The report, when talking about the history of farming talks of a catchall category 'white'. But is that accurate?

No.

In 1938 87% of farms were owned by Afrikaners. But only 3% of manufacturing, 1% of mining, 8% of commerce. 49/ https://twitter.com/wildebees/status/1155709386859458562

So in the last part of this thread, I will talk about the elephant in the room. That thing South Africans never talk about, and which I think feeds into much of our current political malaise.

50/

Pierre Bourdieu, a french sociologist has a theory about what he calls the "social silence". In the FT Gillian Tett, wrote an excellent piece on why the financial industry, did not notice the imbalances that built up in the financial system, before the crisis in 08. 51/

Offering Bourdieu's theory as an explanation she observed "that elites in a society typically maintain their power not simply by controlling the means of production (ie money), but by dominating the cultural discourse too (ie a society’s intellectual map)." 52/

To understand South Africa, like the financial system, we need to "start thinking more about power structures, vested interests and social silence."

To Be Continued 53/