Racism, capitalism's handmaiden

By M. S. Prabhakara

CAPE TOWN, AUG. 27. Though South Africa is hosting the forthcoming World Conference Against Racism (WCAR), resourceful sections of the white minority whose voices and words dominate the media, are less than enthusiastic about the meet.

Arguments against the very idea of such a conference are mooted from a variety of seemingly persuasive, indeed liberal, perspectives. Thus, with institutionalised apartheid now only a dim memory, if that, for the majority of the South Africans, surely it is not necessary to keep on scratching and reopening healed wounds of the body politic? Can South Africa, with all its more urgent priorities relating to the basic needs of the majority of the people - the `Previously Disadvantaged', as the seamless euphemism has it, about which more below - afford to spend millions of rands on a conference which will amount to little more than a prolonged talk-shop? Would all that money be better spent on ensuring the safety of the citizens, and providing water, electricity, housing and health care to these `Previously Disadvantaged'?

Indeed, since people throughout history have been free to like or dislike others, free to choose their friends and neighbours, can one force people to `love each other' which is what the ultimate objective of the WCAR is, driven as it is by a bunch of idealist busybodies, many of them foreigners at that?

The euphemism, Previously Disadvantaged, now in near- universal use in the manner of the speakers of George Orwell's duckspeak, encapsulates the hypocrisy of all such demurring. The reality is that the majority of the population, now given the privileged status of being only `Previously Disadvantaged', continue to be currently disadvantaged; and are expected to remain even more disadvantaged in the foreseeable future.

The euphemism is, however, soothing, and also has its uses. It pleases the minority whose smooth, but venomous voice and words on radio and TV talk shows and correspondence columns of newspapers chortle with glee as the democratic Government, held to ransom by its own surrender to the orthodoxy of the market, fumbles from one crisis to another. Paradoxically, the euphemism also seems to please the majority, the poor, to use the simple and visceral word shorn of all ambiguity and sophistry, by seeming to invest them with a measure of polysyllabic verbal dignity.

How wonderful it is to be Previously Disadvantaged, with the horrors of that status now only a faint memory, with the reality of being ``presently advantaged'' and the prospect of being even ``more advantaged'' in the future. Blessed indeed are the Previously Disadvantaged, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven in the future.

The most interesting of such arguments is the one that assumes that discussions of racism invariably end up with requiring all the people of a community to love each other - a normative utopia which is simply against the law of nature where preferences and prejudices born of deep-rooted memories and conscious choices are the natural order. Arguing against such `freedom of choice' is just one step away from loss of civil liberties and totalitarian control, the spectre of a universally invasive Big Brother.

The political philosophy underlining such concerns is that the best of governments is one which governs the least, with the state having no interventionary role, certainly not in areas which are presumed to be entirely in the private domain.

The confusion, if it is that, arises from a wrong understanding of the phenomenon of racism. Racism includes prejudices based on derived ideas of race and skin colour and goes beyond these. The victims of racism have never asked to be loved; they only want their humanity to be acknowledged.

Segregation under the British colonialism and institutionalised apartheid under the Boers denied this humanity to the majority of the people, rationalising this under some Biblical principles. The real rationale, as with slavery, was that these practices were profitable, they simply added surplus value, to use an expression now considered obsolete.

In other words, inasmuch as Atlantic slavery, colonialism, segregation and institutionalised apartheid are causally related to the emergence of capitalism and its consolidation as a world system, of which South Africa was and continues to be an integral part. Revisionist versions of South Africa's history, with their own agenda, now argue that apartheid did not benefit South African finance capital; that the admittedly amoral capitalists with foresight clearly saw the untenability of the rigidities of hard apartheid; and were always trying to reform the system from within.

The current confrontation between organised labour and the Government on the issue of privatisation of state assets, with a two-day general strike on the eve of the formal opening of the WCAR, dramatically juxtaposes the issues of capitalism and racism.

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