Andile Mngxitama is rapidly becoming the authority and custodian of the campaign against white monopoly capital, writes Malesela Steve Lebelo.
South Africa is a bourgeois society in which the white middle class of liberals and white supremacist bigots and the black middle class dominate all aspects of the public sphere. The latter, a creation of PW Botha’s Grand Design, Total Strategy, has grown exponentially since the onset of the transition in 1994.
It now includes a new political elite created out of Struggle credentials, real and imagined, but largely imagined. The black African subaltern classes, rooted in the South African Social Security Agency (Sassa)-created political economy, are subjected to conditions of social death institutionalised in Total Strategy and entrenched by the 1994 transition and the constitution that undergirds it.
The material conditions for the production and reproduction of a black middle class with a distinct social and political outlook and economic interests was at the heart of Botha’s Total Strategy. A determined response to the rising tide of black radicalism articulated in the Soweto Revolt, Total Strategy was a systematic assault on Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness (BC) philosophy as an instrument of mass mobilisation. It sought to fragment black solidarity forged by the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM). It requires exceptional historical imagination to appreciate Total Strategy’s systematic assault on black radicalism while showing characteristic tolerance for the congress tradition.
The construction of a black middle class became one of the imperatives of Total Strategy in its determination to contain black radicalism. This was a deliberate, calculated manoeuvre to create a layer of “a black laager” to insulate the white supremacist social order against the predictable though sporadic eruptions of popular unrest and violence from the black African subaltern classes. The Botha-created black middle classes were insulated from the popular violence of 1984 to 1993 that ravaged black African subaltern classes. And so was the white supremacist social order.
The latter were perpetrators and victims in the carnage that consumed black African society. Their children were hauled out of class to murder and “necklace” an enemy of the revolution. It is schools in their neighbourhoods that became sites of struggle and theatres of violence that rendered them dysfunctional in the decade leading to the transition in 1994.
The dysfunctional state of these schools continues to haunt society. Two decades of dismal matric results serves to underscore the reality of social death afflicting the black African subaltern classes. It is only one of the myriad indicators that the yellow-suited Statistician-General, Pali Lehohla, has consistently identified as markers of black African subaltern classes’ condition of social death, not in as many words though.
The black middle class exists, protestations and denials to the contrary notwithstanding. It is a historical, political, economic and social reality whose existence is open to theoretical analysis and should be. The historical denial of their existence because they lived cheek-by- jowl with the black African subaltern classes no longer hold. Historically, black middle classes were stigmatised for collaborating with the white supremacist social order upon which their lifestyle depended.
With the creation of a new political elite, the 1994 transition destigmatised black pretensions and aspirations to middle class ranks. The black middle classes are chastised for their flight from blackness, demanding to be loved by white supremacist institutions totally incapable of loving them. The black middle classes are to the white supremacist bourgeois social order what “the house niggers” were to the “world the slaveholders made”: insiders. Botha bestowed the black middle class with a social life in a white supremacist bourgeois social order while thrusting the black African subaltern classes into a bottomless abyss of social death.
The black African subaltern classes’ condition of social death is considered a scandal by black middle classes. It is an affront to their sensibilities. The experience of racism by black African subaltern classes, who invariably exist outside the bourgeois social order, is no more than an academic exercise in seminar rooms.
Academics incapable of recognising, let alone conceptualising the social death that afflicts the black African subaltern classes dominate public intellectual discourse about the phenomenon. It is an academic undertaking exhilarating to academics enraged by images of a black man buried alive in a coffin and of a black pregnant woman caged at the back of a van. It is ammunition they use against white supremacists in the world the latter made.
The black African subaltern classes’ condition of social death is a constant menace to the bourgeois social order. Middle classes across the racial divide are anxious that “the miracle of 1994” may be at its nadir. Their anxiety is heightened by Jacob Zuma’s apparent determination to wreck the economy in his war against white monopoly and metropolitan capital.
White monopoly capital is the base upon which rests the bourgeois social order that nurtures white middle classes, including white supremacist bigots and black upwardly mobile middle classes. It is the material base that supports their respective lifestyles. Both should be concerned about the prospect of a violent reaction from the black African subaltern classes rooted in the Sassa political economy.
Yet, only the black middle classes are deeply concerned about the prospect of an eruption of popular violence from the black African subaltern classes as economic woes deepen. Total Strategy created a layer of a black, middle class laager to insulate the white supremacist and bourgeois social order and white monopoly capital. This layer of the black laager continues to serve that purpose.
Andile Mngxitama’s relentless pursuit of white monopoly capital exposed this reality. Absa’s nefarious deals with the apartheid state and later with Nelson Mandela are the subject of the public protector’s report, pointing to damning revelations that could harm the entire white monopoly capital sector. This has thrust Absa in the firing line in the event of an outbreak of popular unrest anticipated in 2017.
Mngxitama is convinced that this matter warrants mass mobilisation against Absa and the entire white monopoly capital sector. First to react to Mgnxitama’s call to the barricades is the black middle classes or in Zuma’s parlance “clever blacks”, who chastised him for attacking white monopoly capital.
Mngxitama is not maligned for the perceived affinity he has with the securocrats or Zuma camp and by extension, with the Guptas. It is rather for the threat he poses to white monopoly capital.
Emerging as the leading thinker in the securocrats’ think tank, Mngxitama is rapidly becoming the authority and custodian of the campaign against white monopoly capital. Zuma and the securocrats, upstaged by the Cyril Ramaphosa-Pravin Gordan axis, the corporatists, are turning to the masses, the black African subaltern classes.
In 2016 the securocrats suffered one crushing defeat after another. In Parliament, in the media and the courts, the securocrats were thumped.
Their turn to the masses, which may translate into taking the war against white monopoly capital to the streets, dovetails with Mngxitama’s strategic assessment of the political conjuncture.
In a rare display of political astuteness, Mngxitama has thrown down the gauntlet on Julius Malema and the EFF to lead a rolling mass action against Absa.
No prizes for guessing who, in Mngxitama’s mind, should be mobilised into a rolling mass action.
It is the black African subaltern classes.
* Lebelo is a historian and author.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.