If we fail to build a mass-based and democratic left we, as with the US, the UK, India, and the Philippines, will face an increasingly bleak and dangerous future, writes Imraan Buccus.
I’m in the US this week and it certainly feels different. If Donald Trump’s “Muslim ban” plan is implemented it could mark the end of my frequent trips here. There has been a sharp rise in anti-Muslim feelings in the US with numerous incidents of Islamophobia and hate reported recently. In one, a teacher in the South was left a note telling her to hang herself with her hijab.
Trump’s election to the American presidency is a political disaster that could result in a global fallout.
The president-elect has expressed feelings of racism, xenophobia, global-warming denialism and is a man who does not have the temperament for public office.
He is now the most powerful man on the planet.
A number of commentators have argued that this disaster was first presaged with the election of the corrupt right-wing millionaire Silvia Berlusconi in Italy.
They have a point. Berlusconi similarly is a millionaire with appalling ethics and no regard for the truth. It does make some sense to point to the election of Berlusconi as the arrival of “post-truth” politics in the West.
But Trump is also part of a more contemporary wave of right-wing, at times neo-fascist, authoritarian populists that have swept into power. This wave includes leaders such as Narendra Modi, Benjamin Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin and Rodrigo Duterte. It also includes politicians such as Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen. This far right-wing populist retrogression, usually organised around charismatic and often demagogic figures, pretends to be on the side of the people and blames vulnerable groups, often ethnic or religious minorities, for the economic crisis caused by unrestrained capitalism.
It has made effective use of social media to whip up fears and anger, with organised and well-funded attempts to push “post-truth” propaganda through social media outlets.
We are also confronting authoritarian populism back home. President Jacob Zuma and EFF leader Julius Malema are both authoritarian populists. Authoritarian populism has also displaced more democratic forms of politics among students on some campuses.
Figures like Zuma, Malema and student leader Mcebo Dlamini are demagogues trying to mobilise nationalist sentiment to bolster their own authority and power. They all present themselves as men of the people and they all have alarmingly authoritarian tendencies.
Dlamini’s disregard for the truth is extraordinary. Malema’s recent invocation of the spectre of genocide is chilling.
Zuma and the Guptas, as we know, are running a social media propaganda operation along the model of the “alt-right” movement in the US, complete with Twitter bots, foundations, such as Jimmy Manyi’s Decolonisation Foundation, and post-truth propaganda publications such as Andile Mngxitama’s Black Opinion. South Africa, as with many countries, including the US, is at a dangerous juncture.
There are a number of reasons why so many societies have succumbed to authoritarian populism.
The most important reason for the turn away from democratic and progressive values is that the extreme form of neo-liberal capitalism supported by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, and before them Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, has plunged millions into destitution while the new managerial class has grown excessively wealthy.
The left has failed to win a critical mass of support for an understanding of the crisis built around economic justice.
But the right has been extremely successful in stoking prejudices that result in, for instance, Mexicans and Muslims copping it in the US.
The development has been supported by the decline of the traditional media and the rise of social media that is vulnerable to the proliferation of “fake news” and “post-truth” analysis and opinion.
South Africa is already quite far down the rabbit hole. If the country is to avoid hitting rock bottom, it urgently needs to take urgent action.
The first step is to understand that millions of people are facing a serious economic crisis, and take effective steps to remedy this.
The lazy sloganeering of the left has not helped.
Recent research carried out by Ivor Chipkin, Jeremy Seekings and Nicoli Nattrass has shown that South Africa is not a classic neo-liberal state.
In fact, the progressives in the ANC have built an innovative welfare state with massive investments in public housing and social grants.
There is a real possibility of attaining a minimum wage. More needs to be done to rein in capital and prevent the export of profits but the fundamental problem is that the state has been deeply corrupted.
This corruption needs to be stopped and we need to make the state work for society as a whole rather than a predatory elite.
The third task is the urgent need to build a mass-based and democratic left.
If there was a credible left in the US, Bernie Sanders would be the president-elect. Previous NGO-led attempts to build a united left in South Africa, such as the United Front and the Democratic Left Front, ended in failure.
We need to learn lessons from those failures and base future attempts at building a real left on popular organisations.
Numsa is the obvious starting point, but Amcu should be engaged too, as well as social movements.
If these could come together, we could have hundreds of thousands of people in factories, mines, informal settlements and schools united in a single progressive project.
If we fail to build a mass-based and democratic left we, as with the US, the UK, India, and the Philippines, will face an increasingly bleak and dangerous future.
* Buccus is senior research associate at ASRI, research fellow at the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s school of social sciences, and academic director of a university study abroad programme on political transformation.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
The Sunday Independent