The Question of Violence: Part II

South Africa and violence

Apartheid was subjectively and objectively violent. While all of the subjective violence, the deaths, the torturing, the disappearing, the army shooting in our townships, the dompass, have all been done away with the blatant reality of Apartheid’s objective violence remains. It is an objective violence that is real in its symbolic, systemic forms as well as having been normalised.

Even those who continue to suffer from racism, sexism, poverty, exclusion and lack of opportunity have been made to believe, by the pacifists within our country, that things are better now or, even worse still, that things were better under Apartheid. Don’t bring up the past, these pacifist exclaim. We have had freedom for 18 years, they remind us; whilst all along the objective violence remains intact.

Recently, on the occasion of his birthday, Comrade Mandela was criticised by some for being a “sell-out”. No doubt, many continue to believe that the decision to negotiate a settlement with the Apartheid regime was an incorrect one. Given that as early as the 1980’s “the talks about talks” were initially facilitated by big (White, Western) business in South Africa, one can understand why then already a distinction was made between political and economic emancipation. Are we surprised then as to who those were who led the Class Project of 1996?

Economic emancipation of the majority of people in South Africa, despite the gross injustices of the past and the twins of capitalism and Apartheid, was sacrificed on the altar of majority rule, human rights (excluding economic ones of course) and democracy. Then already political freedom was separated from economic emancipation in South Africa. To have separated these two would have been like negotiating a peace settlement in the Middle East, allowing for Palestinians to have East Jerusalem as their capital but not allowing Palestinian refugees to return to Palestine. Political and economic freedoms are intertwined and both remain at the heart of objective violence in South Africa today.

Egyptians, after the toppling of Hosni al-Mubarak, soon realised that their challenge was not just the toppling of one man. It had to be a toppling of the entire system. Most of those who participated at the forefront of the revolution in Tahrir Square would today question whether participating in a political system that had at its centre a state that was fundamentally designed to exclude and serve only the interests of the ruling elite, including the military.

In the early 1990’s, we thought that if we simply overthrew White minority rule, introduced democracy and replaced the Broederbond’s cadre deployment with our own that we would be able to use this Apartheid state apparatus; a state designed to exclude the majority of our people. We thought that if we transformed this state that it would miraculously act in the majority’s interest, especially the favour of poor people. As Marx and Engels warned, we had to replace the entire sinking ship all together.

As a result, the objective violent Apartheid state remains intact. It is a state that serves the minority, now who can afford it, Black and White. It is a state that excludes the majority in how it operates and prescribes rather than involves people in every single step of decision making. It is not a socialist state and it is not a democratic one. As before 1994, the Apartheid state apparatus remains a breeding ground today for corruption, inefficiency, ineptness and non-accountability.  

The response therefore to this continued state of objective, bourgeois violence is the subjective violence of the proletariat. Whether it is workers at Impala mine, students protesting on the campus of Walter Sisulu University, scuffles between DA marchers and Cosatu affiliated workers, crime in general or more importantly the on-going protests within townships and locations, thus far been term as “service-delivery protests”, these are all forms of the violence of the proletariat in response to the objective violence.

This subjective violence is in our language when we engage each other and hurl insults or when we make demands in the Western Cape, attaching words such as “ungovernable”. Whoever initiates these acts of subjective violence are primarily those who suffer from the objective violence of our society and are therefore only responding to it in the form of subjective violence.

A violent future?

As members of the Mass Democratic Movement it is therefore important that we be hesitant is simply condemning (subjective) violence. We must understand that these are justifiably the reaction to an objective, bourgeois violence that continues to persist in our society, even after nearly two decades of freedom. We must be vigilant not to separate ourselves from those who are so frustrated that the only voice they have is subjective, physical violence. Sadly, those who suffer the most from objective violence are often those who bear the brunt of subjective violence as well.

It is not important to decide whether Comrade Mandela sold us out or not. It is not important whether one condones violence, in either form, or not. What is important is that we realize that we need a fundamentally different way of thinking of the state, other than just to be happy with that which we inherited from Apartheid. We must realise that it is not just about implementing policies but that we radically need to change policies to ensure that the objective violence that persists in our society in tackled.

It is important that we be vigilant about not too liberally condemning acts of subjective violence committed by those who remain on the margins of our society. To condemn them would be to condemn the very poor we struggle to emancipate.

The words of Marx, Engels, Caudwell and even Dr King continue to ring out: “Since a dispossessed class will fight to the last ditch, while there is hope, how can the transition be affected other than violently…?” (Caudwell, 1938, Pacifism and Violence)