Fanon’s Curse:
Re-imagining Marxism in South Africa’s Age of Retreat
Kirk Helliker and Peter Vale
(Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa)
Paper presented at XII Annual Conference of the International
Association of Critical Realism
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 23rd-25th July 2009
‘Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its
mission, fulfil it, or betray it’1
Given its growing, even dark, reputation for xenophobia, it seems
extraordinary that South Africa remains open to ideas from the
outside. Fifteen years after apartheid in South Africa ended, the
country’s great cities are branded with the same imported images
that clutter glittering malls in New York, London or Sydney. The
rapidity of this makeover from apartheid’s grey conformity is held
1
Fanon 1967, p. 166.
1
to be testimony to the success of neo-liberal globalisation which
was enthusiastically embraced with apartheid’s ending.
The argument in this article is positioned at the intersection
between the source and the power of social ideas in South Africa.
To explain: located, historically, in a web of metropolitan knowing,
public policy-making in South Africa has invariably followed
imported forms of social discourse: indeed, successive national
narratives – imperialism, colonialism, apartheid and globalisation –
are the echoes of voices and ideas which have been developed
elsewhere. This, a type of cultural cringe – to use A.A. Phillips’2
term – inevitably afflicted South African society and politics, as any
casual reading of the country’s history shows. The current
narrative and practices of neo-liberalism, coming after decades of
bitter struggle against apartheid, is the primary marker of an age of
retreat in South Africa.
Although increasingly hidden by the incarnation of capital
and the national project, South Africa has a long and deep-seated
association with Marxism. This intellectual project, including the
critical moments in its rise and demise, is the central focus of this
article. The argument is simple, almost linear: South Africa’s
interest in Marxism – especially Western Marxism – was abruptly
2
Phillips 2006.
2
truncated. There has been an unravelling of interest in Marxism
since the end of apartheid: this we regard as a retreat.
The generalised condition of retreat has stunted the possibility
of an engagement with building a socialist alternative that once
appeared to be ingrained in the struggles which raged during
apartheid’s endgame. Two immediate reasons explain this
outcome. First and foremost, South Africa’s relationship with the
world and the process of its domestic transformation has been
predicated on the purported benefits to be derived from neo-liberal
globalisation. Secondly, and more importantly for our purposes,
the intellectual-activists that helped to deliver sharp blows in
apartheid’s final years have become distanced from radical forms
of praxis, including being drafted into the direct service of the new
state. In what follows, these two responses are interrogated in
some detail.
However, the article is not simply about identifying signs and
forms of retreat. It will also re-imagine – and explores the
prospects for – a post-apartheid Marxist project. In doing so, we
consider the state, civil society and universities as three possible
terrains for social transformation. We suggest that progressive
intellectuals have become imprisoned by a distorted understanding
of the sites and possibilities for deep-seated change. In particular,
3
intellectuals have become transfixed and mesmerised by the state
in a manner which fails to significantly advance struggles within
and which, simultaneously, have put radical intellectualism at
universities and radical praxis within civil society on the back-foot.
The discussion proceeds as follows. As an important
backdrop to our argument, we consider the significance of radical
praxis as it emerged and became consolidated in the 1970s and
1980s amongst Marxist intellectuals in South Africa – the country’s
so-called “struggle years” – and how this was torn asunder with the
post-apartheid transition. We then look at ‘Western Marxism’ in
South Africa prior to the country’s transition – with a view both to
isolating its major trends and identifying its limitations. Since
critique is central to the task at hand, we will deconstruct the notion
of ‘Western Marxism’ – as it developed in South Africa – in order to
draw its diverse faces to the fore. We also examine the often
awkward but critical role that Marxist intellectuals played in the
liberation of their country. The abrupt demise of (a South Africanstyled) Western-centred Marxism, in an age of neo-liberalism, is
then outlined schematically. Finally, on the basis of key
contemporary debates about social and political transformation,
and in drawing upon recent experiences from elsewhere, we argue
for re-imagining Marxism in contemporary South Africa.
4
The rise and fall of radical praxis
Before traversing the footpaths that must run between the
sociology of knowledge and the philosophy of science, we must
clear some ground. In doing so, we highlight radical praxis –
especially the links between theory and practice during the
struggles against apartheid, and explaining how it was that these
were severed under post-apartheid re-structuring.
From the late 1940s onwards, liberal interpretations of South
Africa’s deepening racial quagmire argued that continued racial
domination
economic
undermined
growth
–
capitalist
this
development
subverted
any
hope
and
stifled
of
social
emancipation. This approach was represented in the two-volume
The Oxford History of South Africa edited by Monica Wilson and
Leonard Thompson.3
At about the same time, a number of scholars – including
South African exiles and émigrés4 – attacked the work of this
Liberal School. A “new school” (as the Canadian Frederick
Johnstone5 called this Western-style Marxism) argued that racial
domination was integral to the functioning of the capitalist
3
Wilson and Thompson 1969-1971.
They included initially Richard Atmore, Martin Legassick, Shula Marks, Stanley Trapido and
Harold Wolpe.
5
Johnstone 1978.
4
5
economy in South Africa. The most widely cited of this work is an
early article by Harold Wolpe6 in which he argues that the
Reserves (later called the Bantustans), by preserving limited
access to agricultural land by the families of Black migrant
labourers, subsidised urban wages and therefore served as a
source of cheap Black labour for industrial and mining capital.
As the “new school” made headway, there was talk of a
Kuhnian-type scientific revolution underway in the country,7
especially at the country’s (mainly White) English-language
universities. Its flowering was certainly buoyed by the re-birth of
socialist thought in Western Europe following three closely linked
developments – the upheavals of 1968, the recovery of interest in
the Annales School and the flourishing of Marxist historiography,
especially in the United Kingdom.
The
onward
march
of
the
“new
school”,
and
the
simultaneous re-activation of work-based and community-based
organisation and mobilisation against the apartheid regime during
the 1970s, speeded the fortunes of Marxist explanations bringing
closer the link between social theory and political practice. This
was seen in the role played by White intellectuals – academics and
students, mainly – in the formation of Black trade union
6
7
Wolpe 1972.
Jubber 1983, p. 54.
6
movements in the east coast industrial port of Durban and, later, in
the country’s financial capital, Johannesburg and Cape Town, the
Mother City. The epitome of this intellectual activism was the
Sorbonne-trained, Rick Turner, who was assassinated in 1978.8
Years after his tragic death, Turner’s theoretical writing returns
again and again to inform South Africa’s political debates. A
decade later, in the 1980s, the partnership between activists and
intellectuals continued and came to enhance the political work of
the mass-based United Democratic Front (UDF) in its challenge to
the legitimacy of the apartheid state.
Because of the successes of anti-apartheid struggles, it is
easy to judge these as entailing an untroubled relationship
between thought and action but, in reality, they were tied down by
complex social knots and contradictions many of which entailed
theoretical debates. So, early Marxist writing – as Martin
Legassick9 later noted in self-reflection – criticised the exiled South
African Communist Party (SACP) for stressing race over class in
the struggle against apartheid. And, later with the expansion of the
non-racial trade union movement, divides appeared between socalled “Workerists” and “Populists”. The former were inclined to
stress the role of the unions, shop-floor politics and the inevitability
8
9
See Turner 1972; Fluxman and Vale 2004.
Legassick 2002.
7
of class conflict; the latter were drawn, rather, to the goal of mass
mobilisation and struggle, both armed and other. Sympathetic
intellectuals (most of whom were White) normally adopted the
“classist” position, and often viewed national liberation movements
(including the non-racial, exiled African National Congress (ANC))
with some suspicion for their populist leanings. But there were also
debates within (and between) the ANC and its affiliated
organisations, especially the UDF, about the importance of
working class leadership, and, at times, about “one-stage” and
“two-stage” theories of transformation.
The intensity of the interaction between social theory and
political practice (and the success of this link) was the harbinger of
a new social epoch for the country. In addition, the socialist
currents within the trade union movement and the deeply-rooted
local structures set up by the UDF promised radical change. This,
it was believed, would be followed by a strong partnership between
civil society and the state, which would build a polity whose
defining purpose would be to overcome the social and economic
injustices remaining in apartheid’s wake. With apartheid on the
verge of collapse, and following the release from prison of Nelson
Mandela, the American sociologist Michael Burawoy visited the
country and glowingly wrote that ‘everywhere there were
8
sociologists [and other academics] acting as organic intellectuals
of the home-grown liberation movements’.10 The early 1990s in
South Africa seemed to be everything but on the edge of an age of
retreat.
Fifteen years after the end of apartheid however the promise
of epochal change remains in the past while the intellectual
partnership which nourished it, is no more. What happened?
Undoubtedly, the rise and force of neo-liberalism crowded out the
hopes, world-wide, for a different future. But, South Africa’s hope
for a different future was undermined by the ripping apart of the
strategic partnership between ideas and action which had once
promised so much: the result, its debris, lies scattered about this
article.
Today, the post-apartheid government (which is led by a
liberation movement and its subservient alliance partners,
including a communist party) pursue a form of politics which is
emptied of the progressive content which characterised the 1970s
and 1980s. The divide between workerists and populists is no
more, having collapsed in the face of a doxa which stresses
market-driven economics and shallow procedural-type democracy
10
Burawoy 2004a, p. 11.
9
(what Unger11 calls ‘sleepy democracy’). Certainly, there are social
programmes which aim at redistribution in the country, but these
are palliative and are compliant with orthodox neo-liberal economic
policy frameworks. In the main, they are technocratically-driven
programmes within a market-driven ‘development’ paradigm and
are
deprived
of
the
support
from
grassroots
democratic
mobilisation which was so fundamental to the struggle that ended
apartheid. As Rick Turner envisaged for a democratic South Africa,
The political party as mediator between the individual and
government tends to take on the characteristics of the system
itself, the ‘party machine’ dominates the membership and the
rank and file become increasingly divorced from policy
making. .... The political arena becomes polarised between
an atomised mass and a number of small groups trying to
manipulate the mass in order to get political jobs. The result of
this is to move the source of power in society out of the
political arena and into the control of functional power groups.
... [T]here must be other additional centres of power which can
11
Unger 2005, p. 30.
10
be used by the people to exert their control over the central
body.12
The issue for the future is not whether the post-apartheid
South African government has chosen an evolutionary road to
socialism but whether it has too closely integrated the economy
within the folds of neo-liberal globalisation. The difficulty of making
a different choice – by any other path but retreat – has been
complicated by the fall-off in interaction between theory and
practice that had so intrigued Michael Burawoy.
One plausible explanation for the fall-off is the rise and
growing popularity of post-modernism with its failure to engage
persuasively with politics.13 But, as a more probable cause, the
power of Marxist analysis has all but disappeared as a distinctive
perspective within the South African academy. Three possible
reasons explain this. First, the ending of the socialist states and
the self-styled triumph of the market has compelled political and
social discourses towards market-driven interpretations compatible
with rational choice thinking. Linked to this, secondly, is the flight of
Leftist-leaning intellectuals from the academy towards policy
research, consultancy or into the institutions of the state. And,
12
13
Turner 1971, p. 81.
Booth 2007, p. 178.
11
finally, there is the emergence of a crass instrumentalism which
has driven critical scholarship to the corners of the country’s
universities. The latter explains why – as elsewhere in the world –
the humanities are on the back-foot in South Africa.14
But, as we have already noted, there was a moment when
the humanities – especially Western Marxist perspectives on them
– fashioned social and political debates in South Africa, and it is to
this period, and the debates that raged two decades ago, that our
attention now falls.
Western Marxism in South Africa
At its formative moment, Western-style South African Marxism
focused on the relationship between the country’s economy and its
polity, specifically on the relationship between class and race. Two
main perspectives and one theme emerged during these early
years. The first reflected a divide within English Marxism that the
historian Perry Anderson15 had both identified and analysed. The
South African sociologist Wilmot James16 called the two sides of
14
See Vale 2008.
Anderson 1980.
16
James 1983.
15
12
this particular divide ‘Social History’ and ‘Historical Sociology’. The
second, the thematic focus, was directed towards the study of
labour – here, the work of Eddie Webster17 stands out.
The social historians were associated with the work of
London University’s Institute of Commonwealth Studies, which in
the 1970s was directed by the South African born Shula Marks.
But their form and influence are best appreciated through the
writing of the historian Charles van Onselen especially his twovolume Studies in the Social and Economic History of the
Witwatersrand.18 This approach to understanding South Africa’s
past, its present and its future was widely disseminated throughout
the South African academy through the annual History Workshop
at Johannesburg’s University of Witwatersrand. A close reading of
this work suggests a form of historiography that drew on the
writings of British Marxist historians like Eric Hobsbawm and E.P.
Thompson which stress the idea of history from below, and argued
that lower orders act rationally. In the context of South Africa, van
Onselen and his cohort stressed social agency over political
structure, seeking to reconstruct understandings of the country’s
17
18
Webster 1985.
Van Onselen 1982.
13
history through sensitivities to the activities and practices of the
country’s popular classes.19
The other thread of Marxist thinking was ‘historical
sociology’. Here, the leading figure was the exiled Harold Wolpe
who had trained in law but, after his exile to Britain, switched to
sociology. Its members included Frederick Johnstone and Martin
Legassick – together they are called the ‘elder statesmen’.20 They
represented the structuralist tradition in sociology and, with time,
their writing was strongly influenced by Nicos Poulantzas whose
impact was especially evident in the work of a second generation
of South African writers.21 Strictly speaking, James’ divide was
helpful only from a heuristic point of view because some writers
crossed from one side of the divide to the other. For example,
notwithstanding his structuralist analysis of the South African gold
mining industry in his book, Class, Race and Gold, Johnstone22
displayed a strong affinity to E.P. Thompson’s stress on culture,
experience and consciousness. But debates across James’ divide
were not common. Influential commentators, like Belinda Bozzoli,
suggested that the structuralist stream in Western Marxism was
characterised by the negative characteristics of ‘normal science’,
19
IIiffe 1984.
Saunders 1988, p.169.
21
Burawoy 2004, p. 663.
22
Johnstone 1976.
20
14
including non-creative enquiry.23 However, the most interesting
debates were amongst the historical sociologists – especially in
relation to state, class and power – where robust exchanges often
took place.24 For instance, there was an intense debate about the
causes of the form and policies of South Africa’s Pact Government
(1924-1933) which was an alliance between the National Party and
the Labour Party. Some Marxists25 prioritised conflicts between
fractions of capital over the distribution of surplus, and others
emphasised the capital accumulation process and struggles
between capital and labour.26
Generally-speaking, South African Marxists were known for
their parochialism and for treating racial domination in South
African society as ‘exceptional’.27 In a review of the literature,
Belinda Bozzoli28 raised methodological concerns about Westernstyled South African Marxism, claiming that it simply involved
importing and adopting a Northern theory, so amounting to ‘locally
received … (foreign) … orthodoxies’.29 She went on to suggest
that ‘[w]hat South African reality could demonstrate to the
intellectual world, has increasingly been pushed aside in favour of
23
Bozzoli 1981, p. 53.
See Helliker 1988.
25
See Davies et al. 1976; Kaplan 1979.
26
See Innes and Plaut 1978; Innes 1979.
27
Alexander 2006, p. 7.
28
Bozzoli 1981.
29
Bozzoli 1981, p. 53.
24
15
what that world can tell us about South African reality’.30 For
Bozzoli,31 the sterility of Western-styled South African Marxism
was because ‘“real” theory’ was produced in the North and South
Africa itself was not a ‘source of theorising’. In particular, the very
specificity of apartheid society, namely the constitution of racial
subjectivities, as an epiphenomenon, was reduced to class.
Bozzoli’s own work is drawn towards E.P. Thompson’s idea on the
need to deploy theory in a flexible and contingent manner in order
to both interrogate and breathe life into historical and social
evidence. 32
This – a quandary born of the cultural cringe – was not only
confined to Marxism in South Africa. Ken Jubber traced a century
of development of the social sciences at the University of Cape
Town arguing that, in terms of what was taught, that institution was
like a ‘displaced British university’.33 But this judgement was mild
when measured against the view of Rhodes University’s Lawrence
Wright who described South Africa’s English-medium universities
as instruments for ‘transmitting metropolitical knowledge and
excitement in a colonial situation’.34
30
Bozzoli 1981, p. 54.
Ibid.
32
Thompson 1978.
33
Jubber 1983, p. 58.
34
Wright 2006, p. 73.
31
16
We raise the Western roots of Marxism not to emphasise its
irrelevance or unworthiness to South African tasks, but rather to
highlight all the more remarkably how it became embedded in the
struggle for liberation during the 1970s and 1980s in South Africa.
And, it is to this task that the argument now turns.
Marxist intellectuals and South Africa’s liberation
Ari Sitas, in reflecting on “the struggle” years, speaks of an
‘indigenous hybridity’35 which marked the radical intellectual
formations of the 1970s and which deepened throughout the
1980s. He goes on to say:
What can be traced as an intellectual formation started being
developed outside and despite University ‘disciplinarities’.
What started from the early 1970s onwards through marginal
and harassed groupings of left intellectuals, white and black
was a social discourse which had a normative and political
foundation; it was such a formation that provided the culture
levers to prize open departments and disciplinary fields of
35
Sitas 1997, p. 16.
17
inquiry. And such a formation, contained different narratives of
emancipation and was animated by egalitarian norms.36
The diversity within this intellectual formation included not just
White Left-inclined academics and students, but also intellectuals
linked to the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) which was
founded in 1972 by the activist intellectual, Steve Biko.
Western Marxism in South Africa took root in a fluid,
contested and creative context which was to shape its form.
Commenting on this, Andrew Nash37 suggests that the type of soil
in which the seed was planted was as important as the Marxism
itself: ‘the peculiarities of this process of assimilation, rather than
the ideas which influenced specific individuals, influenced the form
of this moment of Western Marxism’.
This emerged in a 2005 study on activist-sociologists at the
University of the Witwatersrand by Shireen Ally.38 Her point of
entry was that the radical intellectual formations, while rejecting the
centralised authoritarian power of the apartheid state, did not reject
the notion of power per se. Importantly, however, Ally’s view is that
power is not a ‘thing’ wielded from above (or the centre): rather,
36
Sitas 1997, p. 13.
Nash 1999, p. 66-7.
38
Ally 2005.
37
18
power is organically generated as a series of relationships infused
in social processes. So, for Ally, Western Marxism, as it was
assimilated in South Africa, was both ‘a reflection of power’ and
‘the product of a conditioning by various social and political forces
and processes that ... deeply implicate it in power’.39
More explicitly, she argues that the rise and success of Black
Consciousness, by stressing race over class in the struggle
against apartheid, effectively excluded Whites – even radical
Whites – from any meaningful role in “the struggle”. As Biko
argued:
Black consciousness is in essence the realisation by the black
man of the need to rally together with his brothers around the
cause of their subjection – the blackness of their skin – and to
operate as a group in order to rid themselves of the shackles
that bind them to perpetual servitude. … Blacks no longer
seek to reform the system. … [They] are out to completely
transform the system and to make of it what they wish.40
Faced with this development, the appeal of Marxism for radical
Whites was not simply on the basis of any objective truth and
39
40
Ally 2005, pp. 2, 5.
Biko 1979, p. 149.
19
rationality, but rather, because it provided them with ‘a comfortable
discourse’ – class over race – with which to ‘interrogate structures
of power’.41 It permitted them to remain politically relevant as
“Whites” in South Africa; it was a ‘self-preservation mechanism’, as
Ally calls it.42
The acceptability and appeal of class analysis was further
smoothed by the organisational and political space created by the
non-racial stance adopted by the emerging Black trade union
movement. During the 1970s, and well into the 1980s, most of the
senior (and relatively powerful) positions in these unions were
occupied by White Marxist intellectuals,43 notwithstanding that the
tradition of Western Marxism opposed any notion of vanguardist
leadership. This remains highly contested ground. Sakhela
Buhlungu44 contends, amongst other things, that White leadership
sidelined organic Black intellectuals within the union movement.
But others claim that White Leftists made a key contribution to
building democracy within union structures.45
Overall, the reflexive intellectual impulses on the South
African situation which emerged in the 1970s had, by the 1980s,
41
Ally 2005, p. 5.
Ally 2005, p. 13.
43
See Buhlungu 2006.
44
Buhlungu 2006.
45
See Maree 2006.
42
20
morphed into a cadre of public intellectuals who were to serve the
interests of the liberation movements. It should be stressed
however that the relationship of White intellectuals to the different
organisations,
both
inside
and
outside
the
country,
was
asymmetrical; some individuals were positioned within the various
movements on a full-time basis – this gave them various forms of
responsibility and accountability; others, who enjoyed greater
intellectual autonomy, were at a distance from this responsibility.
Given the country’s complex politics, it is not surprising that
interpretations of this involvement were contested – and strongly,
too. Nevertheless, the acceptability of radical praxis had been
firmly established.
The end of apartheid and of Marxism
While intense political struggles marked the years leading to the
end of apartheid, these were underpinned by impassioned
theoretical debates. One of these seemed to offer a return to the
liberal discourses which had marked the 1960s. This debate
suggested, despite the historical complicity of apartheid in
capitalist
development,
that
the
(economic
and
political)
21
‘dysfunctionality’ of racial domination was an increasing possibility,
especially to monopoly capital.46 This was not a sudden about-turn
or a theoretical retreat. In part, the new questions within Westernstyled South African Marxism pointed towards deepening social
tensions arising from the emergence of workplace and community
struggles, and questioned capital’s continued reliance on the
state’s repressive might and its racially exclusionary legislation.47
The economic and political contradictions and crises being
played out during the late 1970s and early 1980s raised the
prospect of South African capital adapting itself to the deracialisation of society and even, perhaps, pursuing this option as
an ideological project. This was not far off the proverbial mark
because, during the years of formal transition (1989-1994), this
position was pursued in a social partnership between business and
the ANC. As this partnership deepened, a rightward ideological
move occurred (or, perhaps more aptly, intensified). For example,
‘most of the top UDF leaders welcomed the support’ of capitalist
elites and ‘shifted away from socialist rhetoric’.48 So, the depth and
intensity of the socialist tendency within the UDF and the broader
liberation movement should not be overplayed. Nevertheless, John
46
See Johnstone 1978.
See Fine 1990.
48
Seekings 2000, p. 298.
47
22
Saul, the Canadian radical, sardonically called the emerging
partnership between capital and activists, the ‘class snuggle’.49
As these processes got underway, the UDF-centred massbased organisations which had been at the forefront of the urban
struggles (and which had so effectively weakened apartheid) were
all but immobilised. This was not necessarily as a deliberate
strategy, but was certainly a consequence of ‘the snuggle’.
Nonetheless, increasingly from the mid-1980s, the ANC-led
Charterist movement50 (of which the UDF was part) sought to
inhibit the formation of pluralistic political and organisational
tendencies in order to consolidate and discipline “the struggle”.51 In
the end, as the liberation movement became the ruling party, “the
struggle” became absorbed into the state and dissipated as a
result. Reminiscent of Frantz Fanon’s argument in The Wretched
of the Earth52 about the post-colonial state, the ANC stalwart
Raymond Suttner suggested that this was the ‘domestication’ of
popular struggle:
49
Saul 2000.
The Charterist Movement (led by the ANC) takes its name from the adoption of the
Freedom Charter at a mass gathering in Kliptown in 1955.
51
See Friedman 1992.
52
Fanon 1967.
50
23
At the level of the state and top echelons of the ANC, … there
is a definite desire to trim down the mass character of the
ANC and channel mass action in general along lines that are
statised and institutionalised. ... [T]he masses are not
intended to raise the issues independently as self-acting
popular actors.53
It was not only Mandela’s ruling party which was to choose
the (by now) well-marked and well-trodden path towards
capitalism; South African Western Marxist intellectuals did
likewise. As Nash54 wryly observed, ‘the leading figures of a
generation’ (of South African Western Marxists) ‘capitulated almost
without exception to the imperatives of the market and the crudest
forms of bourgeois ideology’. Intriguingly, Saul’s appellation, ‘the
snuggle’, was in direct response to an article in the year 2000 by
Glenn Adler and Eddie Webster,55 in which the latter called
explicitly for ‘class compromise’ between capital and labour in
post-apartheid South Africa. This call aimed to resolve the tension
between deepening democracy and promoting economic growth
for ‘reconstruction’. But, in Saul’s view, this suggestion effectively
53
Suttner 2006, p. 23.
Nash 1999, p. 66.
55
Adler and Webster 2000.
54
24
sacrificed any further need for class struggle and mobilisation.
Undoubtedly, the global retreat of Marxism following the fall of the
Berlin Wall and Western triumphalism played a role in this local
intellectual unravelling. The ‘New South Africa’ and its intellectuals,
it seems, were all too readily drawn to Francis Fukuyama’s free
market mot d’ordre, the end of history.
South African intellectuals increasingly displayed a syndrome
of pessimism and disillusionment that John Holloway56 identifies
with post-modernism, arguing that the ‘bitterness of history
teaches us that it is now ridiculous to maintain the grand narrative
of human emancipation’ and that this disillusionment ‘seeps into
the core of the way we think, into the categories we use, the
theories we espouse’.57 Initially this leads to theoretical re-working
and, then, to retreat. Ari Sitas, one of the country’s most respected
radical thinkers, is a major example of this loss of moorings. Only
three years after the election of the ANC government, Sitas
declared that the powers of sociology, so admired by Burawoy,
were ‘beginning to wane’58 noting that ‘we have lost the capacity to
respond creatively’ and are ‘conceptually threadbare’.59 Seven
56
Holloway 2002.
Holloway 2002, p. 154.
58
Sitas 1997, p. 12.
59
Sitas 1997, p. 17.
57
25
years later he60 admitted that ‘we are growing our very own
psychological blockages’ and, further, that there is a ‘collapse in
our broader social-ethical commitments’. Sitas61 had seemingly
turned his back on the emancipatory power of Marxism and
focuses on – with great passion and significance, to be sure –
indigenising social theory.
Just as the rise of Western Marxism in South Africa had
localised causes, so did its collapse. The latter entailed both the
undermining of Marxist scholarship within academia (or Marxism
as an intellectual project) and the tearing apart of radical praxis.
These relate to the different worlds in which radical intellectuals
work: academia, civil society and – now under post-apartheid
conditions – the state.
The demobilisation of “the struggle” has been of great
significance in South Africa. Intellectuals have grappled to find “a
home” in post-apartheid civil society and have not engaged in any
sustained, meaningful and fruitful radical praxis. There is certainly
a substantially altered civil society – unlike its recent apartheid
past, it seeks not ongoing confrontation with the state but rather
engages and collaborates with the state, often in a dependent and
docile manner. Further, civil society is in large part devoid of social
60
61
Sitas 2004, p. 19.
Sitas 2004, and 2006.
26
movements. In this regard, Mngxitama62 speaks about the
‘NGOisation of resistance’ over the past fifteen years, which
implies forms of organisation (NGOs) that operate in large part
within the confines of the neo-liberal international development
paradigm.
There are also growing contradictions between the technicalmanagerial needs of the state and the free-thinking intellectual
goals of academia. For the state, ‘this is not the time for theorising’
(certainly not for critical imagination) ‘but for devising policy for
“delivery”’ of development, conceived a-politically.63 Of particular
concern is a pronounced drift towards rational choice-based public
policy-making and the corporatisation of higher education – this
has forced theorising towards conformity rather than critique. To
quote Eddie Webster: ‘The advent of democracy has ... shifted the
centre stage away from the social movements that led to the
democratisation process, toward the new state whose demands
are for more technical policy-oriented research’.64
Two examples of this compliance are illustrative. First, the
restructuring of higher education has tended to commodify
academic life and has produced, in its wake, a near national
62
Mngxitama 2006, p. 63.
Neocosmos 2004, p. 1.
64
Webster 1997, p. 280.
63
27
obsession
with
quantified
research
outputs
and
external
benchmarking. And, secondly, there has been a marked migration
of Marxist intellectuals towards problem-solving research in the
state-sponsored Human Sciences Research Council; others have
become state functionaries.65 This migration reflects Michael
Burawoy’s warning on the ‘instrumentalisation’ of intellectual
knowledge: what he calls the ‘turning … away from an
interrogation of ends to an obsession with means’. So, for
Burawoy, the post-apartheid state sees ‘sociology as an
instrument in plans for national reconstruction. It has little patience
for public and critical sociologies that articulate the disparate
interests to be found in society’.66
What is to be done?
Lenin’s legendary question on the strategic problem of securing
socialism is, perhaps, one of the key recurring themes in politics,
and provides South African intellectuals with a double-bind. For
them, both epistemology and political action demand an answer –
to pursue one without the other is to retreat along with the state
65
66
See Uys 2005.
Burawoy 2004a, p. 25.
28
and its paraphernalia in the face of neo-liberal pressure. In the age
of retreat, then, Marxism as both a theoretical project and as a
political practice need to be simultaneously re-imagined and reinvigorated.
In his challenging book on Change the World without Taking
Power,67 John Holloway suggests that Lenin’s famous question is
miscued. More precisely, he argues that the question, “what’s to
be done”, presupposes a fixed and teleological end to social
change into which a rational strategy can neatly and tightly fit. In
Holloway’s view, historical change is open-ended and not
controlled; it is an ambivalent and a contingent process which
cannot be contained as Lenin’s famous question assumes. We use
Holloway’s perspective as an angle to re-imagine Marxism during
post-apartheid South Africa’s age of retreat.
Based on his historical reflections on past revolutionary
movements and in the light of the Zapatista movement, Holloway
nevertheless does make a universal claim about “what’s not to be
done” – social transformation is not possible by taking or seizing
state power. This is an argument for a society-centred theory of
change in which social power develops autonomously of state
power without necessarily opposing or replacing the latter. Other
67
Holloway 2003.
29
writers have called these ideas the ‘self-limiting’ or ‘anti-politics’
revolution.68
Holloway69 argues that the state in capitalist society, arising
from the separation of economy and polity, is an inherently alien,
distorting and distant force that effectively represents what he calls
‘power-over’ subservient classes. As he says in a Porto Alegre
discussion paper, the state has excluded
Us from the social determination of our own lives. The state
seeks to impose upon us a separation of our struggles from
society, to convert our struggle into a struggle on behalf of, in
the name of. ... The drive towards self-determination moves in
one direction, the attempt to win state power moves in the
opposite direction. The former starts to knit a self-determining
community, the latter unravels the knitting.70
Clearly, to fix ‘capturing’ the state as a basis for social
transformation is problematic, whether this is to be accomplished
by evolutionary means through the electoral process, or by
revolutionary means through a militant vanguard workers’ party.
68
See Baker 2002.
Holloway 2003.
70
Holloway n.d., p. 5, emphasis in original.
69
30
Accessing the state simply entails gaining control of central
institutional mechanisms for oppression – this is what Holloway
calls ‘power-over’ – so it reproduces the conditions sustaining
capitalism. For Holloway, real, un-alienated, liberative power –
what he terms ‘power-to’ – lays deep in the bowels of engaged civil
society. As a result, true transformation involves exploring and
activating latent potentialities as a means to social empowerment,
without necessarily being directly and openly anti-hegemonic vis-àvis the ruling bloc as understood in the Gramscian sense. Plainly,
this is a far cry from the state-driven processes of political change
which, as we have noted, mark South Africa’s transformation.
So, to deliver transformative change, Marxist theory and
practice in South Africa needs to be re-imagined in a manner that
incorporates Holloway’s deep-seated sources of social power. At
the same time, we recognise that Holloway’s conceptual advance
is a highly disputed claim which has been roundly condemned for
its one-sidedness – particularly, for negating transformation in (and
through) the state.71 Over thirty years ago, Holloway was heavily
responsible for introducing the German State Derivationist School
to the English-speaking academic world.72 This school stressed
the idea of form analysis: the state in capitalist society was a
71
72
See Bensaid 2005; Dinerstein 2005; McNaughton 2008.
Holloway and Picciotto 1978.
31
specific ‘social form’ that reflected and refracted the contradictory
social relations that animate capitalism. This was similar to
Poulantzas’73 notion of the state as the material condensation or
crystallisation of contradictory relations.
Built into the very state form therefore are contradictions,
conflicts, tensions and ambiguities. This suggests, then, that the
state is not all-powerful and does not exercise ‘power-over’ without
generating tension. Indeed, the state is a place of contestation and
struggle and this makes it a site for transformation. In this regard,
we suggest that the case of Venezuela under the presidency of
Hugo Chavez offers a useful counter-weight to Holloway’s position.
This is because the state in Venezuela provides a basis for
progressive social transformation.74 For the purposes of our
argument, this entails recognising the legitimacy, and the
complementary nature, of state- and society-centred notions of
power and change and promoting the role that socialist
intellectuals can play in both sites of social transformation. Indeed,
Venezuela’s ‘Chavista’ movement involves a strong ‘statist’
moment but also significant mobilisation of social power.
73
74
Poulantzas 1973, and 1978.
See Ellner 2008.
32
Lebowitz75 identifies a ‘dialectic between leadership and the
movement of masses’, in which the government pushes for radical
measures notwithstanding initiatives that resist transformation from
within Venezuelan society. Ciccariello-Maher76 highlights the same
by pointing out how ‘sectors of the state are working actively to
dismantle and dissolve the old state apparatus by devolving power
to local organs capable of constituting a dual power’. The
formation of parallel structures is certainly not what Holloway had
in mind, and there is always the concomitant danger that the state
will simply flood the space occupied by civil society, leading to
what Issa Shivji77 has called the ‘statisation of civil society’.
Nevertheless, developments in Venezuela indicate that change is
not simply state-centred – first opposing, then taking power; the
case in South Africa – but entails transforming power. At the same
time, as Holloway stresses, the autonomy of active society must
be ensured in relation to the dictates of the state. From the
perspective of this argument, successful change must be
supported by Left-leaning intellectuals both inside and outside
state organs.
75
Lebowitz 2007, p. 52.
Ciccariello-Maher 2007, p. 42.
77
Shivji 2004, p. 8.
76
33
The role of both civil society and the state in socialist
transformations has been the centre of enumerable debates on the
Left, and South Africa has not been immune from these. Andrew
Nash78 has claimed in the South African context that a key lesson
to be learnt from the fall of Western Marxism is that the
philosophical divide between Soviet and Western Marxism has not
disappeared – rather, they remain as two ‘fundamentally different
philosophies’.
This
perspective
however
dichotomises
and
homogenises important theoretical nuances which suggest that
divides run in all directions, too – so, there are serious divisions
within Western Marxism itself. For instance, the influential work
Empire by Hardt and Negri79 has been subjected to wide-ranging
critiques by many commentators.80 Indeed, Meiksins Woods81
labels it as ‘a manifesto on behalf of global capital’ because in the
end it is ‘an argument for the futility of oppositional politics’. Key
notions contained in Empire, such as ‘multitude’ – which fails to
address the class structure underlying global capitalism – certainly
reveal that Western Marxism has many diverging streams.82
78
Nash 1999, p. 79.
Hardt and Negri 2000.
80
See Balakrishnan (ed.) 2003.
81
Meiksins Woods 2003, p. 63.
82
See Kellner 2005.
79
34
Understanding this enables a far more nuanced appreciation
of what is at stake. Western Marxism in South Africa was
developed as a reaction to dogmatic or ‘Neanderthal’ Marxism (to
use a term from Frederick Johnstone),83 which was associated
with the worst practices of Soviet-style Marxism. However, recent
experience has shown that Western Marxism can also be toxic if it
is applied without careful thought. So, variants of Western Marxism
have led to a proliferation of catch-phrases and distinctive
practices such as Euro-communism, the Third Way and Radical
Democracy that do not effectively push back the frontier of control
of capital. Trends within Western Marxism are not themselves
untouched by the anti-statism associated with neo-liberal thought –
for example, the concept of ‘market socialism’ is only suggestively
(and
so
problematically)
theorised
as
an
anti-capitalist
alternative.84 Further, through the use of the market, the state has
been the target of Neo-liberals; likewise, the Left has sometimes
used the idea of civil society – as supposedly representing the
universal interest – to undermine the idea of the state. Some
contemporary Marxists – James Petras85 in the case of Latin
83
Johnstone 1978, p. 108.
See Sayer 1995.
85
Petras 2005.
84
35
America and John Saul86 in the case of Southern Africa – would
consider much of Western Marxist thought as a centrist-deviation
that has reached a tryst with capitalism in order to discipline
Marxism. In rightfully rejecting Soviet-style Marxism, significant
trends within Western Marxism have regrettably turned their back
on “the” socialist project and the necessary statist moment.
If transformation is to be true, it has to be both state-centred
and society-centred; hence, neither state-centred nor societycentred intellectual engagement can be ruled out a priori; likewise,
neither can be justified on any grounds, nor under any conditions.
Certainly, the form they take, their significance and their features
will vary with time. Drawing on the insights offered by Zygmunt
Bauman, Michael Burawoy87 distinguishes between two species of
public intellectual – legislators and interpreters – which he links to
the successive periods of liberation and reconstruction. As a rule,
the first – the intellectual-as-legislator – engages with the priorities
of the Party during liberation or with the successor state during
reconstruction; given this, it is not surprising, these intellectuals
enjoy limited autonomy, relatively speaking. The second species –
the intellectual-as-interpreter – are invariably concerned with
visualising a new moral and political order, and are routinely
86
87
Saul 2004.
Burawoy 2004.
36
positioned at a critical distance from any Party or organisation or
state. Using this bifocal, Burawoy argues that rather than
encouraging critical reflection in the post-apartheid period, the
South African government believes that ‘intellectuals had played
an effective interpreter role in the trenches of civil society during
liberation, but now they must return to the barracks to be
legislators – focusing on training and policy research’.88
This outcome presents proponents of state-centred change
and political transformation with an uncomfortable paradox. For
Holloway,89 no political organisation or entity – say, ‘The Party’ –
can rightfully claim a monopoly on what constitutes a just
economic
and
social
order.
Therefore
intellectuals
–
as
autonomous reflexive professionals – can never be reduced to
investigating means to predetermined ends. To do so (or to be
compelled to do so) is to be compromised both intellectually and
ethically. Burawoy90 notes this dilemma in relation to the late
Harold Wolpe, the South African intellectual-activist: ‘Like [Louis]
Althusser, Wolpe wanted to create a space for independent
theorising within the framework of liberation’, so as not to become
simply a party functionary. In post-apartheid South Africa, Wolpe –
88
Burawoy 2004, pp. 672-3.
Holloway 2003.
90
Burawoy 2004, p. 659.
89
37
both patriot and Party-loyalist – criticised the ANC-led government,
questioning its very goals and priorities with an eye to stimulating
broader debate about the possibilities of deeper forms of
transformation.
This example raises serious challenges for Left-leaning
intellectuals working as functionaries within the post-apartheid
state, or providing policy inputs as researchers to state-sponsored
bodies and think-tanks. Their capacity to make a “real difference”
in the lives of the people they have chosen to serve remains, in
many cases, an desire rather than a reality. In some instances,
they have contributed, often in immeasurable ways, to the
enactment of progressive policy initiatives – for example, with
regard to the protection and rights of workers in the face of threats
from labour market ‘de-regulation’. However, these initiatives
remain subservient to the tenets of the government’s macroeconomic paradigm. And this is why it is important to note that
fifteen years after the ending of apartheid, South Africa’s ANC-led
government is the poster-child of the ‘good Left’ – compliant and
disciplined, it shows no signs of shifting beyond the limits imposed
by neo-liberal ideology. This differs sharply with the ten-year old
38
Chavez government which is often called the ‘bad Left’ because it
has drifted leftwards.91
For reasons which remain unclear, Left-inclined intellectuals
in South Africa are engrossed and enthralled with the state, in
what Neocosmos labels as ‘state fetishism’92 or ‘intellectual praisesinging of state power’.93 Although we disagree with Neocosmos’
seemingly outright dismissal of state power in processes of social
transformation, he rightly argues that – currently – the South
African state is not the basis for an emancipatory project, which
must involve an ‘independent popular … politics’:94 ‘The basis for
a democratic politics must be the recovery of politics within society,
in other words, the creation of a fully active and politicised
citizenry’, without the state dictating ‘whether popular organisations
are democratic or not’.95
However, seeking to advance struggles from the platform
offered by the South African state is an uncertain proposition under
the present balance of forces. Moreover, seeking to do so under
the current de-activated condition of civil society appears highly
misplaced. For instance, despite the dire need for land reform in
91
Lebowitz 2007, pp. 38-40.
Neocosmos 2006a, p. 59.
93
Neocosmos 2006, p. 357.
94
Neocosmos 2006, p. 363.
95
Neocosmos 2006a, p. 65.
92
39
order to address the gnawing issue of rural poverty, land reform
remains market-based. At present, there is no significant land
movement which is building local community capacity with an eye
to autonomous self-activity or to pressuring the state. The lesson is
clear: Left intellectuals need to escape their ‘statist’ mind-set on
post-apartheid
transformation,
and
re-visit
the
sites
and
significance of social power in civil society.
The term “civil society” though is a notoriously slippery term.
Unlike Neocosmos,96 we prefer not to use it as conceptualised in
contemporary Liberal thinking. He argues that civil society is
inherently framed and defined by the state, such that any practices
deemed illegitimate by the state fall outside the boundaries of civil
society; what he labels as ‘a consensual state domain of politics’97
as opposed to politics beyond civil society or a popular domain of
politics. This subjectivist (indeed, cleansed) determination of civil
society goes contrary to the Gramscian notion, in which civil
society is a site of both domination and contestation.
Nevertheless, the state does seek to incorporate and
institutionalise civil society within its life. In this regard, NGOs (as
the ‘civil’ end of civil society) tend to work within the confines of the
liberal paradigm. For instance, they regularly ‘pursue clinical land
96
97
See Neocosmos 2006a, and 2008.
Neocosmos 2004, p. 11.
40
reforms under neoliberal structures and policies’ and conform to
‘the “proper” [civil] procedure and content of “oppositional” politics
in accordance with the liberal formula’.98 In doing so, they may go
contrary to and even undermine more radical – called ‘uncivil’ in
Neocosmos’ framework – initiatives undertaken by popular
organisations.99
Under neo-liberalism there has been a marked ‘shrinking of
“civilised” political space’100 as articulated by the civilising mission
of global capital. Previously, civil politics embodied mainly
property-friendly politics but now it also includes market-friendly
politics.101 Popular initiatives undercut this global project and
challenge liberal notions of civility. In Ghana, for example, the
establishment of forest reserves and modern agribusinesses for
export-oriented activities has increasingly commoditised land and
led to land expropriation; as their ‘moral right’,102 peasants have
sought to repossess this land through (amongst other acts) the
destruction of timber saplings and informal timber marketing
activities. Kanyongolo (in a study of Malawi) shows how land
occupations go contrary to market-driven land reforms and are
98
Moyo 2004, p. 11.
See Petras 1997.
100
Moyo and Yeros 2005, p. 39.
101
See Yeros 2002.
102
Amanor 2005, p. 114.
99
41
effectively de-legitimised by the state’s legal and judiciary regimes,
but land-short farmers consider occupations as a ‘legitimate
democratic strategy for redressing injustice’.103
Popular and indigenous notions of civility question the
imposition of globalised and statist notions of acceptable forms of
politics
civilisation.104
and
Indeed,
Partha
Chatterjee
has
consistently argued that the ‘squalor, ugliness and violence of
popular life’ cannot be imprisoned ‘within the sanitised fortress of
civil society’105 as this has been imagined, constructed and
defended by the post-colonial state. In this regard, Yeros raises
serious doubts about the prospects of ‘civil solutions to neocolonialism’ and claims that the ‘civil domain, by definition, cannot
be broadened by civil society’ (as this is understood in its liberal
setting). ‘The onus lies on progressive uncivil politics in the
periphery’106 to wedge open and deepen the potentialities for social
transformation.
The central point (and here we agree with Neocosmos) is
this: in moving beyond a statist notion of transformation, Leftist
intellectuals
must
recognise
the
legitimacy,
viability
and
103
Kanyongolo 2005, p. 118.
See Kaviraj 2001.
105
Chatterjee 2002, p. 70.
106
Yeros 2002, pp. 61, 249.
104
42
significance of sites outside the state that involve popular-radical
struggles challenging the basis and form of state power.
In general though, the possibility of work within postapartheid civil society presents enormous hurdles. The levels of
organisation and activism in this direction compared to the
“struggle days” are miniscule. While the trade union movement
continues to have a strong shop-floor presence, neo-liberal
restructuring has given rise to a number of serious challenges,
including the decline in membership in the manufacturing and
mining sectors and the need to organise ‘atypical’, casualised
workers.107 In addition, the country’s main federation, COSATU,
continues in alliance with the ruling ANC and this inhibits its
autonomy and militancy.
Besides the union movement, post-apartheid society is
marked by a broad range of social movements. These movements
generally ‘operate within the parameters of the new [postapartheid] status quo’,108 and they have a fluctuating and uneven
organisational and political presence. They have tackled issues
such as land reform, HIV/AIDS, housing, and the privatisation of
electricity
and
water
services.
The
more
radically-inclined
movements have Leftist and even Marxist tendencies, where the
107
108
See Naidoo 2003.
Ballard et al 2005, p. 630.
43
influence of the anti-statist works of Tony Negri, John Holloway
and Frantz Fanon are recognisable.109 A diversity of strategies
exists and at times intense internal – and factional – debates take
place. For instance, the question of forming alliances with
COSATU (given the latter’s alliance with the ANC) has been a
contentious point.110 To remain independent of party politics forms
part of the wider framework of ‘autonomism’ implicit in Holloway’s
position; and it raises the need for ideological and organisational
terrain free from the oppressive effects of Holloway’s ‘power-over’.
In
this
regard,
creative
work
(influenced
by
Left-leaning
intellectuals with acute Fanon-like suspicion of the post-apartheid
state) has taken place amongst the shack-dwellers of Durban.111
Not all NGOs are tame; many are progressive. For example,
in the Eastern Cape Province, the country’s poorest province, a
range of progressive NGOs are working on land and agrarian
reform. They are organising farm workers into committee
structures, given the failure of the trade union movement to have a
significant rural reach. They also propose agricultural programmes
that are fully consistent with the food sovereignty model of the
global small-scale farmer organisation, called Via La Campensina,
109
See Gibson 2006.
See the articles by Ashwin Desai and Oupa Lehulere in Khanya: a Journal for Activists.
No.11. December 2005.
111
See Pithouse 2006.
110
44
and act contrary to the ‘green revolution’ model which is currently
being vigorously pursued by the Eastern Cape Department of
Agriculture.
They
readily
interact
with
university-based,
progressive intellectuals.
Leftist intellectuals, in re-focusing and collapsing their
struggle into the state under post-apartheid conditions, abandoned
the trenches of civil society. However, civil society (particularly
sites of popular struggle) animate and breathe life into intellectual
work; and currently the scope for anti-hegemonic work for socialist
intellectuals is more likely within civil society than within the state.
In addition, though, any prospects for radical praxis (whether in the
state or civil society) depends fundamentally on re-engaging with
Marxism as an intellectual project, and this entails vigorous and
arduous work at sites of higher education in South Africa. Over the
past decade, universities have been stripped bare of robust and
reflective
intellectual
agendas
because
of
the
rampaging
instrumentalism.112 Recovering the critical life of the universities
will not be easy. Amongst other things, this will require strategies
to prevent the flight of key scholars into consultancy work or
management at the expense of critical teaching and research
activities in academic departments. Without these steps, Webster
112
See Vale 2008.
45
argues, ‘there will be no sociology [or Humanities] of any type,
whether it is critical, policy or public’.113
Conclusion
One of the great hallmarks of ‘Western Marxism’ in all its variants
and forms is its humanism: certainly, this is the quality that marks it
off dramatically from the ravages of neo-liberalism and Stalinism.
Hardt
and
Negri114
distinguish
between
a
transcendental
humanism – an anti-humanism based on an all-knowing Subject –
and an immanent humanism that arises from the local everyday
experiences and struggles of specific and diverse groups of
people.
Using this particular optic, Richard Pithouse115 argues that
the ANC government represents transcendental humanism while
the
localised
post-apartheid
struggles
–
shack-dweller
organisations and other grassroots groups – entail immanent
humanism. In one interpretation, the Hardt and Negri distinction
tends to be antagonistic to statism, almost implying that
113
Webster 2004, p. 40.
Hardt and Negri 2000.
115
Pithouse 2008.
114
46
revolutionary parties – once in power – become corrupt shells of
their former selves. This, of course, is consistent with Holloway’s
general argument about ‘power-over’. But, the dialectic quality of
the
Bolivarian
revolution
in
Venezuela
suggests
that
a
revolutionary party, on achieving electoral success, can be a
presence – a life force for immanent humanism – in the daily lives
of its citizens. Statism alone, as exists in post-apartheid South
Africa, without an active civil society, is not a force for
transformation.
Much of what is taking place in Venezuela parallels what the
slain Rick Turner imagined as a future democratic socialist South
African society: Turner116 argued that to change the world, we
must imagine another. This cannot be achieved within the halls of
government.
South
Africa’s
sorry
experience
with
true
transformation has surely demonstrated this to a generation of
Marxist intellectuals who enjoyed a rich intellectual heritage that, in
many ways, surpassed all others.
Metaphorically, South African Marxism was given birth in
academic environments in which critical thought could flower and
blossom; it was nurtured and nourished by the intense struggles of
the workplaces and communities. It grew old and died however in
116
Turner 1972.
47
the piled carpeted offices and in glittering city malls. What South
African Marxist intellectuals must learn is that their on-going
infatuation with the state and state power prevents them, the
generation that helped to free their country, from fulfilling the
mission to which they were so nobly called.
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