Succession More Than You Thought

The bourgeois newspapers are not completely empty of good writing. The Communist University tries hard to find the best. But this is not the only reason for following the bourgeois press. The press is the open signalling system that the ruling class has to use. Everything of bourgeois rule that must be socially generalised, or in other words to be made hegemonic, has to be publicly visible. The meaning and intention of bourgeois class rule, both tactically and strategically, are not hidden. On the contrary they are made brutally clear on a daily basis. This is easy to see if the press is sampled across several different titles, and over time. So what is going on right now? On Friday, Ngoako Ramatlhodi was smeared in the Mail and Guardian’s embedded “Scorpions section”. (In the City Press it is revealed that the leaked affidavit allegations against Ramatlhodi come from apartheid-era cane-furniture millionaire Habakuk Shikoane). Another article, by Vicky Robinson and Stefaans Brummer in the M&G fingers dozens of individuals, including at least two National Office Bearers of the ANC. On Saturday both Lawrence Mushwana and Zola Skweyiya came under pressure in the Weekender, and there was a front page splash about Tony Yengeni in the Saturday Star. On Sunday the City Press front page went after ANC Chief Whip Mbulelo Goniwe. The Sunday Times front-page splash smears the Commissioner of Police, Jackie Selebi. The Sunday Independent has a faux-news piece on its front page that has the sole purpose of propping up the shaky Schabir Shaik judgement. These three articles are linked below. The CU suggests you read them with certain questions in mind:

• Is there a sudden outbreak of corruption, or has it always been there, or are these reports based on innuendo and smear?
• Is there any such thing as bourgeois morality, or is bourgeois morality always hypocritical? Are there other corrupt leaders have not been touched, and if so, why?
• Is there any part of the liberation democracy that can survive the attentions of the Scorpions, the NPA, and the courts?
• If not, who are going to be the inheritors of the revolutionary leadership that is being dismissed wholesale by legal process - assisted, witnessed and approved of by the bourgeois press?

It is fine to say: We don’t want corrupt people. At least it would be fine if you could clearly distinguish the corrupt from the clean. But even if you could do that, there remains the practical problem of reconstructing a new political cadre to replace the one that is being dismissed or locked up wholesale, by legal process led by “Hollywood” media hysteria. If there are no democratic leaders who could resist the “anti-corruption” bum’s rush, then get used to the fact that the bourgeois press is your new boss. It will hold the whip. Your “representatives” from now on will be their people, and strangers to you. They will only survive as long as the bourgeois media wants them to. We could in the future be saying “our ANC leaders let us down” or that they wasted our liberation, but whose fault will it really be, if we let the bourgeoisie take the gap left by the axing of this revolution generation? It is fine to say: No smoke without fire. But then what do you do after the bonfire of all the present leaders? For example, the SACP is clean, but will the bourgeois press support the SACP? Not likely! So without political measures taken now, what we will get is only a different lot of corrupt bourgeois, except that the new ones will be less committed to the liberation movement of the past, or not committed at all, but in fact beholden to the bourgeoisie. In the matter of defining guilt and corruption the three articles linked below fail. Instead, they rely on innuendo, rumour, and puff. They suggest but do not prove. The law itself is unable to give certainty, as the Shaik case shows. The reason is that in a society that is based on capitalist corruption, there is no test that can distinguish corruption from normal business. The best the courts can do is to decide matters of material fact. In the matter of intention, which as we have seen is the heart of the matter of corruption, the law is bound to fail. Then it descends to being a political instrument, following and not leading the bourgeois media hysteria, whether the judges intend this or not. So it was with the “generally corrupt relationship” fiasco, as we have seen. So it also was when in the Kapenguria courthouse Judge Ransley Thacker convicted Jomo Kenyatta, Paul Ngei, Bildad Kaggia, Achieng Oneko, Fred Kubai and Kungu Karumba 53 years ago. The law took out the revolutionary cadre, in an atmosphere of hysteria. The consequences for Kenya are still felt today – neo-colonialism, neo-liberalism, poverty and capitalism, or in a word: corruption. In the bourgeois press the writer who has so far come closest to expressing the nature of the transition from real revolutionary morality to phoney bourgeois morality is the Sunday Independent’s Jeremy Gordin (see the link below). The last linked document, appropriately, is the YCL’s discussion document on organisation building. All three of their documents will be launched on Tuesday at 11h00, at the third floor, COSATU House. Click on these links: ANC chief whip innuendoed, Mpumelelo Mkhabela, City Press (767 words) Exploding diary in boot of car - not, by 3 new journalists, S Times (997 words) Snow job on Squires by new Liz Clarke, Sunday Independent (587 words) Revolutionary morality, legal guilt, Jeremy Gordin, Sunday Independent (1767 words) YCL discussion document on Organisation Building (7894 words)