Democracy is supposed to be the arrangements with which society has agreed to govern itself. These arrangements are codified into laws and regulations through which society reconciles the conflicting interests of the individual members of society. How these interests aggregate into an acceptable policy position, generally coded as law, is a function of coalition building, creating and sometimes manipulation.
Historically the will of the dominant coalition was imposed through wars, conquest and/or force of traditional acceptance of some as royalty. These mechanisms of will imposition have for centuries been undergoing constant review as the locus of political power shifts in societies. When military power was the arbiter of conflicting interests, political power got located on the proverbial 'king's table'. As the choices of humanity became the new arbiter, those they agreed to select from amongst themselves carried the collective will of all, and political power 'relocated' into the hands of 'the elite'.
In a democracy where the wills of society have for a while been a domain of a conqueror society over a conquered one, the combination of these wills into a common will representable by those selected to do so becomes a contest of status quo maintenance or fracturing. Elite pacts on how permutations in and for these combinations are made create anchors to the nature of the democracy sought. Society would under these circumstances agree on an outcome or attributes of such an outcome, and leave that to a cognitively appropriate cohort of elites to codify the wills of society into laws and/or constitution.
The basis of such laws would invariably be about the management of public power and its allocative and distributive functions and power over scarce and often contested resources. The cognitive prowess of those empowered to codify becomes in this instance a function of the adjudicative power of those assigned with issuing judgements which would norm society's jurisprudence. Such is the making of elite sororities and cohorts through which human co-existence with power is navigated, and somewhat manipulated. Properly managed this easily mutates into a condition of elite dominance.
The question then becomes who is elite and who is not. Criteria to become elite ranges from being lettered, resource endowed (irrespective of how the resources were accumulated), position allocated to you by the existing pecking order, capability to command and sustain influence over critical social capital bearing constituencies, sheer command of instruments of violence for or against humanity, and capacity to direct the adjudicative power of what might be called a State. In a recombinant state, these constitute elite dominance.
Elite dominance rules the world, and it rules by systems, legality and law. It owes its capacity to create elite advantage to the modules of a legal code that is backed by state power; and its resilience in times of crisis can be attributed to a combination of legal privilege -shielding devices and the state’s willingness to extend a helping hand. In South Africa, apartheid was a racial elite construct whose objects were arguably no different from other elite constructs in the world, wished or existing. It's only fault was to exclude other 'would be' and 'wannabe' elites on the basis of race.
The apartheid elite provided to private capital a strong state, predictability of policy, laws required for the 'preferred economic system' to prevail, a cheap and oppressed workforce, and an environment conducive for extraction of resource value out of the country to the benefit of the ideationally powerful. It is now arguable if a post apartheid elite is not hard at work to do the same, only with a 'non-racial' flair. As an elite construct whose objects were more about race-based preservation without interference with the extractive economic interests of those that controlled instruments of global violence, it was good, like all others, for its purpose.
As a dictatorship form, apartheid lacked the political legitimacy required to make the immoral extractive economic system morally acceptable. The support for its change might have been for its change in order to attune it to a growing global humanism, without stripping it of its perfect elite dominance character. For as long as its change did not alter the economic power relations, save for allowing for making it a multiracialised endeavour, its fundamentals are inherently fit for 'economic extractive' purposes of the 'global'. Herein lies the risks of a democracy anchored by a 'economic' dictatorship minded elite.
What compounds this context, is emerging and compelling evidence of societies whose economic miracles were anchored on democratic arrangements that meet the requirements of a State in Dictatorship. The state of national disaster occasioned by COVID19 might be a lost opportunity for South Africa to use the pandemic related incentives to decree a health outcomes driven economic recovery dictatorship to take the country out of an ideology-less economic paradigm. Save for the auction of SOEs, the availability of mechanisms to enforce a new code of conduct by society to unlock its potential could have been differently utilised, worse there was an abundance of benevolence upon the political incumbents
1994, unless evidence to the contrary about how liberation policies shifted away from being about 'the people' and 'abaNTU', can, and arguably so, be declared that 'it was in fact only about institutionalising the politically legitimate, into an other world of elite dominance for the same purpose.'
🤷🏽♂️A ndzi ti vulavulela nje
🤷🏽♂️Be ngisho nje
Comments
Post a Comment