No Apology

In the face of political difficulty the English language becomes ambiguous. For example, the crucial English word “subject” can each be used to two opposite things: either a free or a bound person. This is also the case with the word “agent”. The meaning of freedom is always contested. The word “author” in English derives its primary meaning from the Latin “auctor”, meaning an originator. An originator, by definition, has to be a subversive transgressor of a previous status quo or orthodoxy. How the rebel “author” becomes transformed through language into a conservative “authority” looks somewhat mysterious at first sight. But it actually shows very well how, under a bourgeois class dictatorship, everything is bent to the purposes of the bourgeoisie, even including the language itself. Everything subversive, if it cannot be crushed, must be co-opted. Any original act will always open the author up to charges of stealing or wasting time. Likewise, money freely given to a friend could, or even must, be held by a bourgeois judge to be “corruption”, whereas if the same money was paid for a consideration in the rotten cause of capital it would not be found corrupt. Within ANC ranks and in “ANC Today” some of the defenders of black bourgeois economic empowerment would even try to domesticate the work of Karl Marx and turn it to their purposes. The revolutionary author Marx becomes in their mouths (as once in the mouths of Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky) all of a sudden an apparent supporter of capitalist class formation! This Communist University blog is an author but not an authority. It does not bow to conventional wisdom per se. Nor does it try to set up a new conventionality. It is an author respecting other authors, forever. It is for freedom. Guest bloggers, please apply – or set up your own. The CU will be happy to help. Hence if this CU should say that Jacob Zuma is not in the camp of the Imperialist monopoly finance bourgeoisie, whereas Cyril Ramaphosa, Bulelani Nggcuka, Saki Macozoma, Penuell Maduna, Mzi Khumalo and others that have been mentioned are indeed in that Imperialist comprador camp, then you are free to disagree. And several people have recently disagreed. We await a written explanation of their point of view. Until it arrives in finished form we can only guess what it might be. Comrade Zuma lives in a large house – rented. He has a country place – consisting of a collection of rondavels. He has money – borrowed. But even if he had a lot of money of his own, like his fellow ex-Robben-Islander Nelson Mandela, so what? Is that the point? As the great Shivji pointed out this month in his valedictory lecture: capital is not a thing, it is a relation. The oppressed poor don’t usually begrudge the rich their riches. They would like to have such riches, too. They seem to know very well the crucial difference between the good wealth and comfort that they desire, and the exploitative capital relation that differentiates them and drives them down, whether as workers, peasants, petty bourgeois, or unemployed and destitute. Knowing all this, it should be easy to discriminate between a merely rich man, and a capitalist. To illustrate this distinction Karl Marx (in Capital Vol. 1) calls the merely rich man a “miser”. By contrast with such a simply rich person the capitalist may properly own very little (e.g. the late Brett Kebble). The capitalist is distinguished by being a master of the relations of capital, which if investigated are found to be a spectacle, an illusion, and a fraud of humanity. Yet the difference between a Zuma and a capitalist is still not clear to some of our critics. Tomorrow Jacob Zuma goes on trial on charges of corruption, while the masters of the generally corrupt relationship called capitalism go free, demanding respect and honours. Today, on the day of the 85th anniversary of the founding of the South African Communist Party, the same Jacob Zuma will address the SACP’s anniversary rally on behalf of the African National Congress. The poor people understand all this very well. They support Zuma. Others don’t understand it. They find it “ironic”. We await their further and better responses. Meanwhile, Jacob Zuma does not look like a capitalist or a miser or a corrupt person from here. Which leaves him as a free-willing individual, and his supporters as free choosers of their own leadership, something we should respect. By all means expect an agenda from Zuma. There is time for that. The ANC electoral Congress is in December 2007 and the national election in 2009. Vukani Mde’s excellent reflections (from his Weekender Political Diary) on all this are linked below. The Johannesburg YCL political school meets today at 11h00 in the SATAWU offices, 13th Floor, Old Mutual Building, 29 Kerk Street, between Harrison and Loveday Streets, Johannesburg. They will be studying Jeremy Cronin’s “Neo-liberalism, reformism, populism and ultra-leftism”. Next week they will be discussing Lenin’s short but powerful works on women (linked below). Click on these links: Lenin on Women, 1919 – 1920 (4097 words) Mixed birthday messages for SACP, Vukani Mde, Weekender (456 words) We dabblers shall overwhelm the NEC, Vukani Mde, Weekender (333 words) So who is it gonna be, Vukani Mde, Weekender (198 words) From China with love and PS, Vukani Mde, Weekender (303 words)