The Ruth First Lecture was a slap in the face of the true bearers of racial and economic inequality, says Christopher Rutledge.
Johannesburg - Ruth First, according to the SAHistory.org website, was a “Marxist with a wide internationalist perspective who travelled to China, the Union Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) and countries in Africa, experiences that she documented and analysed.
“She was central to debates within the Johannesburg Discussion Club, which led to the formation of the underground South African Communist Party - SACP (of which First was a member).
“She had a brilliant intellect and did not suffer fools gladly. Her sharp criticism and her impatience with bluster earned her enemies and she was often feared in political debate. However, she was not dogmatic.
“First’s willingness to take up a position which she considered to be just, was not always welcomed within the ANC or SACP”.
It was disturbing thus to see how this critical Marxist voice and her lasting legacy of speaking out about the systemic inequalities that underpin the global system of capitalism, was turned into a liberal (and here I use the word in its most vulgar manifestation of denying the structural causes of inequality) middle class affirmation of self.
The contributors, including the moderator, dressed up as “militant coconuts” engaged in an embarrassing session of back-slapping and affirmation of middle-class values and legitimising “House Negro” politics, that left one momentarily suspended in a surreal world in which 20 million black South Africans and their battle to put food on the table, were reduced to nothingness.
At question was not the critical undogmatic engagement with structural power that looms over the faltering dream of a New South Africa, one imagines Ruth First would have placed before us, but instead we were treated to the “bluster” of the personal dilemma of the black middle class in accessing the institutions of White Supremacy.
Many “coconuts”, I am sure, will take issue with my description of identity politics and the personalisation of those identities as “bluster”. But allow me to explain.
One cannot be sure what the authors of the SAHistory.Org had in mind when describing First`s impatience with bluster, but in the context one can safely assume that it alludes to” loud, aggressive, or indignant talk with little effect”, with emphasis on little effect.
The entire premise of the lecture was based on, much like a religious call to conversion, the mistaken notion that focusing on the inequality between individuals will and can lead to the disarming and dismantling of the structural system of inequality. The personal, besides limiting the horizon of the possible and what is ultimately required to dismantle a system, also risks hampering the battle against prejudice and discrimination that is the lived reality in the here and now.
For the same reason that apartheid as a political system could not be defeated by this type of reflection on individual relationships, so too, the extended reality of class, racial and gender privilege cannot realistically be undone by directing people away from the kind of social solidarity necessary to overcome oppression.
As an exercise in personal reflection on our need for recognition that helps the audience and reader to engage with the question of oppression and privilege at a psychological level, it certainly has value. As a “critical socially engaged” reflection on the systemic inequalities that underpin the South African reality, however, it falls short.
As Mattias Iser points out; if our expectations of being recognised are always contingent upon the social and historical context we live in, how is moral and political progress possible at all? Is it - in view of our basic dependency on the view of others - not more likely that our striving for recognition leads to uncritical conformity instead of an emancipatory struggle for recognition?
Already in Rousseau's Second Discourse on Inequality (Rousseau 1755), he argued that individuals lose themselves in vain pretence, because they deceptively attempt to please others. Building on this basic premise, Jean-Paul Sartre points out that individuals are reified by every kind of recognition because even the affirmation of others freezes the subjects in their present state, thereby denying their potential for change.
Struggles for recognition have the unfortunate potential of enclosing us ever deeper in a dependency on power relations without ever rising to the level of understanding the construct which binds us.
Well-known feminist writer Judith Butler points out that norms of recognition never remain valid by themselves but need constant reaffirmation. While the process of reaffirming dominant norms occurs in various forms, some as contestation, others as critical reflection, the danger is always that the paradigm of the Master’s House remains intact and our struggle for recognition simply becomes a negotiation for accommodation within the Master’s House. As Bell Hooks pointed out though, the Master’s House cannot be dismantled using the Master’s tools.
The lectures’ middle-class bias and its denial of the lived reality and anger of those who do not meander in the hallowed halls of UCT and Harvard, is most probably the panel’s most searing slap in the face of the true bearers of racial and economic inequality, the intellectual dishonesty which purports to find systemic solutions in the individual psychology, notwithstanding.
As Patricia Hills Collins points out: “Each one of us derives varying amounts of penalty and privilege from multiple systems of oppression that shapes our lives”.
Acknowledging that these systemic and structural inequalities exist is important, but it is only the first step. A discourse or an analysis that stops at this acknowledgement is incomplete to be sure, but also fundamentally inadequate, and unable to provide a “critical, socially engaged” platform worthy of the legacy of a critical Marxist thinker. A critical engagement would move beyond seeking accommodation within the system and its paradigms to construct new paradigms that change the system and produce different results.
Yet, the question, about the lecture and its self-appointed committee, that begs an answer, is not so much the uncritical bluster, the divergence from the ethos of what Ruth First stood for and the make up of the panel and committee, but to what purpose?
To be true to Ruth First’s Marxist history, it would be appropriate to locate this question in a materialist conception of history and to quote Marx in trying to provide some perspective to the question of motive.
Marx, in describing the anti-Irish racism of the 19th century is clear that; “[t]his antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And that class is fully aware of it.”
Today we might call this kind of analysis a conspiracy theory. Certainly this claim of conspiracy theory is the corollary of a discourse that focuses primarily on the individual relationship, of making privilege visible, rather than on the system that produces the relationship.
But if Marx is correct, then the vast effort to render the class and structural causes of privilege, and by extension, exploitation, invisible, serves not the cause of progress, but of the status quo.
What should we then read into the usurpation of Ruth First’s Marxist legacy or the subsequent unprecedented 4 000-word apologia by the moderator on the Independent Media Group’s platform, if not an attempt by the ruling classes, and the House Negros to endow the public discourse with an “impotence” and a diversion from the real causes of inequality?
Or is it a case of what Hannah Arendt calls “founding a new Rome”? In remaining locked in the paradigm of the Master’s House, are we not guilty of neglecting the fundamental requirement to “begin”? As she so eloquently states: “[t]he way the beginner starts whatever he intends to do lays down the law of action for those who have joined him in order to partake in the enterprise and to bring about its accomplishment”.
In beginning, we have to break free of the constraints which the Master has put in place. This cannot come about if we are knowingly or unknowingly tethered to recognition of identities that are defined by the Master’s paradigm and kept alive by the set agenda of the House Nigga. The act of “foundation”, beginning, requires us not to found “South Africa anew”, but to found a “new South Africa”. In order to do that, our discourse must move from the shallow pools of race, the past and the status quo, to the open waters of emancipation, the future and the anomalous.
* Christopher Rutledge is a young lion of the 80`s brigade and a social activist and commentator.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.