Peking Duck

In England there is a way of talking known as the royal “we”. This is the second person plural form used by kings and queens and Margaret (“We are a grandmother”) Thatcher. It goes something like this: 1st Gentleman: “Gad sir, how dare you! You farted in front of the queen!” 2nd Gentleman: “Frightfully sorry, old boy! I didn’t know it was her turn!” Queen Victoria: “We are not amused!” President Thabo Mbeki often uses the royal “we”. He did so again yesterday in “ANC Today”. His weekly on-line letter begins like this: “Recently we participated in the 30th Anniversary and Corporate Gala Dinner of the Black Management Forum (BMF).” This “we” is not him and his wife, Zanele. It is not him, Essop Pahad and Frank Chikane. It is just him, Thabo Mbeki, alone. It is the royal “we”. His letter goes on to praise Mandarins, (yes, Chinese Mandarins) in a manner which will have the likes of Devan Pillay (prophet of bureaucratic “embedded autonomy”) glowing with courtly pleasure. See the linked document from ANC Today below for this part of the presidential blog. There are three articles in the ANC Today this week. The second one (not linked below) is a motivational speech for bureaucratic “best practice” from Minister of Provincial and Local Government Sydney Mufamadi. Always, the bureaucrat must look over his or her shoulder like a person at a polite banquet, to see which cutlery is supposed to be used for which dish. In “best practice” there is no autonomy, “embedded” or otherwise. Follow-my-leader is the rule. Things are “de rigeur” or “faux pas” (“done” or “not done”). Nobody must think for himself. The mystery author of the over-excited unsigned article called “The Communist Assault on the Year 1996” also repeatedly pronounces from the position of the royal “we”. Yet it reads more like the grubby and convoluted work of Ronald Suresh Roberts than that of our philosopher king-emperor and Lord of the Mandarins, Thabo Mbeki. The trouble with anonymity is that you can never be sure. It might even be a joke. See the second ANC Today extract in the first document below. Text-jugglers, phrasemongers, trick-cyclists, bibelots, mountebanks and charlatans are like bodily gases. They are better out than in. The harder they come, the sooner they blow away. As Bob Dylan almost once sang to our president’s generation: “Your answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind”. The WTO is another source of greenhouse gas. But more dangerous. Neva Makgetla tells it like it is. See below. COSATU Weekly puts out the message on the Cuban Five, short and to the point. See below. Also below, a short letter on the capitalist art of hedging, directed at the Mandarins of Telkom. Lenin was a great straight talker, and for that reason was practically immune to the schemes of frauds and poseurs. As Jeremy Cronin recently reminded us, Lenin regarded reformism as a far greater danger than ultra-leftism. In the end it is the free-willing historical subject, both individual and collective, that matters. Power to the people! The Johannesburg YCL will meet at 11h00 on Sunday, July 2nd in the SATAWU offices, 13th floor, Old Mutual Building, 29 Kerk Street, between Harrison and Loveday to discuss excerpts from Lenin’s “Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution”. A very apt work for the present conjuncture. Next week, presumably at the same time and place, the same YCL will discuss excerpts from “Left Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder”. See the link below. Click on these links: Revolutionary Mandarins and legal Marxism, ANC Today (4355 words) Africa in danger of Doha runaround, Makgetla, Business Day (732 words) Days of support of the Cuban Five, COSATU Weekly (487 words) A perfect hedge, Letter, Business Day (214 words) Lenin, 1920, Left-Wing Communism, C1, 2, 4, 6 & 7 (14931 words)