The political movements led by Julius Malema and Jacob Zuma have gathered around them a “progressive caucus” in Parliament. On the face of things, it sounds, well, progressive; a step in the right direction is often a good thing.
In the case of the progressive caucus, and given their valorisation of violence, their paramilitarism, which should be out of place in a democratic society, and increased nativisms – belief in the enduring validity of their own ideas and that only the ideas of native-born people matter, anyway – the gathering seems more like a reactionary group.
The caucus seems to draw its intellectual inspiration from the nasty origins of Western progressivism while making all the right noises about “revolution” and “the people”.
Consider how a political leader may say “we must fight for the rights of our peoples”: how great that sounds until you realise that Adolf Hitler (the anti-communist), Donald Trump (the disaster capitalist and hero of the bros in the manosphere), and even Pol Pot may say or have said nice things about their own people.
Given some of the ideological solidarities between figures on the progressive carousel and the late Cambodian revolutionary and their expressed views about non-Africans (whites, coloureds, and Indians) we should probably remember that Pol Pot, too, was highly suspicious of ethnic minorities and foreigners.
In his revolutionary-speak, they were bad elements that “clung to old ways, who complained” incessantly, and were “condemned as counter-revolutionaries simply based on their appearance, previous professions, or background”. All of which resulted in torture and extra-judicial executions.
In other words, when someone says anything about “the people” there should probably be a lot of careful scrutiny.
Opening the caucus for closer inspection, it seems to represent an incoherent, apparently loose affiliation with cult-like figures united by their opposition to real or imaginary forces of classical liberalism, liberal capitalism and social democracy, and even communism – to the extent that the South African Communist Party can be taken seriously.
The biggest flaw, it seems, is in the association with Western/European progressivism. It’s what happens when you present yourself as a carrier of supreme logic, throwing around catchy slogans and relying on rhetoric and cant.
On the face of things, this progressivism seems to lack an emancipatory impulse. This absence is apparent mainly because the progressive caucus seems to draw on the European tradition (Age of Enlightenment between 1685 and about 1820), and/or the North American strand. Let’s evaluate these two strands and try to identify the immanent and insoluble contradictions of Western/European progressivism.
Making a lot of money and erecting shiny buildings (adorning our lives with the material trappings of capitalist consumer culture) can never be a measure of human achievement.
European and North American progressivism
The European tradition of progressivism focused explicitly on liberalism and social democracy, much of which was already in place in some form on that continent. The US version had the good intention of encouraging transparency and better governance. In both cases, progressivism was Eurocentric (the good and the bad) and simply insisted on better managing society.
If, however, we situate the Europeans and the North Americans in history, we have to include the times when colonial empires were firmly in place. Notwithstanding the “progressive intents” of the Enlightenment between 1880 and 1920, the Belgians inflicted one of the worst and most vicious genocides on the Congolese.
The German genocide against the Herero and Nama people between 1904 and 1907 ran against the grain of European self-images of Enlightenment progressivism.
Still staying with the Europeans, when they were at war between 1914 and 1945, at least 80 million around the world were killed. Some estimates are much higher.
So, if the European Enlightenment “raised the greatest hopes ever conceived of humanity”, as Yehudi Menuhin said of European wars in the 20th century, it (also) “destroyed all illusions and ideals”.
What about the US “progressive reformers”? The US presents itself as the oldest democracy in the world. Sure. Except democracies do not commit genocide, nor do they enslave people, restrict Asian movements to internment camps, and they do not implement eugenics and involuntary sterilisation. Let’s ask Katie Eyer, a legal scholar at Rutgers University in the US, who explained this continuity rather well:
“Many of the justifications that segregationists offered for their actions — such as a desire for good schools and safe neighbourhoods — do not look so very different from the justifications that we continue to rely on to legitimise racial inequality today. Thus, an accurate accounting of our national history of racial discrimination — rather than substantiating a sharp break between past and present — reveals many uncomfortable continuities.”
So, you can say the US has been a democracy since 1776, but an intellectually more honest account would appreciate the way that, progressive reformists notwithstanding, undemocratic politics and policies in that country went from erasure of the indigenous people to slavery, to Jim Crow and now, to mass incarceration of black males. There has been an almost seamless transition from slavery to mass incarceration. See Loï Wacquant’s chapter, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration” in the book, Race Law and Society.
Wacquant explained that the way in which bondage effected the “social death” of imported African captives and their descendants on American soil, mass incarceration also induces the civic death of those it ensnares by extruding them from the social compact. Slavery, the Jim Crow system and the ghetto are “race-making” institutions, which is to say that they do not simply process an ethno-racial division that would somehow exist outside of and independently from them.
In South Africa, the parliamentary progressive caucus would insist on their anti-imperialist credentials. That’s cool, ja. Yet, early in the US progressive era (1898-1917), progressives assumed an imperialist position. Their position was the continued expansion of American capitalism to Africa, Asia and Latin America, for the benefit of Americans.
Self-described as “progressive reformers” they believed that America’s growth and prosperity were inseparable from the spread of American capitalism around the world – by various means of coercion and consent. Almost all progressives in the US were either indifferent to, nor did they object to, that country’s military interventions in Latin America and the preparation for and eventual entry of America into World War 1.
The question we may ask of Parliament’s progressive caucus is this: which progressivism inspires you the most, the European or the North American?
We either listen to and take seriously the rhetoric from or about the progressive caucus, or we can look at the evidence and conduct of its members.
They are simultaneously fascistic and authoritarian, driven by personalities (Jacob Zuma and Julius Malema). They are nativist, driven by the politics of revenge, and everyone who looks different, sounds different or has a professional class affiliation that is “counter-revolutionary,” has to be removed from state and society.
There is, in sum, nothing emancipatory about the progressive caucus, and many members are much better described as professional politicians and political prebendaries who would change allegiance as soon as the wadi runs dry, as it will when seasons change. DM