'Big Society' offers South Africa a way past tired old dichotomies

‘Big Society’, the selling point of the Conservative Party in their successful 2010 general election campaign in Britain, is an attempt to reframe British politics beyond the liberal/conservative paradigm mapped out by the worn-out dichotomy of big business (on the right) and big government (on the left). As an on-going strategy it aims to empower citizens and their communities by engaging decentralized local government with community work and social enterprise. In light of recent calls from Julius Malema (pictured above) for nationalisation in South Africa, it’s time the Distributist alternative, embodied by many of the ‘Big Society’ ideas circulating around Britain, entered the local debate. In a June 2010 article for BusinessDay, Chris Waldburger argues that instead of nationalising our country’s assets into a vague emanation of ‘the people’, we should recapitalise the people themselves, and allow South Africans to become the true stakeholders in their own future:

When the Soccer World Cup recedes into memory and South African public life begins again, there is no doubt that the debate over nationalisation will recommence.

It was African National Congress (ANC) Youth League President Julius Malema who sparked these fires, and what concerns many investors is the fact that Malema was also the first to demand the recall of former president Thabo Mbeki . And with Malema declaring Mugabe’s land-grab a success, one wonders if nationalisation is the next logical step for an ANC propelled by a fatalistic momentum outside the control of party moderates. 

But if truth be told, Malema was not the first politician to urge nationalisation. As he himself has pointed out, Nelson Mandela as late as the early 1990s was calling for nationalisation of the mines. And perhaps the chief source for the debate is the Freedom Charter, which declared that “mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole; all other industry and trade shall be controlled to assist the wellbeing of the people”. 

Mandela would vociferously and somewhat paradoxically contend that the document was not a blueprint for socialism, yet before the fall of the Berlin Wall (and the rise of the New Left in the shape of Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and indeed Mbeki), nationalisation remained firmly on the ANC agenda. 

And now the ANC, in the face of widespread discontent at the failure of Mbeki’s neoliberal Gear policies to provide meaningful gains in standard of living for the poor, finds itself in an internal wrestling match for its doctrinal future. The general argument against nationalisation runs along the lines that since para-statals such as Eskom are failing, why would government intervention in the mining sector fare any better? Can the state possibly extend itself even further when health, education, and energy already seem like time bombs waiting to explode? Let efficient and competitive private corporations do what they do best — make profit — and then we will see the inevitable trickle-down benefits of supply- side economics. 

Those in agreement with Malema, however, contend that monopolies were created in the mineral industries by imperialist henchmen such as Cecil John Rhodes — a figure who notoriously allowed fires to burn in De Beers’ mines for eight hours before he sounded the alarm, all for the sake of turnover, which mostly found its way into foreign banks. Such exhibitions of corporate power will always insist on the enrichment of the few at the expense of the working-class many, activists contend. 

And so, depending on your background and political bent, it seems that is predetermined to favour one of these two options. 

But what if there was another option — an option other than the devil or the deep blue sea that could marry the concerns of the poor, with the innovation and competitiveness of the free market? As South Africans hash out an age-old, and a seemingly anachronistic, debate, it may be useful to broaden the horizons of our economic thinking.

Read the rest of the article here.

Christianity and the Invisible Hand

In his classic 1926 work Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, R.H. Tawney (1880 – 1962) explores the complex relationship between Protestantism and economic development in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As a Protestant himself (Tawney was an Anglican), he builds on ideas espoused by Max Weber in his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, demonstrating the influence the doctrines of the Protestant Reformation unknowingly had on the development of modern economic thinking.

Religion and the Rise of Capitalism serves as an ‘examination of the spiritual problems concealed behind the economic mechanism of our society’, and its general thesis is concerned with the role of Protestantism in the exclusion of ‘economic activities and social institutions from examination or criticism in the light of religion’. Although Tawney was not a Distributist, here he identifies the golden thread that runs throughout Distributism: the belief that economic phenomena ought to be expressed in terms of personal conduct, and not in terms of mechanism. The mechanism we are most familiar with today is commonly known as the ‘invisible hand’, by which what would otherwise be the ethical concerns of the individual buying and selling in the market, are absorbed into a self-regulating system that supposedly ensures the maximization of resources for the benefit of all. Tawney clearly understood that this conception of economics relegated Christian charity to a region that subsists beyond our everyday interactions with others in the world we find ourselves in:

If preachers have not yet overtly identified themselves with the view of the natural man, expressed by an eighteenth-century writer in the words, trade is one thing and religion is another, they imply a not very different conclusion by their silence as to the possibility of collisions between them. The characteristic doctrine was one, in fact, which left little room for religious teaching as to economic morality, because it anticipated the theory, later epitomized by Adam Smith in his famous reference to the invisible hand, which saw in economic self-interest the operation of a providential plan… The existing order, except in so far as the short-sighted enactments of Governments interfered with it, was the natural order, and the order established by nature was the order established by God. Most educated men, in the middle of the [18th] century, would have found their philosophy expressed in the lines of Pope:

Thus God and Nature formed the general frame,
And bade self-love and social be the same.

Naturally, again, such an attitude precluded a critical examination of institutions, and left as the sphere of Christian charity only those parts of life which could be reserved for philanthropy, precisely because they fell outside that larger area of normal human relations, in which the promptings of self-interest provided an all-sufficient motive and rule of conduct.¹

The work of the invisible hand relies on the premise of what Tawney calls the ‘all-sufficient motive’: self-interest. Not only is our Christian charity removed from our daily economic existence, but it is replaced by the very thing Christian charity bids us to overcome. In many respects this new rule of economic conduct has brought forth much material fruit, but if we are to have any faith in the words of Christ Himself and His countless commands with regards to money and material possessions, it is something we cannot accept insofar as it is founded on selve-serving interests and relationships of exploitation and violence. Overcoming the blind acceptance of the unjust mechanisms of modern economics, as materially advantageous as they may be, is perhaps the first step towards a truly Distributist economy. In the words of Pope John XXIII in his 1961 encyclical on ‘Christianity and Social Progress’, Mater et Magista:

[If] the organization and structure of economic life be such that the human dignity of workers is compromised, or their sense of responsibility is weakened, or their freedom of action is removed, then we judge such an economic order to be unjust, even though it produces a vast amount of goods whose distribution conforms to the norms of justice and equity.²

A recurring question with regards to Distributism concerns its practical implementation. How are we to begin to live out these ideas? The first step, as outlined both here by Tawney and the consistent teaching of the Church, is to come to the realization that the supposed moral neutrality of the economic order is a modern illusion, and the invisible hand of the modern economy, if it even exists, is not a substitute for personal accountability and restraint in one’s participation in the market. The next step is simply to open oneself up to living in accordance with this realization, and allowing Christian charity to once more govern one’s actions within the sphere of economic activity. This step is difficult, especially as the realization deepens of how implicated we really are by virtue of our participation in--and reliance on--such an unjust system, and how dependent we’ve come to be on the structural violence that is concealed behind the economic mechanism of our society. It means re-evaluating what we buy, how much we buy, who we buy from and what kind of work we do. It means praying to God for the grace to give up our jobs if they don't contribute to the common good of society, asking ourselves whether the work we do helps feed, clothe and shelter man, or whether it distracts him from the natural and supernatural ends he is called to, enslaving him with worldly and useless desires. Dorothy Day wrote that 'everyone should be able to place his job in the category of the works of mercy' in one way or another. It is here where the commands of Christ and his call to a detachment from earthly possessions begin to take on a new meaning for the industrialized world, where the call to come out of Babylon3 is perhaps louder than ever. 

References:
1. R.H.Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, p.191-192
2. Pope John XXIII, Mater et Magistra, nn. 82-83
3. Apocalypse 18:4

Ethics, Not Economics, Will Fix Our Broken Society

In a country of war-like levels of violent crime; the constant abuse, rape and murder of children; and staggeringly brazen levels of corruption; South Africa’s loudest political protests have largely been framed as responses to mere service delivery inefficiencies.

In the face of gross moral breakdown, our public conversation has confined itself to a critique of the mere workings of government.

In his State of the Nation parliamentary address last Thursday evening, President Jacob Zuma failed to transcend this technocratic fixation – the solutions proposed did not broker anything beyond the increased lubrication of government machinery.

Whilst service delivery is a legitimate crisis requiring indignant and urgent action, one could arguably assert that the glaring absence of a deeper kind of protest to our society’s grotesque habits is of an even more alarming nature than municipal ineptitude and callousness.

Rather than confronting the darkness of our country directly, we have instead neglected the issues in a blaze of government-speak and rhetoric. Instead of turning to the difficult yet simple light of human morality, we have relied on technical intervention alone to solve deeply spiritual problems.

Even in the language of the official opposition to the ruling party, the terms of debate have largely remained that of inefficiency and delivery. The problem with this approach is that it never answers the question that is truly at the heart of our politics: what has gone so horribly wrong in our land?

Some Preliminary Questions...

... and answers from the Distributist Review:

What is Distributism?
Distributism finds its roots in the social and economic theories articulated in the documents of the Catholic pontiffs, beginning with Pope Leo XIII’s (pictured right) Rerum Novarum. These social encyclicals raise imperatives on economic transaction and its relation to labour, solidarity, wages, the wide diffusion of ownership, and the proper limits of technology. Distributism is an economic system compliant with the principles of these documents, and is centred on the widest possible ownership of property as the best guarantee of political and economic freedom. A family that owns its own land or its own tools can make its own way in the world without being dependent on someone else for a “job.” Thus, Distributism seeks to extend property ownership to as many as possible, and end the concentration of ownership by few capitalists or state officials.

What are the ‘means of production’?
The ‘means of production’ are the land, tools, and equipment needed for labour to transform raw materials into goods and services. As wealth (goods or services) is only possible by the combination of the means of production, labour, and raw materials, we believe it is best when these are owned cooperatively (worker-owned) or entirely operated by the family.

Are you Capitalists or Socialists?
Neither. Capitalism–or Proletarianism–is a system bent on the maximization of returns on investments, and seeks it at the expense of labour and the common good. Socialism aims to eliminate ownership and place it in the hands of an impersonal, centralized government. Both systems–Capitalism and Socialism–limit real ownership in practice. The only difference between a Socialist state and a Capitalist state is whether power is concentrated in a few private or a few bureaucratic hands.

So you don’t support ‘Big Government’?
Distributists are decentralists who believe most organizational functions (whether business, government, or labour) should occur at the smallest competent level as possible (subsidiarity). Institutions like local guilds and governments exist to curb large-scale control, whether bureaucratic or commercial.

Distributism and South Africa

Distributism is a socio-economic theory formulated in the early 20th century by G.K. Chesterton (pictured right) and Hilaire Belloc in an effort to apply the social teachings of the Catholic Church to an increasingly industrialized world. Often misunderstood to be a compromise between socialism and capitalism, Distributism is in fact a sharp critic of both philosophies insofar as both are enemies of private property: socialism restricting ownership to the state, and capitalism to an elite few. As Chesterton once said, "Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists."

Distributism is underpinned by the Catholic principle of subsidiarity (as articulated by Pope Pius XI in his 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno), which holds that all economic activity ought to be performed by the smallest possible unit. Families if possible, ought to be in control of the means of production, rather than large corporate bodies which alienate people from their work and means of livelihood. By favouring cheap mass production over that of small societies of artisans, such modern corporations erode the cultural fabric that naturally binds communities together. Distributism, by bringing labour, capital and the environment back into a united whole, aims to restore the integrity of such communities.

It is not difficult to imagine the potential impact the ideas embodied by Distributism could have on the current state of affairs in post-apartheid South Africa. Since 1994 the new government, albeit with its own set of internal challenges, has lacked the much-needed single-minded direction in initiating meaningful and sustainable social and economic development. Leftist plans of nationalisation have been abandoned in favour of cautious yet ineffective programmes like GEAR and BEE, both incapable of creating any real economic progress for the average South African. The same holds true for the disastrous state education initiatives employed over the past 17 years.