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The poor are advancing in a class war unwinnable under prevailing economic conditions Ashwin Desai, Brij Maharaj and Patrick Bond Eye on Civil Society column, (The Mercury) 31 August 2010
During this period of acute social angst over whether underpaid state workers will successfully withhold services mainly from poor people, so as to wrench a 1.6% wage increase and R300/month housing allowance (at a R5 billion cost/annum) from a government that just let FIFA escape our shores with R25 billion in pure profit (no taxes or exchange controls), it may be useful to take a step back to put the world’s worst inequality in context.
Consider an all-time favourite challenge: the quest for the Holy Grail.
The twentieth century witnessed the return of this symbol time and again, in order to make sense of upheavals that accompanied industrialisation, the horrors of war and the erosion of the influence of Christianity.
It was the theme of probably the most popular English-language book of the last century, Lord of the Rings by Bloemfontein-born J.R.R. Tolkien. But in Frodo’s hands, the Grail is not the “healing, heavenly talisman” but “powerful, corrupting and malevolent”.
Movies followed. John Boorman’s Excalibur, George Lucas’s Star Wars, the Indiana Jones series, and Monty Python’s were obviously re-tellings. With the release of the last of the Star Wars episodes and the amazing popularity of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, the Grail continues to re-invent itself as representing personal struggle, collective journeying and the need to achieve the ultimate goal which when found will reveal a deeper level of truth and meaning to a dispiriting post-industrial society.
No matter how exotic the locale, however, the search tends to occur across social terrain that has been carefully laid by ruling groups. Whatever poverty-alleviating fruit is found along the path reminds those missionaries who consume it, that legitimising the earthly garden market is, ultimately, a worthy substitute for the elusive Grail. ‘The perfect is the enemy of the good,’ say some who give up the search, content to eat what’s available; even if that means others go hungry.
In economics, the quest for poverty eradication often represents the struggle to find one magic solution to bring an end to unnecessary worldly sufferings. Merlin-like characters abound, peddling various potions and expounding all manner of sage-like advice.
The last century led to a host of approaches that ranged from colonialism (civilise the natives), the United States (bomb the natives), Pol Pot (exterminate the natives), the Bolshevik Revolution (that ran from permanent revolution to Stalin’s socialism in one country to Castro’s socialism on one island), home-grown forms of state-led African socialism (Nyerere’s ujamma), the hybrid of state and market (the Asian Tigers), and shock therapy economics (post-communist Russia and post-Allende Chile).
And what of South Africa? A great many of these theories were applied here in past decades, even if theorising poverty is today far less common. Most academics have instead taken up consultancies to become more relevant, and in such a milieu, asking bigger questions about the mode of production is plainly useless.
The resulting state of intellectual sloth compelled us to ask, are we uprooting or re-rooting poverty in post-apartheid South Africa?
It appears the latter, for the authoritative SA Labour and Development Research Unit published a report early this year arguing that while rural poverty has been reduced, a tiny bit, mainly through expanded welfare transfer payments and emigration of poor people to the cities, urban poverty actually increased from 1993-2008.
In other words, what ordinary observers view as a manifestation of dreadful policy failure – the peri-urban shack settlement stretching for miles – is in reality an improvement over life in the depressed, hopeless rural periphery. Urbanisation increases, urban poverty increases, but overall poverty decreases – leaving the South African Presidency and some commentators to brag that progress is gradually being achieved, that the War on Poverty is being won.
It’s not, although the state’s War on the Poor is being waged with enthusiasm. We know this from the seemingly ubiquitous ‘service delivery protests’ that turn the state’s attention from attacking poverty, to attacking people. The poor in turn react by burning down state buildings and councillors’ houses in townships ranging from small Mpumalanga dorpies in the mountainous East, to the big-city ghettoes and highways on the plains of the Western Cape.
The National Intelligence Agency is called upon to investigate the reasons for protest. Often, the poor find their quest for justice ending in the same way that the Monty Python quest for the Holy Grail was subverted: with the entire cast arrested.
Yet the state’s supposed enemy, poverty, is bunkered in and heavily fortified. From time to time the enemy suddenly emerges in the form of toyi-toying youth, who manoeuvre with seeming ease around desperately outnumbered local police forces. Indeed this is now a fully-fledged class war, unwinnable under the country’s prevailing economic conditions, given the motley coalition of power brokers engaged in internecine Alliance warfare, all still held within the vice-grip of neoliberal Treasury and Reserve Bank officials.
After all, a million jobs have been lost over the last year, and the macroeconomic ‘recovery’ is accompanied by further job-shedding. The poor are advancing relentlessly, and the SA War on Poverty looks like a US/Vietnam or Soviet/US Afghanistan story-line. The state’s forces are obviously confused and confounded, with anti-poverty strategies comparable to pre-1942 Maginot lines, easily broken through by a clever enemy. In this terrain, trickle-down grants are simply not good enough to stem the broken dike.
The battlefield carnage comes ever closer to home. Just as Pretoria lost its last war against Cuban fighter jets on the outskirts of the Angolan city of Cuito Cuanavale in 1988, bodybags containing high-profile warriors (then it was younger white men, now older ANC politicians) can no longer be disguised, carrying names like Mbeki, Mlambo-Ngcuka, Netshitenzhe, Erwin, Chikane, Pahad.
Following a major Durban conference of poverty scholars hosted by the SA-Netherlands Programme for Research Alternatives in Development, we sensed this state’s imminent defeat, and thus sought to collect leading war scholars’ ideas in a book published this week by Africa World Press.
Its title signifies something we had hoped would not happen: Jacob Zuma turning 180 degrees from his background in poverty, kicking back hard against tough opponents, but then accidentally (we assume) sending the ball careening into his own net.
This is just a book, not a Holy Grail. Zuma’s Own Goal will be launched on Friday by Sanpad at the Elangeni.
You are invited, if you RSVP at 031 279-3900 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 031 279-3900 end_of_the_skype_highlighting.
(Desai, Bond and Maharaj are Durban-based scholar-activists.)
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