IN RECENT days Ronnie Kasrils has been referred to as “a rebel, a Judas, a scoundrel”, as “Satan”, and as a “disruptive, reckless and counter-revolutionary” figure spitting on “the long struggles and the sacrifices of our people”.
And since 2004 organised popular movements have often actively called for a boycott of the polls.
Of course the “Vote No” campaign is asking for spoilt ballots or votes for smaller parties other than the DA. But the sentiment animating this, a desire to withdraw support from the ANC, sometimes in the hope of waking it up, is often the same as that informing decisions not to vote at all.
The “Vote No” campaign also has a certain resonance with Numsa’s decision not to campaign for the ANC, or to offer it financial support, in this election.
Nonetheless the “Vote No” campaign is not rooted in popular organisation and struggle. It is a move on the part of a dissident elite, some of whom have drifted into the kind of dubious version of left politics that takes the form of busing in poor people to attend NGO meetings over which they have no control and pretending, perhaps to themselves as much as anyone else, that this paternalism – a world apart from mass democratic politics – constitutes movement building.
But while this campaign is located at a considerable organisational distance from the struggle on the streets, our public sphere is very much an elite space and people of the stature of Kasrils and Madlala-Routledge have a genuine capacity to shake it up.
José Saramango, the communist writer, and winner of the Nobel prize for literature, began his final novel, Seeing, with an election in an unnamed city in an unnamed country. The novel opens on election day and there’s a hard rain, an almost Biblical rain falling. No one comes in to vote.
At around four in the afternoon voters start trickling in. When the votes are counted 70% are blank. Error is assumed and a second election is set for a week later. This time, despite considerable pressure from the media, 83% of the ballots are blank.
The politicians suspect an anarchist conspiracy. With the legitimacy of the politicians called into question, they turn on the people and there are arrests, interrogations, an avalanche of propaganda and even a siege of the city as the politicians become ever more desperate to insist that the people must offer them the ritual show of support on which their power rests.
The point of the novel is that the power of the political class in certain kinds of democracies depends on people accepting the reduction of democracy to the prospect of making a choice from a set of entirely inadequate alternatives.
The novel has acquired a certain contemporary resonance in recent years as electoral boycotts have been staged against the venality of the political class, its intersections with corporate and other elites, and its complete lack of social imagination, in countries like Greece, India, Mexico and Spain.
The “Vote No” campaign does not assert electoral abstentionism as a principle. On the contrary the suggestion that votes are either spoilt or given to smaller parties is understood as a conjunctural and tactical intervention that is in part a holding operation until a credible electoral choice or choices emerge and in part an attempt to make it clear that there will be fertile ground for credible alternatives.
The campaign can’t claim to be genuinely rooted in popular struggle and organisation. But the hysterical response to it from the ANC is telling.
It shows that as the party limps and stumbles into its decline, sustained by the idea of the ANC rather than its tawdry reality, and buttressed with patronage and repression, it feels itself to be vulnerable to symbolic interventions that mark out the steady withdrawal from participation in its fantasies about itself.
It’s clear the ANC sees ideas that have the temerity to question the notion that this election offers voters a credible choice as a threat to its political legitimacy.
Richard Pithouse teaches politics at Rhodes University. This article is from the South African Civil Society Information Service
Telling response to Kasrils
And since 2004 organised popular movements have often actively called for a boycott of the polls.
Of course the “Vote No” campaign is asking for spoilt ballots or votes for smaller parties other than the DA. But the sentiment animating this, a desire to withdraw support from the ANC, sometimes in the hope of waking it up, is often the same as that informing decisions not to vote at all.
The “Vote No” campaign also has a certain resonance with Numsa’s decision not to campaign for the ANC, or to offer it financial support, in this election.
Nonetheless the “Vote No” campaign is not rooted in popular organisation and struggle. It is a move on the part of a dissident elite, some of whom have drifted into the kind of dubious version of left politics that takes the form of busing in poor people to attend NGO meetings over which they have no control and pretending, perhaps to themselves as much as anyone else, that this paternalism – a world apart from mass democratic politics – constitutes movement building.
But while this campaign is located at a considerable organisational distance from the struggle on the streets, our public sphere is very much an elite space and people of the stature of Kasrils and Madlala-Routledge have a genuine capacity to shake it up.
José Saramango, the communist writer, and winner of the Nobel prize for literature, began his final novel, Seeing, with an election in an unnamed city in an unnamed country. The novel opens on election day and there’s a hard rain, an almost Biblical rain falling. No one comes in to vote.
At around four in the afternoon voters start trickling in. When the votes are counted 70% are blank. Error is assumed and a second election is set for a week later. This time, despite considerable pressure from the media, 83% of the ballots are blank.
The politicians suspect an anarchist conspiracy. With the legitimacy of the politicians called into question, they turn on the people and there are arrests, interrogations, an avalanche of propaganda and even a siege of the city as the politicians become ever more desperate to insist that the people must offer them the ritual show of support on which their power rests.
The point of the novel is that the power of the political class in certain kinds of democracies depends on people accepting the reduction of democracy to the prospect of making a choice from a set of entirely inadequate alternatives.
The novel has acquired a certain contemporary resonance in recent years as electoral boycotts have been staged against the venality of the political class, its intersections with corporate and other elites, and its complete lack of social imagination, in countries like Greece, India, Mexico and Spain.
The “Vote No” campaign does not assert electoral abstentionism as a principle. On the contrary the suggestion that votes are either spoilt or given to smaller parties is understood as a conjunctural and tactical intervention that is in part a holding operation until a credible electoral choice or choices emerge and in part an attempt to make it clear that there will be fertile ground for credible alternatives.
The campaign can’t claim to be genuinely rooted in popular struggle and organisation. But the hysterical response to it from the ANC is telling.
It shows that as the party limps and stumbles into its decline, sustained by the idea of the ANC rather than its tawdry reality, and buttressed with patronage and repression, it feels itself to be vulnerable to symbolic interventions that mark out the steady withdrawal from participation in its fantasies about itself.
It’s clear the ANC sees ideas that have the temerity to question the notion that this election offers voters a credible choice as a threat to its political legitimacy.
Richard Pithouse teaches politics at Rhodes University. This article is from the South African Civil Society Information Service
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