Farewell to the ‘Progressives’

By R.W. Johnson

The news that the Mail & Guardian, now selling fewer than 5,000 copies a week, has had to get rid of half its staff and is clearly dying is a very strong indicator that an era is ending.

I think back to the 1960s when I was a student at the (then) University of Natal in Durban. Our course in Political Theory was supposed to run all the way from Aristotle to the present day, but there was a major problem. Sitting at the modern end of the spectrum were the socialist theorists – the Fabians like George Bernard Shaw and the Webbs, plus Marx and Lenin.

Given Vorster’s crackdown on the Left, this was problematic. To be allowed to read, say, the Communist Manifesto, you had to make a special written request to the university librarian and fill in various forms. He would then lead you to a back room where he would unlock a safe, from which he would remove a copy of Marx’s writings. You had to read it there and then in that room – you couldn’t borrow it or even go and sit in the main part of the library since someone else might then see the offending text.

The year ahead of mine had had a wonderful time reading Shaw and other Fabians and several of them had become convinced socialists as a result, thus attracting the attention of the security police. This alarmed the university, so by the time I did the course the Fabians had simply disappeared off the end of the reading list. Thus we ended with John Stuart Mill. But Mill’s outspoken and thorough-going liberalism also had its problems, so I gather that the next year he too disappeared from the syllabus.

This may all sound pathetic and even childish, but that was the world we lived in at that time. By the time I left South Africa in 1964 the security police were keen to detain me and, knowing this, I stayed abroad until 1978. Returning to the Durban campus, I was amazed to see all manner of once forbidden books on sale in the local bookshop. The local Left was angry when I said there was a definite liberalisation, but there was no doubt that things had changed.

In essence the Soweto events had refocused the police to look for trouble in the townships and on the border, so they were much less interested in chasing down white intellectuals on campus, and weren’t much bothered about what they read. Another major change was that there really was a Left on the campus, not just a few dissident liberal intellectuals, but hardline supporters of the academic boycott and ‘the liberation movement’. And this group controlled student politics.

I was quizzed by a rather hostile SRC. Was I, for example, in favour of freedom of speech? I said yes, but to my surprise they were furiously opposed: freedom of speech would mean that Buthelezi had to be allowed to speak on campus, but that would never do because Mandela, still in jail, was unable to do so. So, down with freedom of speech.

I explained that when I had been on the SRC we had fought for the freedom of speech, but my interrogators just looked rather pitying at the thought of our primitive mistakes. They were thoroughly convinced of their own rectitude and, indeed, were very self-righteous.

But they were also the future. With every passing year in the 1980s, this new ‘progressive’ Left strengthened, particularly among the young and the racial minorities. They were easily swept up into the mass enthusiasm for the UDF and left-wing publications, and NGOs multiplied.

I well remember staying with some schoolteacher friends who told me they were hosting an evening meeting of some interesting new contacts they’d made. Next morning in their sitting room I saw a blackboard with the following equation written on it: mass education + proletarian dictatorship = People’s Education. It was clear that they were being inducted into a Marxist fellow traveller group of some sort. They were very enthusiastic and excited.

To a considerable extent this excitement and enthusiasm were engendered by the realisation that apartheid was ending and that a Brave New World lay ahead, presumably – though also unimaginably – of ANC rule. The Revolution was coming. Amidst this effervescence, the Weekly Mail was born in 1985 and all the young progressives read it. There was great excitement about the IDASA meeting with the ANC in Dakar and then with the growing number of other contacts with the ANC by all manner of other groups. The ANC itself was held in considerable awe.

South Africa had missed out on the student radicalism of the 1960s which had been such a prominent feature in Europe. But now it made up for it. Naturally, with so many white and Indian middle-class intellectuals swinging left, the SACP and its surrogates had a field day, and the number of Marxists and fellow travellers grew enormously.

There was an influential cohort of young South African historians who argued that capitalism and apartheid were so integrally related that the end of apartheid would, more or less inevitably, see the rise of socialism, a conclusion with which the SACP, Cosatu and much of the ANC agreed. Apartheid fell and capitalism continued unabated, but by then, with the ANC in power, progressives still felt confident of the future.

All of which made me grimace: I had seen a very different face of the ANC in exile, corrupt, closed-minded and authoritarian. But there was no point saying that. The vast incoming tide of ‘progressive’ enthusiasm was utterly naive but also tremendously self-confident. When the ANC elite returned and, fresh from exile, immediately set about acquiring wealthy ‘godfathers’ who put money in their pockets, I could see what was coming.

Thabo Mbeki basked in the affections of Sol Kerzner, and shortly thereafter there was a hue and cry because his new BMW had been stolen in Soweto. The ANC put out feelers to the ‘comrade tsotsis’ and the car was returned. But nobody asked how Mbeki had suddenly come by a BMW.

I then found myself at a lunch party which included one of the Weekly Mail editors, Anton Harber. He asked me what I thought of the paper. I asked why it was not covering the quite obvious corruption springing up on all sides. Harber was indignant: if you think we have built up our progressive credentials only in order to throw them all away by digging dirt on the ANC, you are much mistaken.

I made no reply. I had spent much of the 1960s and 1970s in the company of French Communists and Socialists (I was writing a book on the French Left) and had already seen the ease with which growing power led to corrupt compromises. I knew that at that point in the arc of progressive self-confidence there was nothing that I could say which would matter.

And indeed, the progressive tide rolled on through the 1990s and after. As ANC corruption became ever more overwhelming, and Mbeki’s policies on Aids and Zimbabwe became insupportable, the progressives ceased being so ANC-connected, though they still reviled the DA.

Then came Zuma and huge corruption, which dimmed progressive spirits, after which there was a brief revival of enthusiasm – surely everything would be all right under Cyril? But by this time the heart had gone out of most progressives. Quite a few of them had emigrated, and very few of them still belonged to the ANC.  Now when I meet them many of them shake their heads at their own past naivete.

The 2024 election was probably the death knell of the progressive sensibility. It had always featured a large number of politically correct whites. Such folk had mixed motives – including a lot of guilt – but the key was that they wanted to be on the side of the masses. Many had faltered and quit during the festival of corruption which was the Zuma presidency, but the sight of huge numbers of African voters deserting the ANC was an epochal moment.

If even the masses were in revolt against the broken promises and corruption, it was no longer clear what a progressive should do or where he/she belonged. The new Progressive Caucus – the MKP, EFF and other populist fragments – had little or no appeal for any of the minorities.

The breaking of the progressive wave has yet to take full effect. There is bound to be a large though gradual shift in the whole climate of opinion. The point here is what Antonio Gramsci called egemonia (hegemony). Gramsci pointed out that ruling groups often did not need to force subordinate groups to do their bidding. Because they had established an intellectual and cultural hegemony over society, their bidding would be followed voluntarily.

The ANC clearly enjoyed such a hegemony in 1994. The old ruling group, the Afrikaner nationalists, had been completely discredited by the moral and political failure of their big idea – apartheid – so their hegemony over society, once so strong, had completely collapsed. Moreover, within a few years the whole Afrikaner ruling group had fallen to bits and virtually disappeared. Its key institutions – the Broederbond, the ASB, the DRC – all became mere shadows of their old selves.

In its place stood the ANC, headed by the charismatic Mandela, who enjoyed a complete moral supremacy as a man who had utterly resisted apartheid and willingly paid the price of 28 years in jail, repeatedly refusing compromise deals which could have seen him released sooner. His adoption of a reconciliatory attitude cemented his moral, almost saintly standing. And the ANC shared some of this glory: it too had resisted utterly, had endured exile or imprisonment, had suffered many casualties, and had emerged utterly triumphant, supported by a vast popular majority.

There was no doubting the ANC’s hegemony in the first decade after 1994. Mandela was endlessly lionised, with the media rhapsodising about ‘Madiba magic’ and other such nonsense. The media was, moreover, completely intimidated: there were many tough and authoritarian figures in the ANC who would not take criticism kindly and the media was desperate to stay on the right side of the ANC. Accordingly, there was a great deal of praise-singing for other ANC figures.

Thabo Mbeki was frequently described as a man of towering intellectual ability. Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu were treated as secular saints. Steve Tshwete, though often drunk, was frequently described as the life and soul behind South Africa’s sporting successes. Even the pompous and self-regarding Kader Asmal was frequently described as a sort of Nobel Prize winner for water management.

However, it was a fragile hegemony, because the ANC leadership was not well educated and had no means of exercising intellectual or cultural dominance, so its dominance was purely political. True, they were supported by many (usually much better educated) white and Indian ‘progressives’, but the bulk of well educated opinion-formers remained outside the ANC. When the ANC began to make large mistakes – over Aids, Zimbabwe, corruption and so forth — this told heavily against it.

Until 2005 there was precious little criticism of the ANC in the South African media, but the Mbeki-Zuma split allowed the media to be somewhat more open and critical. Some progressives went with Zuma, some with Mbeki. This has since developed to a point where the bulk of the media is quite normally critical of the ANC. Nonetheless, the media are extremely careful not to speak or write in such a way as to elicit comparisons with pre-1994 South Africa. The dominant tone is liberal – though not left. But the old progressive taboos are no longer respected.

There is in fact no new hegemony in sight, for there is no new majority party, and no new ruling class or group. But the days are gone when instinctive loyalty to Mandela’s ANC meant that majority support for ANC initiatives was virtually automatic. Nowadays the opposite is often true: new ANC legislative proposals are strongly opposed across the board and find no automatic support from black voters either.

So the ANC’s hegemony is dying and is not being replaced. The fading of the ‘progressive’ movement is part of this larger process. Those who construct our future will have to do without the same overwhelming self-confidence with which progressives launched the post-1994 changes.

Perhaps that is all for the best. Many of the changes made in order to achieve ideological goals – ‘transformation’ or ‘black empowerment’ – have actually done no end of harm. If in future changes are made only after careful calculation and logical analysis of practical costs and benefits – and without these ideological imperatives – nobody should be sorry.