The Question Is Put

Professor Peter Evans is a very charming person. He is from California and gave the Harold Wolpe Seminar at the Fort on Constitution Hill in Johannesburg last night. His presentation was a revelation of the most sincere and elaborate kind of liberal reformism imaginable. In his mind the state, and the development of society, can and should be essentially reduced to the agency of a cadre of meritocratic civil servants - a benign bureaucracy. He calls this situation not fascism but “embedded autonomy”, hoping by combining these words to evade their mutual contradiction. Evans’ “autonomy” means that the civil servants decide without having to account (except to each other), while “embedded” is supposed to mean connected, either, as in the past, to a national bourgeoisie or, wishfully, in the future, to a “vibrant” pluralist “civil society” where no single class would dominate, leaving the civil servants even more powerful by default. “Power to the People” it is not. What Rosa Luxemburg wrote at the end of “Reform and Revolution” in relation to Eduard Bernstein applies to Peter Evans and to his South African supporters such as Stephen Gelb and Devan Pillay: “’What? Is that all you have to say?’ Not the shadow of an original thought! Not a single idea that was not refuted, crushed, reduced into dust by Marxism several decades ago! It was enough for opportunism to speak out to prove it had nothing to say.” In other words the reformists, by parading their illusions, are helping us to shed our illusions. The final page of Karl Marx’s 1847 “Poverty of Philosophy” is equally direct: “It is only in an order of things in which there are no more classes and class antagonisms that social evolutions will cease to be political revolutions. Till then, on the eve of every general reshuffling of society, the last word of social science will always be: ‘Le combat ou la mort; la lutte sanguinaire ou le neant. C'est ainsi que la question est invinciblement posee.’ [George Sand, from the novel Jean Siska: ‘Combat or Death: bloody struggle or extinction. It is thus that the question is inexorably put.’]” The contradictions are sharpening, whether we like it or not. Likewise in the new Umsebenzi Online, the class conflict within the women’s movement becomes more critical with the proposed formation of a formal Progressive Women’s Movement. The anonymous criticisms of ANC Today are also sharply and fully dismissed in this Umsebenzi Online, in a way that turns the “State Power” debate around and takes it a lot further forward. Let us hope that Professor Evans has a chance to read this, and also his supporters. These are not two separate debates. They form one debate. See the linked issue below. The same debate surfaces in COSATU GS Zwelinzima Vavi’s two recent speeches given during the Durban events of the past week, covering both national and international questions, and linked below. There is to be a MARCH on August 8th in Woodmead against the cruel transnational employer “Kraft”. See the linked notice from FAWU, with support from NUMSA. Finally, see the linked document of COSATU’s wishes for Cuban President Fidel Castro’s speedy recovery. Click on these links: Umsebenzi Online 02 August 2006, Women, and SACP Response to ANC Today (6155 words) COSATU GS Z Vavi to 85th Anniversary of SACP, Pietermaritzburg, 2006 (1942 words) COSATU GS Z Vavi to ITWF Congress, Durban 2006 (1057 words) FAWU March to Kraft HO 10h00 Woodmead 060808 (350 words) COSATU sends best wishes to Fidel Castro (256 words)