Umsebenzi+Online,+Vol+5,+No.+58,+21+June+2006

Umsebenzi Online, Volume 5, No. 58, 21 June 2006
In this Issue:


 * Red Alert:**


 * **Petty bourgeois intellectualism breeds anti-intellectualism**


 * **SACP Statement on the ANC’s response to our Discussion Document.**


 * //Red Alert://**

=Petty bourgeois intellectualism breeds anti-intellectualism=


 * By: Blade Nzimande, General Secretary, SACP**

Over the last year South Africa has witnessed an intensified debate mainly around the role of intellectuals in South Africa’s transition to democracy. We are also witnessing the emergence of a new category of intellectual, the ‘independent analysts’, and this phenomenon has further been spurred on by the matters relating to the Deputy President of the ANC, Cde Jacob Zuma. In recent months the public emergence of the ‘Native Club’ has further put the spotlight on the role of intellectuals in South Africa’s transition to democracy. Most recently, this issue comes to the fore as the SABC News Division is alleged to have blacklisted some commentators from participating in its programmes.

Let us first start by clarifying what our understanding of intellectuals is. To many people intellectuals are normally associated with university trained, highly qualified people, whose role to grapple with ideas, analyse and produce documents and papers. To us as the SACP these are only one type of intellectuals, which in our Marxist tradition we have normally defined as ‘traditional intellectuals’ – formally trained intellectuals.

There is another group of intellectuals that normally hardly feature in the major columns of our newspapers, and usually do not produce papers and documents, but daily articulate, analyse and interpret the experiences of their constituencies. These we normally refer to as organic intellectuals. Such intellectuals can be organic intellectuals of the capitalist class or of the working class and the oppressed.

The South African revolution has produced many such organic intellectuals, some of whom either have had very little or no formal education at all. Amongst these one can count the likes of Walter Sisulu, Moses Kotane, Moses Mabhida, Ray Alexander, Dora Tamana, Jacob Zuma, Babini, Stephen Dlamini. The working class also have its own organic intellectuals, a Zwelinzima Vavi for instance. Many of these have been trained in the trenches of struggle and through informal political schools of the liberation movement. These have ranged from the SACP night schools of the 1940’s and 50’s, ANC political education in exile, the underground and Robben Island, to, for example, the contemporary joint political schools and socialist forums of the SACP and COSATU. These have made a fundamental contribution to the liberation and reconstruction of our country, almost irrespective of what many traditional intellectuals have been doing or saying.

Intellectual work is of fundamental importance to any revolution, and it is something that must be defended, nurtured and encouraged, because, as Lenin said, there can be no revolution without a revolutionary theory and by implication its own revolutionary intellectuals. In many ways it is a pity that the voice, analysis and wisdom of these organic revolutionary intellectuals are hardly covered by the mainstream media. Of course as communists we understand that capitalist media would only be interested in promoting certain views that accord with the interests of elites.

As the SACP we welcome these debates about the role of intellectuals. Suppression of intellectual activity and critical enquiry is the hall mark of dictatorships. We all know that the biggest casualties of fascism were the intellectuals and free intellectual enquiry. As part of the international communist movement since our formation in 1921, we readily admitted from the 1980’s to some of such behaviour within the ranks of the communist movement itself, including the anti-intellectual strands of Stalin and Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

As the SACP we do not believe that intellectual enquiry is neutral or value free, contrary to what some of the traditional intellectuals claim. In our last edition we for instance noted the developing convergence between the aspirations of the middle classes and the bourgeoisie (black and white), and the ideas increasingly being articulated in significant sections of the mainstream media. Even the idea of ‘independent’ analysts is in many respects a misnomer, since in class societies, intellectuals tend to express the interests of this or that class, including their own middle class interests, but often couched as ‘objective’ or ‘independent’.

However the main points we want to make in this article is that there is a creeping danger among sections of our intellectuals, through some of their pronouncements and paradigmatic assumptions, of creating a climate of anti-intellectualism.

Just to cite some of the more explicit manifestations of these dangers. In his column ‘Out to Lunch’ (16 April 2006) by David Bullard, columnist of the Sunday Times, talking about Cde Jacob Zuma and ‘his supporters’, had, inter alia, this to say:

“He (Zuma) grew up without a father and his mother was employed as a domestic worker in Durban, causing him to spend most of his formative years moving between Zululand and the surburbs of Durban.

“As a consequence of this deprived childhood the young Zuma received no formal education

“His (Zuma) appointment in 1994 as MEC of Economic Affairs and Tourism for the KZN provincial government obviously wasn’t based on his grasp of economic principles. In fact it’s quite possible that poor Jacob struggled to understand what was going on during the meetings

“But politics is politics and you never turn down the offer of a job just because you haven’s a clue what you’re doing. If that were the case there would be an awful lot of unfilled Cabinet positions”

Then Bullard crowns his argument with the following:

“Despite his many tribulations, they [Zuma supporters] still regard him [Zuma] as a future president. That’s what happens when you hand democracy to people who can barely write their own names.”

We are not here talking about the Zuma matter, but just wish to point out the dangers in some of our intellectual practices promoting anti-intellectualism through elitist, petty bourgeois intellectualism. What Bullard is essentially despising and treating with disdain is the lived reality of millions of South Africans who also ‘grew up without a father’ (either dead or a migrant worker in the cities) and whose mothers are employed as domestic workers. These are the South Africans who fought to bring about the democracy we all enjoy today.

Apart from the clearly racist tone of his column, Bullard is treating with complete insensitivity the experiences and sufferings of millions of black South Africans.

I was however even more disappointed when Jacob Dlamini, a columnist of **The Business Day**, referring to the Zulu spoken by Cde Zuma, wrote in **The Weekender** (15 April 2006) that:

“The Zulu that I speak is fairly eclectic, with liberal borrowings from Afrikaans, Xhosa and everything in between. Zulu A, on the other hand, is the Zulu that began and ended in the classroom for me. It is formal Zulu, with nary a click out of place

“If Zulu A carries any political baggage, that would be an untidy nationalism built on the fiction of purity. In other words, Zulu A is the kind of Zulu that seems to exist in spite of modernity. But it is also the kind of Zulu that one associates with war. It is the kind of Zulu whose cadences I hear when I think back to the civil war that East Rand townships lived through between 1989 and 1995. It is the Zulu spoken by men with red bands tied around their heads, marching up and down our streets, shouting ‘Usuthu’ and hacking, burning and shooting everyone in sight”

Whilst one should not carelessly dismiss Dlamini’s experience with what he calls ‘Zulu A’, this illustrates the extent to which the petty bourgeois ‘modernity’ articulated in this piece of writing has the potential of breeding anti-intellectualism amongst the mass of the people of our country. How could it be that Dlamini doesn’t know that the Zulu he despises, was also the Zulu of those of our cadres who defended our people from these very same marauding ‘men with red bands’ in KwaZulu Natal, and that it was also the Zulu of Harry Gwala?

The way in which some African intellectuals are disparagingly and disdainfully treating African languages, as ‘things’ that exist ‘in spite of modernity’, is indeed deeply disturbing. It also points to the dangers of petty bourgeois, elitist intellectualism that looks down upon the majority of our people, defining them as outsiders to this modernity, modernity only understood by these intellectuals! Yet they do not tell us what this ‘modernity’ is. We however suspect that deep down they know that it is the ‘modernity’ of brutal capitalist exploitation, large scale retrenchments, casualisation and poverty. They surely also know that it is a modernity built on the blood and sweat of the very same workers and the poor they treat with disdain. They praise this modernity because over the last twelve years it has delivered a handsome post-apartheid economic dividend for them.

Then it is the turn of a certain Professor Achille Mbembe, in **The City Press** of 4 June 2006. He likens ordinary people to a savage and uninformed lot blindly following a ‘prophet’ leading them to self-destruction. He also urges us to embrace a ‘modernity’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’ as the only way forward for our country. At least he is quite forthright that this ‘modernity’ must exclude the SACP and COSATU and the ANC Youth League. In other words, this modernity must be a space populated and hegemonised by the petty bourgeoisie and its ‘rent-seeking’ practices.

As we have said before, most of the media is increasingly incorporating this modernity into its own paradigm in the manner in which news stories about the working class and the people are covered, with their legitimate struggles and aspirations dismissed as ‘populist’. This is, in essence, the (re)creation of the same world of colonialism and apartheid, where the mass of our people were hidden in the kitchens as domestic workers, in the mines as mineworkers, and in the townships and far flung bantustans, far away from the centres of ‘modernity’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’. Except the difference now is that this ‘cosmopolitan’ world is occupied not only by the white elite, but by the black elite as well. In this ‘new modernity’, our people are only useful in so far as they provide the voting fodder to sustain a ‘modernity’ that excludes them and their interests.

Variations of the same themes are also increasingly found in much of the commentary by the emerging layer of ‘independent’ analysts, whose intellectualism is of an elite variety – a petty bourgeois intellectualism. We are raising all these examples because of the dangers that this kind of intellectual practice is likely to breed anti-intellectualism amongst the people.

By raising these issues we are by no means saying that our own cultures, languages and other practices must not be subjected to ongoing critical and intellectual scrutiny. But in doing so we need to guard against elitism, and rubbishing our people as ignorant, and treat them with disdain for not being educated. How different is this from apartheid?

All this underlines the importance of the efforts of the SACP and other progressive forces in fostering, nurturing and producing left, especially black, intellectuals who prioritise the interests of the workers and the poor. The only guarantee to consolidating and deepening a people’s democracy must be renewed efforts to produce left-wing intellectuals, especially organic intellectuals for the workers and the poor. This is also the only way to defeat the dangers of anti-intellectualism!

=SACP Statement on the ANC’s response to our Discussion Document=

The SACP Politburo held a four hour bilateral meeting with the National Working Committee of the ANC Monday 19 June 2006 whose aim was to discuss the challenges facing the national democratic revolution and the respective roles of our formations in this regard. The SACP formally tabled and presented its Central Committee Discussion Document on its relationship to state power and possible future electoral options.

The SACP welcomes this engagement and the planned further bilateral which is to take place within the next four weeks to continue these discussions. We also welcome the fact that our allies are engaging with our document, and the ANC presented its own initial response to our document at this bilateral. We of course do welcome critical engagements with our document, including disagreements with it.

We also agreed at the bilateral that we should try by all means to avoid debating these important matters and our respective documents through the media. The SACP is strongly committed to this. However for this debate to be carried out in a principled, comradely and constructive manner, we only wish to make the following observations and clarifications, as they are already in the public domain:

We are rather disturbed by the tone and thrust of the ANC response to our document. We had long agreed to a certain set of protocols in the Alliance for purposes of engagement, including the fact that in our engagements we should not question each other’s bona fides. The calling into question of the credibility and intentions of the SACP leadership is completely unacceptable and unwarranted. We wish to reiterate the importance of conducting debates in a manner that respects the integrity of all our organisations and their leaderships. This in fact serves to confirm what our discussion document points to - the emergence of a dominant project within our movement, whose style of engagement seeks to delegitimise critical debates and relies on labelling rather than substantive and comradely engagement.

The ANC response also tends to focus on the intentions of our discussion document in a conspiratorial fashion rather than engaging the substantive issues raised therein. For instance, instead of substantive engagement with the issues the response attributes our document and the issues it is raising to ‘opportunistic infiltration’ of SACP structures, ‘part of it possibly aimed at destabilising the Alliance as a whole’, ‘where the ANC cannot launch branches’, but ‘the SACP and YCL has been able to launch branches’. Debating through such innuendos and insinuations is foreign to the traditions of comradely debates within our movement, and it doesn’t do the image of all our formations, individually and collectively, any good.

We also emphatically reject the unfounded and untruthful allegations about mysterious ‘donor agencies’ funding the campaigns of our Young Communist League. The campaigns of the YCL are funded from the same pool of funds raised by the SACP, principally through its membership levies and our collective fundraising campaigns. The YCL is not funded by any donor agency.

The tone of the document seems to be a reflection of the mindset of the author of the document than a substantive engagement with its contents. The SACP remains hopeful that, as the ANC Secretary General said at the time of the release of our document, we are still going to have a principled and honest debate on these matters guided by Alliance protocols. We remain committed to open, frank but comradely debate to strengthen our Alliance, and we look forward to continued engagements within our Alliance structures and through our internal publications.


 * Issued by:**

Malesela Maleka SACP Spokesperson Tel: 011 339 3621 Fax: 011 339 4244 Mobile: 082 226 1802 Email: **malesela@sacp.org.za**