NOW WHAT?

The Obama campaign once again put together a political ground game unparalleled in modern American political history.  The power and efficiency of the machine has been proven in battle.  It is a weapon of enormous power.  It would be a tragedy if it were once again to be mothballed, or worse still, disbanded now that Obama has run out of elections.  If this machine were kept oiled, it could be an extraordinary force for progressive change, pressuring Congress to move left, targeting vulnerable Republicans, forcing Washington to focus on issues of concern to the Left.

It would take a fair amount of money to maintain the machine, but because no election is in the offing, at least for a while, there is no limit on the amount that individuals could give to such an effort.  Surely there are a dozen rich progressives who could be tapped for a pool of one hundred million dollars or so.  That is peanuts -- indeed, it is eight times as much as Americans spend each year on peanut butter.

As the United Negro College Fund might have said, but didn't quite, a weapon is a terrible thing to waste.

WHAT HAVE I BEEN READING

While I suffered through the final days of the campaign and then luxuriated in the discomfiture of Karl Rove and his clueless collection of billionaire suckers, I was also slowly reading Willie Esterhuyse's dense, detail-filled account of his personal involvement in the three years of secret negotiations and private talks that led up to the release of Nelson Mandela and the unbanning of the ANC in South Africa on February 10, 1990.  End Game: Secret Talks and the End of Apartheid, is not well-written or well-organized, but it fascinated me because it deals with a period of time during which I was very deeply engaged with South Africa and the anti-apartheid struggle.  In this brief comment on the book, I will not try to summarize its contents, beyond indicating in very general terms what Esterhuyse tells us.  But I do want to relate it to things I was being told, in Durban, by South Africans very much on the left wing of the mass struggle.  Before I begin, let me again thank J. P. Smit, a reader of this blog who teaches philosophy at Stellenbosch University, for sending me the book as a gift.  It was very generous of him.

In order to keep this post within limits, I am simply going to assume that my readers possess a high level of knowledge about South Africa.  If there are questions, please pose them in the comments section and I will do my best to reply.

In 1987, South Africa was in crisis.  There were four interrelated centers of opposition to the apartheid system imposed and written into law by the Afrikaner-based National Party, which by that time had ruled South Africa for thirty-nine years.  The first was the "armed struggle," a military attack on the state based outside South Africa that carried out raids and acts of sabotage against targets inside the country.  Although it received support from the Soviet Union and created great fear in the hearts of White South Africans, it was in fact not terribly effective, and had been repeatedly penetrated and beaten down by the extremely ruthless and efficient state security system.  The second center of opposition was a significant group of exiled South Africans who had fled the country to avoid imprisonment and had, for almost thirty years, made lives for themselves in Europe while mounting a campaign of economic sanctions, boycotts, and political pressure designed to force the National Party to end the apartheid system.  Precisely because the old agricultural and mining economy of South Africa had given way to a modernizing industrial economy, the economic sanctions were seriously constraining the capacity of South Africa to establish and run an expanding capitalist economy, and by 1987 there was strong internal pressure from the [White] business community on the state to make adjustments that might suffice to bring about the cessation of the sanctions and boycotts.  The third center of opposition to apartheid was a large, racially diverse, growing movement inside the country, drawing principally on the African, Indian, Coloured, and White English-speaking populations, but including within its ranks a number of progressive Afrikaners.  Members of this movement were repeatedly harassed, arrested, "banned," condemned to house arrest, and killed by the state security forces and its operatives.  By the time I visited South Africa for the first time in 1986, this Mass Democratic Movement, as it was called, had grown very large, leaving the Afrikaner state more and more besieged and compelled to "circle the wagons."  The fourth center of opposition was a small group of men, by now getting well up in years, who had been tried, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964.  These men, among them most notably Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, and Govan Mbeki, had been held for decades in a prison on Robben Island off the coast near Cape Town.  It will seem strange to describe prisoners as a center of opposition, but the international fame, indeed, celebrity, that they had achieved as martyrs in the fight for liberty made their presence, and the dignity and discipline they exhibited, a dagger in the heart of the apartheidproject.  It was by 1987 well understood that a resolution of the struggle, regardless on what terms, would at a minimum require the release of the Robben Island prisoners.

In 1987, a series of secret contacts and talks was initiated between members of the exile community and Afrikaners who had direct or indirect contacts with the state apparatus.  Willie Esterhuyse, then a professor of philosophy at Stellenbosch, was tapped to participate in these talks.  Among those tapped from the exile community was Thabo Mbeki, son of the imprisoned Govan and eventually destined to serve as the second President of a free South Africa.  [It was also Thabo Mbeki, I feel compelled to observe, who by denying the nature and reality of the HIV-AIDS pandemic in South Africa during his presidency condemned countless Black South Africans to unnecessary deaths.  I can never find it in my heart to forgive him for that.]

The book I am commenting on is, above all else, Esterhuyse's detailed, very personal, highly subjective account of his interactions over three years and more with Thabo Mbeki.  What I want to talk about is not the details of that interaction, although there is much that could be said about Esterhuyse's account, but rather the nature of the struggle that served as the context for the talks that eventually led to direct negotiations between Mandela and the man who served as the last President of the apartheidstate, F. W. de Klerk. 

The document that had for forty years served as the manifesto of the demands issued by the African National Congress was the Freedom Charter, adopted by a large meeting of ANC members and supporters in 1955.  There is a great deal of uplifting and inspiring language in the Freedom Charter, but at its core were four demands for South Africa: (1)  A non-racial, universal one-person one-vote political democracy;  (2) A unitary state, in which there are no racial or national sub-groups of the population written into the laws and political structures of the state;  (3)  Nationalization of the mines and banks and monopoly industry;  and (4) Redistribution to the dispossessed population of the agricultural land seized by Whites [principally Afrikaners].

Democracy, no group rights, socialism, and land redistribution. 

These were the demands with which the ANC began its negotiations.  The Afrikaner state wanted to protect private ownership of the mean of production [for the English-speaking as well as for the Afrikaans-speaking capitalists] and Afrikaner control of the good agricultural land.  In addition, it wanted some form of Group Rights built into a new constitution to protect the small minority of Whites from domination by the overwhelming African, Indian, and Coloured majority of South Africans.

Furthermore, as Esterhuyse's account makes clear, contrary to what any sensible objective observer might suppose, P. W. Botha, and F. W. de Klerk after him [the two presidents during the lengthy negotiation process], believed until far into the process that the Afrikaners could somehow retain control of the state apparatus even in the face of the extension of voting rights to non-Whites.  Far-fetched as this may seem, it was desperately important to Botha and de Klerk for two reasons.  First, as already indicated, Afrikaners were terrified that the people they had been oppressing for so many years might do to them what they had been doing to their subjects.  But second, and perhaps even more important, by the 1980's, the South African state had become a vast welfare system for Whites.  An unusually large proportion of the White population worked in state jobs of one sort or another, frequently in sinecures in which they did precious little useful work but simply sucked at the state teat [if I may be a trifle vulgar.]  In the phrase that the American Right has invented to rationalize their political decline, these Whites had become takers, not makers.  The supporters of the National Party feared -- quite correctly, as it turned out -- that if Whites lost control of the state apparatus, many of those jobs would go to people of color.

At this point, I wish to interject a bit of personal narrative that may or may not be directly relevant to the course of the negotiations leading to Mandela's release and the establishment, in 1994, of a true South African democracy.  For many years after I founded University Scholarships for South African Students in 1990, I brought the money I raised to the University of Durban-Westville, the university originally established under the apartheidsystem for Indian students in the Natal province on the Indian ocean.  My contact there, who was my very close friend until his untimely death, was Prem Singh, a Lecturer in Politics at UDW whom I first met in 1986.  Through Prem I met and talked with members of the far-left splinter Unity Movement [who viewed Mandela as a middle-of-the-road figure who had never really embraced socialism].  Shortly before Mandela was released, Prem passed onto me what he described as a bootlegged secret document -- a revision of the original Freedom Charter.  When I read it, I was stunned to discover that omitted from it were socialism and land reform, the key economic planks in the original Charter.

Here is my interpretation of what was happening.  Mandela and his imprisoned colleagues knew that the armed struggle had failed, regardless of the hopes and exaggerated expectations of leaders of that struggle like Joe Slovo and Chris Hani.  The external economic sanctions and boycotts and the unrelenting diplomatic pressure were pushing the National Party to make some sort of deal with Mandela [if I may use him as a convenient symbol of the entire movement], but with good reason the state believed that it had the upper hand so far as military and security force were concerned.  If necessary, they could hunker down and hang onto the state by sheer force of arms for the foreseeable future, however increasingly unsatisfactory that state of affairs would be to the business interests.

So -- and this is my speculation, with only that one fugitive piece of paper as my evidence -- Mandela cut an implicit deal with de Klerk:  we will give up socialism and land reform in return for a unitary democratic state with one-person one vote.  I think the leaders of the movement recognized that that was the most they could hope to get, given their military weakness.

But this still leaves one huge question, which I puzzled over endlessly in the period between the release of Mandela in 1990 and the holding of the first democratic election in 1994:  Why would Botha and de Klerk even consider such a deal, since it would cost them their control of the state, which was not only their power base but the source of jobs for the countless Afrikaners who were their constituents and on whom they relied for their political support?  It was not hard to see why the White business community could live with such a deal.  They knew that so long as their ownership and control of the means of production went unchallenged, they could continue to make plenty of money in a Black-run state. 

I have a speculative hypothesis to offer as an answer to this question.  [This is really the reason for this entire long blog post, by the way.]   A few words of background are called for.  The Black [i.e, in South African terms the African, as opposed to Indian or Coloured] population was not unified in its opposition to apartheid.  The ANC was far and away the choice of the largest number of Africans, but in the Eastern province of KwaZulu, the ANC was opposed by a separate organization called the Inkatha Freedom Party [IFP], headed by a charismatic figure named Mangosuthu Buthelezi.  There was a long history of conflict, often very violent, between the IFP and the ANC.  The South African security forces secretly supplied weapons to the IFP and fomented violence between the IFP and ANC as a way of destabilizing the weakening the anti-apartheidstruggle.  One of the touching and pathetic features of Esterhuyse's account is his slow realization that the charges of state involvement in the violence, expressed by Mbeki and other ANC participants in the talks, were true, and that the men in the government whom he repeatedly described as honorable, thoughtful, educated individuals, were directly causing and then benefiting from the violence.

In the period leading up the 1994 elections, this IFP-ANC violence continued.  Newspaper advertisements taken out by the National Party portrayed de Klerk as an honest broker capable of mediating between the IFP and the ANC.  I believe that de Klerk actually deluded himself into believing that he could win an election in which the non-white population for the first time voted, and thus could keep control of the state in White Afrikaner hands.   This would simultaneously preserve the protected and privileged position of the Afrikaners [
group rights," as the catchphrase had it] and also keep at least some of the tasty sinecures in White hands.

Well, this is, as I say, mere speculation on my part.  Perhaps my South African readers, of whom there are a few, will weigh in with their take on this question.

 

WHILE I WAS SLEEPING

When you get to be my age, losing a night's sleep takes it out of you for several days thereafter.  While I have been stumbling around in a daze and trying to nap so as to make up what is sometimes referred to as a "sleep deficit," a vigorous discussion has broken out on this blog in the comments section.  The antagonist, or perhaps protagonist, in this discussion has been Chris, who has for several years scolded me on what he sees as my shameful star-struck admiration for Barack Obama.  He has been answered -- intelligently in my judgment -- by several commentators.  Before I move on to what I really want to talk about today on this blog -- the book about South Africa that I have just finished reading -- I would like to say just a few words about the dispute.  My remarks are mostly a response to Chris's angry rebukes, but I hope they will find an audience elsewhere among my readers.

There are two fundamental facts about political action that one must recognize and accept if one is to have any hope of being at all effective in the world.  The first fact is that each of us is born into a specific moment in history that we have not chosen and cannot change.  If I may once more quote the lovely and evocative passage from Erik Erikson's Childhood and Society, "An individual life is the accidental coincidence of but one life cycle with but one segment of history."

At the present time, the United States is a hegemonic imperial world power.  I am actually old enough to have lived through the early post-war period in which this country chose to step into the space created by the decline of the European imperial powers.  As that was happening, I and many others argued and agitated against this choice, but we lost, and so I have been forced to live the remainder of my life cycle in a time of American imperial world ascendancy.  Chris, I believe, is a good deal younger than I, so he was born into the world that I watched coming into being.  Neither of us likes or supports America's imperial adventures, but neither of us has any way of stopping them.  Some who oppose the direction of American foreign policy in the past half century and more might approve of an interventionist foreign policy so long as it intervened on the other side -- for Castro rather than against him, for Mossadegh rather than against him, for Ortega rather than against him, and so forth.  Others might oppose any imperial role for America, even if that meant simply leaving a space into which some other nation could step.  But those are idle thoughts.  Chris and I, like everyone else on the left in America today, are confronted with extremely intractable facts, the changing of which would require more political muscle than we are able at this moment to muster.

The second fact about political action is that in a nation of 310 million people, in a world of seven billion people, all effective political action requires the building and sustaining of coalitions of enormous numbers of activists who, one can be absolutely certain, will disagree fundamentally on any number of important questions.  For as long as any one can recall, the besetting sin of leftists has been their lust for ideological orthodoxy and their consequent tendency to splinter into ever smaller and more ineffectual factions.  There have, to be sure, been historical moments when weeding out those who disagree with oneself in any way can can lead to greater power rather than less -- one thinks of the Bolshevik revolution.  But this moment in America is not one of them.  So if you want to work effectively for major social change with any hope at all of success, you must learn to embrace and find common cause with men and women with whom you disagree.  When I was young, this meant working for nuclear disarmament with Quaker pacifists and Catholic activists whose religious commitments were anathema to me.  There is nothing admirable or morally uplifting about the refusal to forge workable coalitions with those who are -- so to speak -- part of the avalanche rolling down the same side of the mountain.

We have just come through a presidential election whose outcome was a good deal more progressive than any of us anticipated.  Several really admirable women have been elected to the Senate;  a wretched hollow man who would have brought in his train a nightmare of aides and appointees has been defeated.  But the election revealed, once again, that very close to half of those 310 million Americans are opposed to the changes we seek to make in this country.  That is a fact that we must confront and acknowledge, for it sets limits to what we can, in the short or medium run, hope to accomplish.

This is not the time for the left to splinter into angry factions more concerned with maintaining their ideological purity than with advancing common progressive policies. 

I can assure you with absolute certainty that if we are successful, against all the odds, each one of us will still be disappointed in what has been left undone.  The acceptance of that fact is, in my opinion, the mark of a truly serious and grown-up progressive.

I have been around a long time.  Trust me.  There are going to be some defeats ahead.  For God's sake, enjoy the victories.

FURTHER REFLECTIONS

As I continue to reflect on last night's election results, one thought that keeps returning is this:  A small number of very rich men threw a good deal of their money into the race, and bought virtually nothing with it.  I do not think one can point to a single state that went Republican because of the floods of dark money, nor a single senate race whose outcome was determined by these attempts to buy results.

These men are very rich, and they can easily afford the money they gave to various superpacs, but they are not, I would imagine, philanthropists or compulsive gamblers [even Sheldon Adelson seems not to be a gambler, even though his many billions are derived from a world-wide chain of gambling casinos.]  I have to wonder:  the next time Karl Rove approaches them for the odd million or two, are they going to open their wallets, or will they decide that that is not a very prudent use of their money?  They did not get rich, we can assume, by throwing good money after bad.

The cost effectiveness of their expenditures may have been greater in House races.  I simply do not know.  But it is striking how little they got for their money.

One reason, by the bye, is that America is a very wealthy country, overall, for all that the wealth is very unequally distributed, and a couple of billion dollars every four years is really not a great deal to spend on a presidential election.  The Obama campaign demonstrated that there is more than enough money in the hands of those to the left to fund a campaign very nicely without relying heavily on a handful of billionaires.

A second thought, or perhaps it would be better to call it a puzzlement.  Barack Obama has now run three highly visibly national political campaigns:  the campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2008 and two presidential races.  You may not like Obama,  Fair enough.  You may consider him a Kenyan socialist, or a Muslim bent upon imposing sharia law on an unsuspecting America, or a mediocre student who was foisted on the Harvard Law review by affirmative action.  Again, fair enough.  But how could anyone who is not blind imagine that he is an ineffective or incompetent campaigner?  His three campaigns have been far and away the most technically proficient operations ever mounted in modern American politics.  And yet it has been an article of faith on the extreme right that Obama is a bumbling amateur incapable of doing anything more than making a rabble-rousing speech.  It would be easy to suppose that this bizarre misperception is merely the expression of barely concealed racism, but I have a feeling something else is at work.  What it is, however, I do not know.

WHEW

Well, that was fun.  How do I love thee?  Let me count the ways:

Barack Obama joins Bill Clinton as the only Democrats since Roosevelt to win two full terms as President.

Elizabeth Warren can serve as Senator from Massachusetts for the rest of her natural life.

Barack Obama will appoint one, two, or even three Supreme Court justices.

Tammy Baldwin is the first openly gay senator in American history [but not, needless to say, the first gay senator.]

Allan West and Joe Walsh are gone.

For the first time, same sex marriage won a state referendum.

And we need never, ever again think about Mitt Romney and his entire extended, entitled family.  We need not wonder what is in his tax returns, we need not obsess about his car elevator, we need not puzzle out the more obscure bizarreries of the Church of Latter Day Saints.

Sufficient unto the day. 

Now comes the really difficult question:  What can those of us on the left do, starting now, to apply steady and effective pressure for progressive legislation and presidential action?  We have not entered the Promised Land.  We have simply managed to avoid the path to Hell.

We do not need fantasies of perfectly round islands with neatly imagined economic arrangements -- what Marx called Utopian Socialism.  We live in a nation 49% of whose voting citizens chose Mitt Romney.  That quite nicely defines the limits of the possible.  Now is the time to start building organizations, coalitions, movements that can have some hope of moving America to the left. 

But first, I need some sleep.

THERE IS LIFE AFTER NOVEMBER 6TH

I have surfed the web until I am vertiginous, I have micro-inspected every sabermetrician's prognostications, I have offered up silent prayers to a non-existent deity, there are three hours until the results start coming in, and there is nothing for it but to play endless games of FreeCell while the minutes drag by.

Tomorrow, come what may, I will say something about the tasks facing progressives and lefties in America. 

ANOTHER MILESTONE

The five thousandth comment has just been posted on this blog!  How's that for a conversation?