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Having once been an activist of the minor league variety, I am fascinated by people whose commitments are much deeper, riskier, and life-consuming than mine. During my activist days, I marched, sat-in, and challenged authority, but the possible punishments I faced were modest ones – a one-day prison sentence or an undermining of career prospects, like the loss of tenure or promotion.
In a perceptive memoir by the London writer Gillian Slovo, ‘Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country’ (1998) about her courageous white South African revolutionary parents – Joe Slovo and Ruth First – I discovered an affecting depiction of a couple who faced life and death situations, and embodied revolutionary commitments that were far beyond anything I ever could imagine acting on.
Slovo, the amiable, garrulous, optimistic head of the South African Communist Party and leader of the African National Congress’s sabotage campaign, and First, a stylish, independent-minded, crusading journalist and organiser were friends of Nelson Mandela and key figures in the struggle against apartheid. I normally have no sympathy for the Communist Party, but in this case – ideological blinders aside (eg Slovo’s support of the Soviet 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia) – the two of them were part of a movement that was on the side of justice and freedom and they endured constant surveillance, solitary confinement, exile, and assassination – First was torn to shreds by a letter bomb – in their struggle to transform South Africa.
Their daughter Gillian’s complexly sympathetic portrait captures both their heroic effort, and their single-minded commitment’s psychological cost to her when she was growing up. She often felt ‘abandoned’ as her parents disappeared from family life for long periods to serve the cause. There was also the precariousness of daily living (eg the possibility of government raids and arrests always existed), whose effect on the children Slovo and First seemed to underestimate. It’s the price revolutionaries and their families pay. The revolutionaries sacrificing private lives and relationships in order to realise their political goals and, in this case, their daughters forced to assume responsibilities and live with a sense of dread that children of their age and class rarely have to face.
Joe Slovo lived to play a prime role in the ANC when it came to power in South Africa. But most revolutions once achieving power rarely achieve their ideals. Compromise, blatant graft and total betrayal of revolutionary principles is more often than not the norm. South Africa under the ANC, however, has succeeded in maintaining the multi-racial democracy that Slovo fought for (a profound change), and has avoided turning into a military dictatorship like many other African states. Still, it’s a state where media freedom has been curtailed, economic inequality has grown (some of the ANC leaders have become billionaires), farm workers have been exploited and corruption, AIDS, and crime are rampant.
Of course, it is to be expected that once in power, revolutions become tainted when dealing with the intricate realities of governing. But I have always wondered if Slovo and First had begun with a sense of the tragic limits of their revolutionary commitment, would they have chosen to sacrifice their lives as they did?
Gillian Slovo’s memoir depicts a political world far more dangerous and repressive than the extremely flawed one I inhabit. I discovered a useful way of looking at one of America’s imperfections in a statistic-laden book by Timothy Noah, ‘The Great Divergence’ (Bloomsbury Press). The book lucidly deals with one of the issues in the presidential campaign – inequality. Noah ‘concedes that a certain amount of income inequality is necessary in a capitalist system, and you have to let the market reward effort and skill’. But income distribution in the US ranks at or near the bottom in relation to 34 other market-oriented democracies. In fact, income distribution in the United States has become more unequal than in countries like Nicaragua and Venezuela.
And though polls may say that Americans desire more income equality, no mass movement exists demanding some form of income redistribution. Some of the public may indulge in a ritual denunciation of the moneyed class, but the fact that the under-regulated financial industry wrecked the economy arouses no concerted action. Most Americans are also in thrall to the myth of unlimited upward mobility. It’s a part of our creed like believing in the serenity of small-town life, and in the innate fairness of American justice. And that myth has always helped attract immigrants, because most believe that through hard work they can achieve that ‘American Dream’.
According to Noah, the recent evidence is that ‘western and northern European countries provide greater opportunity than the US’ – France having one of the lower levels of income inequality. Only class-bound Britain offers less opportunity. The American belief in unrestricted mobility is reinforced by a society where an egalitarian style is pre-eminent in our language and manner. It makes it difficult for most people to focus on the destructive power of wealth and vested interests, or on class divisions. It’s much easier for them to place the responsibility for their economic situation on the failures of government or on their own personal failings. Of course, neither of our political parties challenges corporate power. In most instances, they serve it. But at least the Democrats believe that government has a social function, and are committed to some regulation of the market, and will offer help to people who are floundering or have failed.
The issues and problems we face are crucial, but less momentous than what Slovo and First had to struggle against. But in our gradual, less imaginative and courageous way, I feel it imperative for us to work to make our society incrementally better.
Leonard Quart is a professor emeritus of American studies
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