The open letter to the SACP from Tim Cohen Time for Communist Party to make a contribution in Business Day on Monday has evoked an impassioned critique from Jeff Guy and continues the debate over socialism and free markets.
With permission here are a few extracts.
“There were several aspects of Marxism I found attractive: its ability to present a holistic and complete explanation not only for society as it exists, but also the way it unfolds. In that turbulent era, when apartheid was in its death throes — with states of emergency, detentions without trial, state clampdowns and endless protests — this holistic and complete explanation was like manna from heaven. I loved the way Marxism drove deep into the economic heart of the machine in fabulously intricate search for a science of society.”
“More immediately, Marxism was the door through which we as privileged students could enter the heady politics of the day, finding a common cause with black students in an era where the pull of Black Consciousness was declining and the push of Congress politics was coming to the fore. It was a time of horror and loss, but it was also vital and exciting. It was fabulous to feel part of a grand force for social change. I graduated with what was called a Bachelor of Arts, but actually what I got was a Bachelor of Marxism.”
“Over the years, I gradually lost my faith. It wasn’t just the failure of the Soviet system, although that was obviously part of it. It wasn’t just that communist governments were almost indistinguishable from suppressive autocracies.”
“It was something much more devastating: observable facts turned out more and more at odds with the grand theory. The more you knew about the theory, the more obvious the distinction between fact and theory became. Marxist theory, it turns out, is not only wrong but diametrically wrong. It’s not only not true; it’s the precise opposite of truth.”
“So here is my invitation: please join us in the world. The real world. The world in which people live, and not some twisted fantasy world of a German romantic who lived a century and a half ago.”
“It’s a fabulous, inventive, creative, rich, fun place. It has all the freedom your party promises but never delivers. By all means, bring your sense of social righteousness and the commitment to build a better world. But please, stop pretending you have an “intellectual” contribution to make to the ANC.”
“Social structures are not the mechanical box you claim they are. They are much more complicated and diverse than the strictures determined by your failed theories.”
“You are, literally, history.”
Business Day was the first to publish a critique by Emeritus professor of history Jeff Guy of the open letter A response to Cohen’s letter to the left and it needs to be read by clicking on the link or going to Business Day.
With permission here are a few random extracts.
“IF THERE is one feature of intellectual life in South Africa that makes me despair more than the failure of the political left to provide us with material for lively and informed debate, it is the crassness of the commentary coming from the right. Tim Cohen exhibits this to such a disturbing degree that his article, “Time for Communist Party to make a contribution” (July 16), demands an answer.”
“Cohen’s view of the history of capitalism is that of increasing freedom to pursue wealth and success. The opposing view is one of ever-restricted opportunity for the majority in a deepening crisis alleviated only by the enormous inventiveness with which capitalism exploits humanity. And this is apparent not only in the long, but in the short term. In 2007-08 the financial markets collapsed, ruined those who had invested in them, and were bailed out by the state backed ultimately by taxpayers’ money.”
“But this is not a question of cleaning up a mess. It is about changing our ideas and our mind-set. It is about realising and coming to terms with the fact that the myth of the market is of our making, and what has been exposed in this scandal is not an aberration, but the continued existence of that myth.”
“Or so those on the left believe. One cannot expect Business Day to go along with it. But its readers deserve more from Tim Cohen’s attack on what he sees as Marxism, the left, and the Communist Party. If, as he hopes, the left will join his real world, he has to do better than make a travesty of its ideas and ambitions.”
This is an important debate that needs to take place now in South Africa. There are those who enjoy the fruits of the market and millions who are prevented from gaining a foothold in the labour market. There are policies determined by government and collective agreements that protect the interests of those fortunate enough to have jobs while millions cannot find decent work because of such restrictive polices and practices. Those job seekers are more than willing to work at a wage negotiated by them with an employer and not fixed by others.
It is interesting that neither Tim Cohen nor Jeff Guy mention Leon Trotsky. Here is a quote from a recent biography by Bertrand M. Patenaude “Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary” (2009, Harper).
Quote at page 305
“The Soviet Union will live and develop as the new social basis created by the October Revolution,” Trotsky had declared after arriving in Mexico in 1937, when he predicted that the birthplace of socialism “will produce a regime of true democracy and will become the greatest factor for peace and for the social emancipation of humanity.” Although doubts crept into his later writings, through the Kremlin’s purges and the N azi-Soviet pact and its bloody aftermath he refused to surrender this utopian vision.
Unquote
In the Torque column in Business Day today David Gleason joins in the debate –
Fewer hungry under capitalism.
With permission here are some random extracts and the full article can be read by clicking on the link or going to Business Day itself.
“I HAVE been reading with interest the commentaries on communism and the South African Communist Party (SACP) in Business Day, and was especially fascinated to read the extraordinary attack on columnist Tim Cohen from Jeff Guy, emeritus professor of history at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.”
“Guy gets quite personal in places, but that’s typical of those losing an argument, any argument — play the man, distract attention from the real purpose. I happen to think the philosophy Marx spawned was brought to fruition by some of the most evil men ever to have walked the planet. Those who run today’s drug-and-arms syndicates, the Mafia of Capone and the estimated 1,5-million who make up the Chinese tongs and triads, would recognise the occupants of the Kremlin between 1917 and 1990 as blood brothers.”
“I am sure Guy won’t like Paul Johnson, the British commentator whose seminal work, A History of the Modern World (now under a different title) laid bare the evidence of rape, pillage and murder of those unfortunate enough to be governed by Russian communists.”
“My concern is local. I think the African National Congress (ANC) has been complicit in one of the greatest political frauds of recent centuries. It has presented itself to an adoring electorate as the party of salvation, the party that will provide “the masses” with the instruments of instant human happiness — houses, schools, hospitals, jobs. The architect of its programme, unobserved in the background, has been the SACP. The SACP has supplied the ANC with its ideological thinking, with all the excuses for failure to deliver, with the latest road to salvation — the national democratic revolution.”
“Guy cherry picks Cohen’s statements without expanding on them. Perhaps, he will argue, that’s caused by the demands of brevity — but he really must do his research. He counters Cohen’s world of opportunity with ‘a billion hungry’. But, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, the actual numbers were 878-million in 1969-71, or 26%, falling to 850-million or 13% after a large increase in population, in 2008. That’s huge; a halving of those going hungry while the world’s population nearly doubled from 3,6-billion in 1969 to the current 7,02-billion.”
“As for the pathetic attempt to blame modern society for climate change: climate change, like the poor, has been with us always. It’s part of the condition of the planet. And dreadful, greedy, dishonest bankers, ‘the commoditisation of human ambitions and desires’? Yeah, they are with us too. And what about all those dreadful, greedy, dishonest, murdering politicians, like Uncle Joe and kindly Mao ? ”
Letter from Donald Benson first published in Business Day today.
LETTER: A failed response
“I have rarely read a response that so completely missed countering the points expressed in the initial article (Trabant versus Mercedes, Cohen versus Marx, July 18).
Prof Jeff Guy’s response seemed to concentrate on the past three or four years of struggling economic experience, rather than to deal with the longer-term, decades-long, evidence of communistic failure.
How does Prof Guy explain what happened to the USSR, or why China’s growth has occurred since it switched to a capitalistic economic system (while retaining the political control associated with the communistic heritage)? And while Prof Guy complains about Tim Cohen comparing East Germany to West Germany and North Korea to South Korea, he doesn’t explain why he thinks those comparisons are wrong.
To a neutral observer, Prof Guy’s inability to explain the failures of communism implies that his response to Mr Cohen’s article is also a failure.”
This response by Tim Cohen was published for the first time today in Business Day and with permission here are some random extracts. The complete article needs to be read by clicking on the link or going directly to Business Day.
TIM COHEN: Marxism gives us more than just a touch of class
“LAST week in this space, perhaps in a fit of frustration about the slightly unhinged nature of South African politics, I wrote a personal plea to the South African Communist Party to drop the pose.”
“SA is one of the very few countries where communists get to claim a handful of Cabinet seats without having to face the electorate.”
“To be honest, I’ve been slightly unnerved by the response, both in favour and against what I thought was a rather innocuous article. I’ve been pilloried publicly and privately by a whole range of South African Marxist intellectuals — which came as a surprise because I actually did not think they would find it necessary to bother responding.”
“In a sense, I should not have been surprised; criticising Marxists is a bit like criticising people with religious faith. In the end, you are not attacking a system of logic, but a belief system. For better or for worse, that system of belief runs right to the core of how people see themselves.”
“In the end, it’s an argument that rests not on logic and science, but on an emotional world view that sees itself as resting on a body of logic and science.”
“It really is time for the bubble that is the SACP to pop — nobody should have an automatic right to claim a seat in the Cabinet based on merely notional public support without having to demonstrate it.”
“So with the pro-forma insults behind us — always a critical part of a South African debate — perhaps we can now move on to some more productive territory. One topic that interests me is this: in what ways can Marxism remain useful ?”
“This is a very broad topic, but rather like Freudianism, I think there are aspects of Marxism that remain useful in the sense that they provide a framework for understanding — rather than the understanding itself.”
“One good example is class.”
“Marxists have a highly politicised understanding of class: broadly that two classes are in a constant battle that dialectically informs history.”
“Yet it does seem to me that to reject the notion of class, just because of the way Marxists use it, would be short-sighted. A fabulous writer who has just died, Paul Fussell, proposed a different way of looking at class in a book titled, unsurprisingly, Class. The book is presented partly in fun, but its observations are so laser-like, they make for convincing social science.”
“Fussell notes that the two-class system has been useful for highlighting injustice and registering bitterness. The three-class system has different benefits. Poet Matthew Arnold divided his neighbours into three groups: at the top, people he termed ‘barbarians’; in the middle ‘philistines’; and at the bottom ‘populace’.”
“The book is a hurly-burly through paved driveways (upper-middle: aspirant but conservative), wallets held together with elastic bands and filled with news clippings to ‘prove’ things (defensive: mid-proletarian) and Mexican fruit pickers (low-proletarian: gross uncertainty of work, day-to-day existence) .”
“The ‘x’ class is interesting: a floating class, who tend to waft through classes. Actors, musicians, even journalists are good examples of ‘x’. Bohemians might be a better-known description.”
“What I love about this more complicated version of class is that it describes reality in much more detail, and in so doing, finds a common element: incentive. In a way, this notion is deeply Marxist; the working class is primarily motivated, Marxists would have it, by an incentive to overthrow capitalism.”
“In short, class could be such a useful analytical tool, if only it were freed from its Marxist chains.”
Reply by: Paul Whelan On: Jul 23 2012 9:53AM
“Criticizing Marxists/communists is not ‘a bit like’ criticizing people of religious faith: it is exactly like criticizing them. Marxism is a faith will all the trappings of one: the Book, apostles, martyrs, endless disputations among the faithful as to the meaning of the Word and an unswerving belief that oppression, suffering and conflict lead in the end to salvation, at least for a chosen few. The only difference is whereas religion is careful to reserve rewards for the hereafter, secular religion promises them on earth. Which is why it has so often made heaven a living hell.”
LETTER: Suspension of reason (26 July)
Dana Wakefield’s letter was first published in Business Day and thanks are due to Business Day for allowing it to be repeated here.
“Tim Cohen’s wry response in The Bottom Line (July 23) brought a welcome note of sanity to the Marxism furore he had provoked, involuntarily or not. Insults hurled, umbrage taken, it doesn’t take much to provoke us … yet we allow bad governance to intensify year after year in the name of liberation and politely ignore the anomaly.”
“Mr Cohen’s main point was that the South African Communist Party, complete with outdated ideology, rules without being elected. He might have included Cosatu’s equally strange perversion of democracy. Then there’s the imminent African National Congress infighting at Mangaung that already reveals the electorate only exists at its convenience; power is what matters.”
“When will this triumvirate focus on the people it’s there to serve? Hopefully, we’ll force that at the next general election with the same fury we showed about Marxism, because living in SA is like falling into Alice in Wonderland’s hole: a suspension of reason.”
LETTER: Easy to snipe from the far left (Business Day)
Another letter published for the first time in Business Day today from Graham Murrovitz, Parkview and thanks to Business Day for allowing me to post it here.
“Somewhat like Tim Cohen, but two decades earlier, while at one of the world’s leading universities, I fell under the seductive spell of what was called New Left Marxism: a quasi-academic journal, The New Left Review, was the vehicle for the sophisticated, albeit at times tortuous and incomprehensible to ordinary mortals, articles written by disciples of the new school of Marxism. Theoretical Marxists are anything but intellectually dim and Marxism seems to be a fertile ground for abstract debate in ivory towers.
The 1960s New Left school was severely critical of Soviet and Eastern European communism, although this never exceeded, naturally, followers’ diatribes against the evils of capitalism. The criticism also always remained more in the realms of theory than the day-to-day horrors of Stalin’s killing fields. Their willingness to criticise the increasingly discredited Soviet model, not as a failure of Marxist theory, but rather of those who implemented it in that part of the world, at least in their own eyes gave them a certain moral superiority.
When I read Prof Jeff Guy’s scathing and somewhat patronising attack (Trabant versus Mercedes, Cohen versus Marx, July 18) on Cohen’s “letter” to the South African Communist Party, which debunked Marx and communism in plain, understandable English (Time for Communist Party to make a contribution, July 16), I was reminded of those bygone years and the New Left school. I may be wrong, but it appears to me that is Prof Guy’s intellectual home. It is a seductive perch from which to ponder the world: one doesn’t dirty one’s hands by joining a communist party and launching into real-life politics. One is free to slam capitalism in all its forms and at the same time criticise the failures of communist governments, without accepting that it is the theory itself which is fatally flawed and thus will lead to disaster, when force-fed into practice.
After paring away the sophisticated theory, I have always understood that, at the base of the Marxist framework, is the belief that individualism and personal liberty are misguided sins and that the mystical “collective will of the people”, expressed divinely through the communist party, is what must prevail at all costs. This fundamentally totalitarian view was at the very core of all the various communist governments which ruled their citizens with great savagery and at huge cost to human life as well as spiritual wellbeing.
Capitalism is far from ideal and full of imperfections. Market fundamentalism is not the answer and a balance has to be struck between regulation and the marketplace. However, in significant contrast to Marxist doctrine, it recognises that human beings are most productive and happy when their individualism is recognised, opportunities provided and their freedom to choose and be protected from tyranny are the order of the day.
The results have been a staggering increase in the standard of living of those who have lived and continue to live in countries where private enterprise is at the centre of economic activity. Yes, unacceptable levels of inequality continue to prevail in many capitalist states and vast areas of poverty exist in many parts of the world. The most recent examples of the unleashing of private initiative and enterprise, China and India, have seen overall mortality rates decline and hundreds of millions become part of the middle class, lifted out of poverty. This was not the case previously.
This does not please Marxists of any description because their blind arrogance does not accept that humans like choice, enjoy materialism and thrive under competition that is not unbridled, but regulated in a balanced way: they call it “false consciousness”. They dream forever of human nature being different: lovingly communal, ready to embrace mediocre equality, prepared to renounce worldly goods, content to subordinate themselves to the party and the state, etc. The fact that this vision does not accord with reality makes them even more determined to defend and promote it.”