Decay in US – yet faith, optimism

Capital mobility has hammered working-class Americans, conservative and xenophobic forces are gathering

THIS is a significant year for both South Africa and the US. South Africa has just had historic local government elections and once the dust has settled citizens will be keen to see how a reconfigured local government will speed up our nation-building exercise. In the US, Trump is exploiting the anxieties of the white working class to drive a racist agenda that would end the US as we know it.

This week I am in the US to speak at a conference that focuses on studying in South Africa, and what the past 22 years have brought. I also get the chance to speak at campuses, encouraging students to choose South Africa as a study abroad destination.

Being in the US has made me reflect that South Africa continues to occupy a special place in the imagination of people around the world. Many stood by us during our dark days.

People all over feel that our future is tied up with their own hopes for a better world. We have a real obligation to all who struggled against apartheid, and to our children, to ensure that we build a decent society.

Of course we are not the only part of the world to have serious problems. America is in deep crisis. There is a chance that Trump could be president. And the old manufacturing economy is gone. The whole city of Detroit has more or less been abandoned. It is only the cities connected to the new knowledge economy, like Seattle and San Francisco, that are booming.

In Texas it is clear that, outside liberal enclaves like Austin, deeply conservative forces are in motion against the new America, in which the English are being surpassed by the Spanish and whites may soon be a minority.

The de-industrialisation of America has left much of the country looking far more Third World than many parts of South Africa. Millions are either out of work or have to work two or even three low-paying and insecure jobs just to survive.

Unionised

For some it seems that this new America, in which young white men can no longer look forward to the unionised factory jobs held by their fathers and grandfathers, has been poisoned by immigration.

But in fact the real cause of America’s decline is emigration – the emigration of productive capital to the low-wage economies of the global south. This is a problem that we have also faced. A large number of our biggest corporations have moved their listings, or their production, offshore. For as long as capital can move across borders freely while people cannot, undocumented migrants will be blamed for the decline of working-class life.

In Dallas and Houston, just like in Johannesburg and Cape Town, xenophobia is the malignant shadow of capitalist globalisation. But despite all of America’s many problems, which include a serious economic decline, the end of secure jobs for millions of working-class people and a political and economic system firmly in the clutches of capital, many Americans still have a real faith in their country .

In South Africa there is a deep cynicism settling into our people. The patriotism that many of us felt during the struggle against apartheid, and in the early years of democracy, is rotting away as we are assaulted with scandal after scandal. For those with the right connections it is boom time. But for ordinary South Africans things are getting harder and harder. Just as in the US, xenophobia is one response to social disappointment.

But unlike in the US, there is a deep cynicism settling into our people. What America has done to African-Americans is unconscionable. What it has done to Iraq and Afghanistan and Palestine is unconscionable. What its bankers and other elites have done to working-class Americans, black and white, is unconscionable. Yet millions of Americans continue to have faith in their country.

This is not the patriotism that Jacob Zuma demands of us, which amounts to little more than craven obedience to the ruling party. It is a real belief, perhaps naive sometimes, in the promise of America.

The Guptas, Nkandla, Marikana, the endless crisis of our school system and so on are steadily robbing us of this faith in our country. When someone does stand up to tell the truth about our leaders, he himself is so deeply flawed that it is impossible to see anything other than opportunism at work.

Yet here in the US it is clear that South Africa still means something to the people of the world. We are still the country of Biko, of Mandela, of possibility and of real social hope. Sometimes it is quite distressing to see oneself through the eyes of others. But sometimes it can be refreshing.

No doubt, in the eyes of the world, the xenophobic riots in 2008 and 2015 and the Marikana massacre of 2012 were moments of deep disappointment in the new South Africa.

The shocking quality of some of our highest leadership has radically compounded that disappointment. Nobody believes in our leaders any more. But from America to Palestine, there are many people that do believe in the South African people.

Buccus is a senior research associate at ASRI, research fellow in the school of social sciences at UKZN and academic director of a university study abroad programme on political transformation.