PATRICK BULGER | What the truck: two years after the revolution that wasn’t

What is history without anniversaries? Two years ago, we sat riveted to our TV screens as the masses in KwaZulu-Natal rose up to throw off the yoke of neoliberal capitalism and claim what is rightfully theirs. Useful stuff like toasters, electric blankets and a baby-blue couch, padded not stuffed, that was naught for their comfort. Or ours.

This year, we’re marking the second anniversary of the revolutionary moment with a few ritual truck-burnings. Police minister Bheki Cele assures us this is not a repeat of 2021, but rather “economic sabotage”. 

Academic research on our 2021 upheaval has been delayed, possibly indefinitely, because no-one, least of all our security services, is saying what happened exactly.

And since those heady days, baffled theorists have again pondered hard as to why the revolution we’ve been waiting for was, yet again, postponed. If our warehouses hadn’t been as packed with shiny Chinese stuff as they were, there could have been even bigger trouble. We were saved by Makro and Game. It was that close. 

Warning about the coming revolution in SA has become a cottage industry, a staple to scare us into ... what exactly? Most folk are trying to lead normal, humdrum lives, putting food on the table, getting the kids to school and the other routines that both bourgeois and proletarian do. Where’s the time to avoid revolution? Or assist it? At best one could join an incendiary WhatsApp group. 

The Mbeki brothers, Thabo and Moeletsi, have warned about revolution, using the metaphor of the “ticking time bomb” to illustrate their analyses. The idea is that when enough poor people get tired of being poor, they will rise up against the rich and grab their cars and cellphones and R37m houses. But still we wait.

In fact, according to the political theorists, a revolution takes place not because the masses are starving and unhappy but because they are well-fed and warm. Yet they can’t escape the feeling that they should be happier and warmer. And better fed. This paradox may be described in the term “disappointed expectations”. Big promises, little delivery. 

So it’s not decades of grinding poverty that cause revolutions, which is fortunate for those in SA who don’t want a revolution, and perplexing to outsiders who cannot understand why a system of grand racial oppression and exploitation has been allowed to endure for as long as it has. Rather, it is the sense that people have got less than they understood they were being offered.

We’re told every revolution needs a trigger. In France in 1789, it was Marie Antoinette feeding them cake that got the masses bellyful, presumably for more cake.

Similarly, while the people toil under joblessness and poverty, it is common cause that ANC rulers, much like the richest in SA, live like kings, lording it over the masses, boasting every luxury conceivable, while paying lip service to a better life for all. They expect a lot of the people, nudging them to look past the obvious ostentation of their leaders, to dwell instead on the structural problems and legacy of apartheid and colonialism.

What’s undeniable, as we head towards 30 years of democracy, is that the ANC has been a flop. Far from the vision of a prosperous nonracial society that energised the anti-apartheid movement, we have become a society run by a racially-obsessed oligarchy based on membership of and allegiance to the ANC. 

Record-high unemployment is stoked by economic policies that despise the market while loving the goods it produces; political alienation is reflected in the collapse of faith in democracy and constitutionalism that has seen people turn their back on formal politics, understanding that unless they talk in flames they will be ignored. Hence the burning and the proliferation of protests. 

The sad truth for the people, in whose name a supposed revolution would take place, is that the chances of anything changing much, revolution or not, are slim.

The sad truth for the people, in whose name a supposed revolution would take place, is that the chances of anything changing much, revolution or not, are slim. Incremental improvements are the best that can be offered, but would Lenin have accepted that? 

The elite is too ensconced, too embedded in the status quo, to allow the social and economic disorder that a revolution would entail. The Marikana Massacre of 2012, a threat to the ANC from outside the ranks of the trade-union alliance, illustrated how far the ruling class will go. 

We have all the elements of a pre-revolutionary society: dashed expectations; failing economy; abuse of power and a president who is not as popular as an ANC president might be. We’re sitting on a time bomb, and if it weren't for thousands of noisy generators we’d be able to hear it ticking. But we can’t. Or won’t.

Would the people really rise up against the ANC, their liberators? The shackles of the Treasury?

The Russian Revolution, which ushered in nearly a century of Soviet oppression, was not directed at the tsars, hated as they may have been. Instead, it toppled the liberal-leaning Kerensky government, crippled by an unpopular war. It took the evil genius of Lenin, whose spirit looms large over Luthuli House, to seize the moment and grab power from a regime that had allowed a degree of political freedom not seen in Russia before, or since. 

More recently, we’ve had the so-called “colour revolutions”, principally in former Soviet republics. Feared by dictators who prefer monochromatic rule in the name of the concept of the people, a colour upheaval often occurs after perceptions of a stolen election. Careful with 2024, then. 

For adherents of the revolutionary ideal, today is a high religious holiday, marking the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille in France. People called the sans-culottes, wretches without the knee-high silk breeches worn by the elite, did the storming, only to find it held a few prisoners and an incarcerated lunatic. Perhaps they should have put the madman in charge, because the winners were the bourgeoisie, we are told, leaving the sans-culottes with the same miserable couture they had enjoyed before the revolution. That’s the price of progress. Slow, but seamless. 

Vive la France! Long live the infernal spirit of defiance and rebellion! A loota continua! 

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