Make+institutions+work,+Tweedie,+Letters,+M+and+G

Letters, Mail & Guardian, Johannesburg, September 23 2005
=**Make institutions work**=

Christopher Caudwell, in Studies in a Dying Culture, picks on Rousseau to expose the fallacy in the idea that human beings lose their freedom because of institutions. “Unfortunately, not only is man not good without institutions, he is not evil, either. He is no man at all; he is neither good nor evil; he is an unconscious brute,” Caudwell writes.

Martin Legassick (Letters, September 16) has given a new spin to the liberal and neo-liberal illusion identified with Rousseau.

It is the people who struggle outside structures, he declares, who are the real democrats. The institutions brought by national liberation are like Rousseau’s “chains” to him (man is born free but everywhere in chains).

Legassick hates fixed institutions in the same way that Margaret Thatcher hated “society” and Ronald Reagan hated “big government”.

Caudwell was right and Rousseau was wrong. Human beings can only achieve freedom through institutions. Legassick is wrong to call for a retreat from institutional democracy.

And he is equally wrong to accuse Jeremy Cronin of being blind to its deficiencies. Cronin has conspicuously and frequently warned against the “hollowing” of our new institutions.

Legassick’s argument gets progressively weaker as he approaches his bottom line. It becomes clear that what he really wants is the break-up of the alliance and for the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions to start all over again without the African National Congress.

Let’s pretend that could happen. Sooner or later, we will arrive back where we are now — with a whole lot of new institutions (and with the next generation of Legassicks denouncing them from the sidelines).

The problem is to take democracy forward from here. Running away from mass institutions, and calling for others to do the same, is no good.

Legassick should rather get involved in the people’s structures and help to give them more life. –


 * Dominic Tweedie, Johannesburg

From: http://www.mg.co.za/articleflat.aspx?area=mg_flat&ArticleId=10182**