By Andile Mngxitama
President Zuma has now established a political praxis that calls for a formal characterisation. His move to stay inside the ANC while making calls to vote for the MK party is a classic move, denoting his political praxis. This political method may appear contradictory at first glance. However, it is internally coherent.
For instance, he insists he is an ANC member, but campaigns for another party. This political praxis when he was state president manifested in what I had then called the "parallel power praxis". President Zuma realised that some critical state institutions were captured by the coloniser, represented by white monopoly capital; he therefore forged alternative structures of state power to circumvent the power and influence of white capital within the state and society.
A graphic representation of this claim is how he countered white monopoly capital capture of the media space by assisting the Gupta family to set up an alternative television station and a newspaper. He furthermore made sure activist black managers such as Brian Molefe, Dudu Myeni and Matshela Koko were in place, and even appointed Judge Mogoeng Mogoeng in the position of Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court. The white establishment was horrified that Judge Dikgang Moseneke was overlooked for a fairly junior Judge Mogoeng. Moseneke was agreeable to white power; Mogoeng seen as anathema. Zuma went for the anti-Stellenbosch candidate.
The move against Minister Nene as Minister of Finance in 2015, and his replacement by known radical Des van Rooyen was another clear indication of Zuma's war against white monopoly capital. He once again, in 2017, made a huge move by removing the practical prime minister who represents white capital's interest, Minister Pravin Gordhan.
These moves put Zuma in direct fight with WMC. White capital sponsored the massive Zuma-must-go campaign, echoing a similar campaign in Brazil.
But Zuma has proven adept at the fight. Party dynamics have been shown to have played a key dynamic when white monopoly capital developed its counter forces through investing one billion rand for their candidate to win against the Zuma-backed candidate Dr. Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. It was a dialectical moment in favour of reaction within the internal party contest. It was a short-wave move, unlike the current MK party option which is a long wave towards recapturing the ANC, if not unleashing the abandoned forces of change to realise the abandoned agenda.
It would seem that Zuma hopes his political act of supporting MK may get to the objective with or without the ANC. The fidelity is to the cause, not the vehicle.
Pursuing his “parallel power praxis”, Zuma then used his prerogative as president to announce radical economic transformation. He called on black political parties to unite and use their majority to effect land expropriation without compensation. A move that prompted former President Thabo Mbeki to retort with a thirty-page missive to denounce the Zuma call for black unity as un-ANC. Mbeki derided Zuma by pointing out that calling for blacks to unite was antithetical to the ANC's policy of non-racialism. Zuma here again was trying to calibrate progressive forces to break the land reform logjam. He was shaking up the dialectical forces.
President Zuma has through this "parallel power praxis" perfected the dialectical moves. As Hegel has it, history is propelled forward by the interface between the thesis (status quo) and antithesis (the intervening force) to get into a synthesis (new equilibrium). For any motion forward, there must be a catalyst. In the current neoliberal hegemony of Stellenbosch, which finds expression in the ANC, the MK Party is the necessary antithesis to create new conditions to break the Stellenbosch hegemony.
Now for a motion forward to be effected, the antithesis has to be greater than the thesis (the ANC of Ramaphosa); otherwise, there shall be no breakthrough. All revolutions aim to build a big enough momentum of the antithesis to emerge in a sustained way. Remember Fidel Castro in the Cuban revolution. Lenin is a master dialectician; hence the success of the Russian Revolution.
The job of progressives and revolutionaries is to help build the antithesis moment in the dialectical process. The results are not predetermined but depend on the interplay between the dialectical forces. If MK doesn't gain sufficient momentum, it means the status quo will remain, and the MK forces shall play a marginal role while building the antithesis wing of the dialectical process.
A related question of dialectics is timing. It must be remembered that Lenin won the 1917 Great October Revolution because he was a master tactician of timing. President Zuma took a bit too long to announce the MK Party move. The downside of this delay is a partial depletion of some key leadership momentum as individuals such as advocate Mkhwebane, Carl Niehaus and Ace Magashule branched out into alternative forces. It shows a lack of internal coherence of the Radical Economic Transformation forces that coalesce around President Zuma.
We must also be alive to the forces on the thesis side of the dialectical process. They may at first be caught off guard. But they may manoeuvre to try to maintain the status quo and set in motion countermeasures to weaken the antithetical momentum. The opportunity for this possible assault lay in the possible contestation for power within a reality of nascent organisational structures, which can't withstand a brutal contestation for power. How this challenge is mediated is going to be critical to the consolidation and survival of the MK party's antithetical development.
We must learn from Che and give the historical dialectical processes a little push. Progressives will have to take sides in battle. Are they for the thesis, or do they want the further development of the antithesis in this new battle to try to settle the historical questions still facing our society?
The Star