Jacob+Dlamini,+Business+Day,+Anxieties+of+the+Bourgeoisie

Business Day, Johannesburg, 21 June 2005
=Anxieties of SA’s new rich stifle call of patriotism=


 * Jacob Dlamini**

PRESIDENT Thabo Mbeki has, we all know, read what playwright Bertolt Brecht called the classics — Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Lenin.

Does he, from time to time, pick up copies of these and leaf through them to remind himself of times past, dreams deferred and innocence lost?

What does he make of passages such as the following from the Communist Manifesto: “The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has … left no other nexus between people than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’?”

Does the bit about “naked self-interest” and “callous cash payment” remind him of the “generally corrupt relationship” between former deputy president Jacob Zuma and convicted fraud Schabir Shaik? Does it raise doubts in his mind about his belief in a black bourgeoisie?

Not only has the bourgeoisie, where it has gained the upper hand, “drowned out the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation”, “it has (also) resolved personal worth into exchange value”.

What does Mbeki make of this and how does it square up with his commitment to the creation of a black bourgeoisie?

The African National Congress (ANC) has talked in the past about SA being a “patriotic bourgeoisie” but is such a thing possible? Can one ever have a class pursuing its interests without at the same time pursuing its class politics? To put the question another way, why would SA’s black elite choose to be defined by its patriotism as opposed to its bourgeois status?

There is a case to be made for a connection between corruption and the bourgeoisie, rather than between graft and patriots. The argument is that the corruption we see is a glaring expression of the status anxiety that almost always attends the bourgeoisie.

What, after all, is a bourgeois existence if not one of worry? Do I have enough money to keep up with the Zumas? Do I have enough to send my kids to the same schools as the Shaiks? Do I have enough to drive the same car as the Mbekis? Do I have enough to go on holiday? Do I have enough to keep up the bond repayments on that expensive house I can’t afford?

What are these if not vintage bourgeois anxieties?

For black people who have recently moved up the class ladder, the anxieties associated with a bourgeois lifestyle are even more acute. Look closely at the conduct of people implicated in high-profile cases of corruption and you will see that these are people driven by anxiety over their newly found but precarious bourgeois existence.

People implicated in graft tend to be those who act as if the new SA is some big mistake, some massive party to which they have been invited in error. They act as if the party is going to end soon and so they had better hoard as much as they can. These are not patriots. They do not believe in the new SA. They support the new order to the extent that it can help them make as much money as fast as they possibly can. Naked self-interest and callous cash payments define their conduct, not patriotic duty.

The idea is to loot as much as you can because you never know who will be in power tomorrow and whether they will be favourably disposed towards you. If this sounds abstract, we only have to think back to Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire and Laurent Kabila’s Democratic Republic of Congo.

Mbeki might want to think about that and the dangers that go with making the fortunes of a class — the black bourgeoisie — dependent on the fortunes of his government. What would happen to the black bourgeoisie if the ANC lost power?

There is no guarantee that whatever party replaced it would be just as keen on the creation of a black capitalist class. Mbeki knows this, I presume.

Of course, if Mbeki were to read the Communist Manifesto again, he would be doing so under circumstances very different to when he was introduced to it and the other Marxist classics.

He would also be reading it against the backdrop of personal disappointment of old friends and comrades such as Zuma.

But there are some sections of the manifesto that would still resonate with Mbeki. One of them would be: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.” The context is different but the Zuma saga shows just how easy it has been to melt all that is solid (a friendship forged in struggle), and to profane all that was holy — a struggle for justice driven by a belief in the essential goodness of humans.

The Zuma case has melted and profaned all that. None understands that better than Mbeki.


 * Dlamini is political editor.