Can our government of national unity (GNU) − and the ANC internally − overcome our woke politics?
Defining wokeism is complicated by its fundamental incoherence. Its origins mix highly ideological Marxist influences with anti-ideological postmodernism. But that need not trouble the movement’s adherents as they don’t prioritise problem solving, or its core enabler, coherent thinking.
Wokeism is about progressives gaining power through thought control. “The long march through the institutions” references the game plan their advocates have been executing, with much success, for over half a century.
Across the West and beyond, ultra-progressives now control leading universities and most media organisations. They largely dominate both the framing of narratives and how events are reported.
Marx’s framing of power relationships around class-based oppressor-oppressed narratives failed because peasants and their descendants, eventually, benefited tremendously from their ‘being exploited’ as industrial workers. The constituencies that today’s woke cognoscenti presume to advocate on behalf of are not workers but rather demographic groups that have been oppressed. This path-to-power places high reliance on identity politics while routinely identifying white males as oppressors.
Such framing has been very useful for the ANC. If the electoral base they were appealing to was workers, they would be under far greater pressure to create jobs and this would be irreconcilable with their making so many South Africans dependent on the state. Creating such dependencies favours patronage politics among many commodity-dependent nations while undermining their productive potential. This is central to explaining why most of today’s commodity-dependent nations are poor.
Wokeness deprioritises both solutions and coherent thinking to emphasise judging using an oppressor-oppressed template. Most people accept such programming because judging is easy − and satisfying − whereas understanding complex challenges sufficiently to appreciate the key tradeoffs is hard and time consuming.
“The long march through the institutions” describes how woke elites pursue unassailable political power. It seeks to install progressives into positions of power by undermining those whose credibility derives from solving complex problems. Influential progressives further seek to undermine challenges to their rule by labelling problem-solvers and builders as oppressors.
While progressives merit credit for having helped to sharply reduce blatant oppression, to a significant extent, those battles have largely been won and the influence of progressives has become counterproductive. Consider the hopes of average South Africans since early 1990.
Nowadays, advancing a society’s prospects generally involves tradeoffs with groups benefiting disproportionately and along disparate timelines. Such progress frequently benefits those least well off but only after a delay. For instance, initially smartphones were prohibitively expensive for most lower income people whereas they have now levelled access to knowledge to a phenomenal extent.
Deprioritising productivity
A major consequence of progressive politics is the deprioritising of productivity. This is extremely harmful in high-poverty countries as increasing worker productivity is essential for achieving broad upliftment.
The biggest determinant of a country’s long-term productivity trajectory is the portion of its young adults who are meaningfully employed in the sense that they develop and apply valued skills.
While both smartphones and colonisation ultimately increased worker productivity, such advances were vastly faster with smartphones. Prices swiftly declined while the features of top models rapidly migrated to low-end models. Unlike colonisation, there was little time for oppressor dynamics to develop. Rather, the poor benefited from wealthy customers funding the development costs of new features.
Smartphones and colonisation both increased productivity through diffusion of knowledge. Colonisation involved so many injustices mostly as a result of unchecked scrambles for resources − both raw materials and labour. It took a long time, but eventually cross border mechanisms were developed to settle corporate disputes. Reasonably paid jobs have proliferated as abusive labour practices continue but at a greatly diminished level.
Scars
If the scars of the past are exploited to shape a country’s politics and national discourse, productivity and upliftment will be greatly impeded. Knowledge transfers will be unnecessarily blocked. We think our school leavers can’t find jobs because our school system is in shambles. Of course our schools must be improved but that won’t dent our youth unemployment crisis. The knowledge which most workers use to do their jobs was learned at work.
Diffusion of data and knowledge are central to increasing productivity and driving growth in today’s highly integrated, ultra-competitive global economy. The rapid expansion of digital possibilities reinforces those characteristics while pressuring firms and employees to become increasingly specialised. This is how competitive pressures have been surging the productivity of workforces in so many lower-income countries. Most of these high-flying nations were colonies not long ago.
Whereas diffusion of knowledge and specialisation support the innovations which drive global growth, the term “diffusion” is almost as alien to our national dialogue as the term “beneficiation” is to today’s global business leaders.
Beneficiation is about adding value to locally extracted natural resources. While adding value is central to increasing productivity, the term beneficiation is peculiar to low-income commodity-dependent nations. Business leaders appreciate that it is generally much cheaper to ship raw materials than finished goods.
Our apartheid-to-Mandela journey positioned the ANC at the vanguard of international progressivism. While upliftment surged globally at unprecedented levels over the past three decades, the ANC’s woke politics and policies entrenched the world’s most severe unemployment crisis. And yet, quite remarkably, there are no workable solutions under consideration.
The ANC shaped our nation’s political dialogue around victimhood while basing its electoral strategy around a majority of South Africans being dependent on the state. These efforts closed access to the colossal upliftment escalators that the global economy provides. Consequently, a majority of today’s black South Africans who were ‘born free’ are on track to never develop commercially valued skills. They will never achieve anything resembling their productive potential and almost all of them will always be poor.
Snookered
The ANC has snookered itself as it can’t fund sufficient patronage to offset the volume of dependencies it has created. Meanwhile, parties it has spawned, most notably the EFF and MK, will pander to the poor and unemployed with radical policies that are fully unsustainable.
Nearly every time a policy tradeoff was needed to balance growth against redistribution, the ANC chose to sacrifice growth prospects. The concept of focusing on improving worker productivity is perceived by the ANC faithful, such as Cyril Ramaphosa, as ‘selling out’. When they do focus on workers they side with unionists that routinely resist productivity enhancements.
That ANC elites prioritise their party above the needs of South African citizens is not about party loyalty. Rather they are motivated by a lust for power and greed.
What are the chances that when our president recently met with the world’s richest man − and quite possibly the greatest problem solver of all time − Ramaphosa asked Musk how he would solve our unemployment crisis? Is it not far more likely that Ramaphosa focused on Musk’s ability to sway investment decisions?
Earlier this year surveys identified jobs as voters’ top concern. While the ANC seems unable to pivot in this direction, the GNU provides an encouraging backdrop for reshaping our national discourse around workable solutions.
[Image: https://www.pikist.com/free-photo-suzkz]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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