It's time to be offensive
COMMENT BY DALE T. MCKINLEY
"If you're not angry, you're not paying attention" — anonymous
It's disgustingly consistent. Open the newspaper, turn on the television or radio, access the internet and you are more than likely to be confronted by yet another woeful tale of the barbaric effects of capitalism.
Yet, such tales are always wrapped up in nauseating, but very real, layers of "normality", presenting institutionalised mass murder, greed and exploitation as part of some unstoppable march towards a Darwinian nirvana that you can do nothing about. Echoing the power-driven egotism of the rapist, you are being told to lie back and enjoy it, revel in the denial of your own strength, your own humanity.
That doesn't really apply to me, you might say: "I see right through it and, anyway, I don't participate in any of that stuff". Well, maybe so, but inactive recognition is not the same thing as fighting it with all the strength and humanity you can muster.
Passivity can take many forms. While silence is the most complicit, we are all guilty of becoming too comfortable with the physical and socioeconomic slaughter that has surrounded us in the past, and continues to envelop our lives at an ever-faster pace.
Let's be brutally honest. What has been the general response of those of us who consider ourselves to be beyond such capitalist manipulation and destruction? Individualised indignation? Collective activism? A weak mix between the two, perhaps? The point is that many have let what revolutionary consciousness we did possess and our active opposition to the ravages of capitalism slip into a generally self-indulgent comfort zone.
All at a time when increasing numbers of workers and poor across the globe are beginning to mount serious and more direct challenges to a capitalism that threatens to turn the 21st century into a technologically advanced version of the mid-1800s. And yet, those challenges will be no more (or no less) than past oppositional surges unless they are accompanied by intellectual courage and organisational cohesion.
It is not without some irony that Marx produced his best work, including the Communist Manifesto, in the mid-1800s. While we may be fond of quoting Marx on the failures of capitalism, we seem to have forgotten that the main point of his work, and that of succeeding generations of revolutionaries, was the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. If we are to be part of keeping alive the possibilities of creating a new, non-capitalist society, then we are going to have to emerge from our defensive shells and wage an offensive ideological and practical battle — in other words, a class war.
As with any battle worth fighting, you must possess the necessary weapons. One indispensable weapon is knowledge of, and a willingness to communicate, the real history of capitalism and the revolutionary struggles against it. Part of the reason why so much of the "left" has fallen by the wayside is the unwillingness and/or inability to contest fundamentally the incessant capitalist propaganda that distorts and denies revolutionary history whilst simultaneously winning the war of ideas about "values" and human relations.
Is it any wonder that we continue to lose these battles when the best that the left can do is to whinge about greed, corruption and consumerist culture, as if any of these human activities can be changed without convincing people that the capitalist system itself can be changed?
The courageous anti-capitalist struggles waged over the last two centuries have been, at their core, struggles for reclaiming our basic humanity. And yet, the better part of the left continues to spend massive amounts of intellectual and practical resources on waging internecine battles that do not interest, nor inspire, those who bear the brunt of capitalist oppression.
Until, and unless, we devote our revolutionary energy (through thought and action) to destroying the capitalist myths and slick propaganda that have taken hold of people's minds, we will continue to be like small religious sects — preaching a message that no one else but ourselves want to hear.
None of this is to say that the revolutionary task of overthrowing capitalist political and socioeconomic relations is simply a matter of sending the right message. Rather, it is to say that we must stop speaking and acting as though we are fighting a life-long defensive battle.
We must go on the offensive without apology and with supreme confidence in the ability and willingness of workers and the poor to struggle for, and create, a new world where capitalism no longer holds sway. It is only then that the real possibilities of radical change will capture the imagination of the future.
[Dale McKinley is chairperson of the South African Communist Party's Johannesburg Central branch.]