The Truth is Revolutionary: Mills and Turner as Theoreticians of Participatory Democracy

Abstract

Critical analyses of the writings of political philosopher R.A. Turner have gained renewed attention. Turner's advocacy of participatory democracy paralleled that of American sociologist C. Wright Mills, whose own theories have experienced a revival among academics and activists as an alternative to the rise of neoliberal economic policies. Despite the international isolation of apartheid-era South Africa, it experienced social changes in the 1960s and 1970s paralleling those in North America and Western Europe. Mills' call for scholars and activists to forge a New Left rooted in sociological imagination was realised in the American civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s. Similarly, Rick Turner's own philosophy of radical politics, elucidated in The Eye of the Needle, found shape within the anti-apartheid resistance in 1970s South Africa. Turner went further than Mills in his practice of public sociology, fusing theory and praxis through his participation in the anti-apartheid struggle. Since Turner's death, the promise of participatory democracy appears to have foundered upon the shoals of neoliberalism and the global ‘race to the bottom’. The challenge for scholars and organisers will be how to best forge a renewed programme of popular conscientisation and community self-management which can realise Turner's vision.

Key words:

• R.A. Turner
• C. Wright Mills
• participatory democracy
• political philosophy
• Durban Moment
• anti-apartheid activism

Notes

1. Among the various scholars and activists honouring Mills in the period immediately following his death were Bill Domhoff, Tom Hayden, Dick Flacks, Irving Louis Horowitz, A.J. Muste, Irving Howe, Harvey Swados, and Dan Wakefield. Turner was similarly memorialised by Raphael de Kadt, Colin Gardner, Duncan Greaves, D.H. Hurley, Shamin Meer, Tony Morphet, Jeannie Noel, Mamphela Ramphele, Peter Sacks, Dick Usher, and Eddie Webster.

2. The past decade has seen an uptick in the volume of published scholarship on Mills, including biographies by Tom Hayden and Stanley Aronowitz, analyses of Mills' works by Keith Kerr, Daniel Geary, and A. Javier Trevino: T. Hayden, Radical Nomad: C. Wright Mills and His Times (Boulder: Paradigm, 2006); S. Aronowitz, Taking it Big: C. Wright Mills and the Making of Public Intellectuals (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); D. Geary, ‘Becoming International Again: C. Wright Mills and the Emergence of a Global New Left’, Journal of American History, 95 (2008), 710–736; K. Kerr, ‘Sociologically Imagined: The Decentering of C. Wright Mills, the Postmodern Cowboy’ (PhD diss., Texas A&M University, 2007); A.J. Trevino, The Social Thought of C. Wright Mills (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2012).

3. R.A. Turner, The Eye of the Needle: Towards Participatory Democracy in South Africa (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1972).

4. ‘Race to the bottom’ has become a term of art in contemporary socioeconomic discourse, pertaining to policies enacted by states or local authorities to attract outside investment. Such policies may include favourably low taxes, a low minimum wage, or lax environmental regulation, The phrase's origin is of uncertain provenance, although it makes an early appearance in US case law with Justice Louis Brandeis' dissenting opinion in Liggett Co. v Lee (28 U.S. 517) (1933). With the acceleration of post-Cold War globalisation, critics such as Tonelson, Krugman, and Rodrik argue that the race to the bottom and its attendant capital mobility have led to trade imbalances and lowered living standards in the developed nations and exposed workers in less developed countries to exploitation and dangerous working conditions: see A. Tonelson, The Race to the Bottom: Why a Worldwide Worker Surplus and Uncontrolled Free Trade are Sinking American Living Standards (New York: Basic Books, 2002); P. Krugman, The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century (New York: Norton, 2004); D. Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy (New York: Norton, 2012).

5. For the purposes of this article, I will use Paulo Freire's definition of conscientisation. Freire held that social awareness derived from an individual's own critical consciousness of his or her social reality. Once achieved, this critical awareness becomes a basis for personal and social liberation: P. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. M.B. Ramos (Harmondsworth: Penguin Education, 1972), 15.

6. Turner, The Eye of the Needle, 23.

7. A.W. Schafer, ‘Citizen Participation: Democratic Elitism and Participatory Democracy’, in D. Thomson, ed., The Allocative Conflicts in Water Resource Management (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1974), 487–508.

8. Pateman describes deliberative democracy as ‘various forms of collaboration between a government, usually a local or municipal government, and citizens on some policy matter’: C. Pateman, ‘Participatory Democracy Revisited’, APSA Presidential Address, Perspectives on Politics, 10, 1 (2012), 15n.

9. C. Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970).

10. J.M. Eldon, ‘Political Efficacy at Work: The Connection between More Autonomous Forms of Workplace Organization and a More Participatory Politics', American Political Science Review, 75 (1981), 43–58.

11. R. Goodin and J. Dryzek, ‘Deliberative Impacts: The Macro-Political Uptake of Mini-Publics', Politics & Society, 34, 2 (2006), 219–244.

12. R. Luxemburg, The Essential Rosa Luxemburg: Reform or Revolution & The Mass Strike, ed. Helen Scott (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008); V.I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done?, ed. R. Service (London: Penguin Books, 1988).

13. C.L.R. James with F. Forest and R. Stone, The Invading Socialist Society (Detroit: Bewick Editions, 1972); C.L.R. James, State Capitalism and World Revolution (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1986); G.L. Boggs with C.L.R. James and C. Castoriadis, Facing Reality (Detroit: Correspondence Publishing Committee, 1958); G.L. Boggs with J. Boggs, Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974); R. Dunayevskaya, Philosophy and Revolution: From Hegel to Sartre, from Marx to Mao (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1991).

14. The extrajudicial murder of dissidents in South Africa calls to mind Carl Schmitt's concept of the state of exception, in which rule of law is suspended in the face of a perceived threat to the state and where the authorities unilaterally determine who is outside the state's protection in the name of public safety. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission implies as much in its conclusions concerning Turner's death: ‘As levels of conflict intensified, the security forces came to believe that it was no longer possible to rely on the due process of law and that it was preferable to kill people extra-judicially’: Government of the Republic of South Africa, The Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report, Volume 2 (Cape Town: Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 2003), 220. Turner's daughter Jann has noted that no one ever came forward to apply for amnesty for her father's murder. J. Turner, ‘Who Shot My Dad?’: http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/who-shot-my-dad-jann-turner, accessed 9 September 2016.

15. For his part, Biko believed Fanon to be particularly important influence on Black Consciousness: G.M. Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa: The Evolution of an Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 11. See also N. Gibson, ‘Black Consciousness 1977–1987: The Dialectics of Liberation in South Africa’, Centre for Civil Society Research Report No. 18 (Durban: Centre for Civil Society Research, 2004), 9–10.

16. The Black Consciousness Movement bore more than a passing resemblance to the US Black Panther Party and its programme of community self-reliance outside the structures of white society. Among the few white American radicals to embrace the global struggle of subaltern populations was the Weather Underground, a faction which emerged from the 1969 collapse of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

17. The early New Left owed Mills a significant intellectual debt. The Port Huron Statement, the 1962 founding manifesto of the Students for a Democratic Society, borrowed heavily from Millsian ideas. SDS's initial efforts, which included the urban community organising program Economic Action and Research Project (ERAP) and support for the Congress of Racial Equality's 1964 Freedom Summer Project, reflect an impetus to create real-world models for participatory democracy: Hayden, Radical Nomad, 55. See also Trevino, The Social Thought, 173.

18. South Africa's annual GDP growth rate since 1994 has averaged 3.26%. United Nations, UN Data: http://data.un.org/, accessed 12 September 2016.

19. South Africa's Gini coefficient in 2009 was 63.1. By comparison, that of the United States was 45.0: World Bank, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI/, accessed 12 September 2016.

20. Mills' doctoral advisor and early collaborator Hans Gerth translated and edited American editions of Max Weber's works: Oakes and Vidich have detailed the controversy over Mills' contribution to Gerth's efforts and Weber's influence on Mills' body of work: G. Oakes and A.J. Vidich, Collaboration, Reputation, and Ethics in American Academic Life: Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 14–16, 37–38.

21. C.W. Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956).

22. Dorothy Ross, in her history of the social sciences in the United States, pointed out the hazards posed by the reification of method, or ‘scientism’, arising from the desire of the social scientific establishment to gain status parity with the natural sciences. This trend was well under way when Mills began his career: D. Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 390, 472–475.

23. Lisa Anderson has noted that American social scientists have long been embedded in the policymaking process and thereby co-opted by political elites: L. Anderson, Pursuing Truth, Exercising Power: Social Science and Public Policy in the 21^st Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).

24. C.W. Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), 130–131. Similar arguments appear in other critiques of American higher education.

25. H.W. Putnam, Pragmatism: An Open Question (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 152.

26. R.A. Turner, ‘What is Political Philosophy?’, Radical (1968), 1-3, http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/what-political-philosophy-richard-turner, accessed 15 August 2016. See also T. Fluxman and P. Vale, ‘Re-Reading Rick Turner in the New South Africa’, International Relations, 18, 2 (2004), 176–180.

27. Turner, ‘What is Political Philosophy?’, 1.

28. R.A. Turner, ‘Dialectical Reason’, Radical Philosophy, 4 (1973), 30–31.

29. D. Greaves, ‘Richard Turner and the Politics of Emancipation’, Theoria, 53, 1 (1987), 32–36.

30. B. Keniston, Choosing to Be Free: A Life Story of Rick Turner (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2013), 30–34. Dr Mafeje's job offer remained rescinded.

31. There appears to have been little interest within white labour unions in fostering solidarity with their black brethren. Much like organised labour in the United States, union leaders' interests were aligned with those of management. Similarly, there was scepticism among at least some BCM adherents over any possibility of solidarity with white liberals: G.M. Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa: The Evolution of an Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 34–35. See also M. Ramphele, Across Boundaries: The Journey of a South African Woman Leader (New York: Feminist Press, 1996), 62.

32. Turner converted to Islam in order to marry his second wife, Foszia Fisher, in a religious ceremony. The couple had been denied the right to marry in a state-sanctioned ceremony as their union would have violated the Mixed Marriages Act, among other apartheid legislation. However, given the strong Christian ethos underpinning the South African anti-apartheid movement, Turner frequently invoked Christian ideas in his social analyses, albeit as a veiled call for building socialism. Ian Macqueen describes Turner as an atheist: see I. Maqueen, ‘Collaboration and Debate in the “Durban Moment”: Steve Biko, Richard Turner, and the Politics of Black Consciousness, 1970–1973’, paper presented at the Durban Moment: Revisiting Politics, Labour, Youth, and Resistance in the 1970s (Rhodes University, Grahamstown, Eastern Cape, 21–23 February 2013), 11.

33. The Student Wages Commission argued for higher pay for black workers based upon cost of living data taken from the Poverty Datum Line: G. Davie, ‘Strength in Numbers: The Durban Student Wages Commission, Dockworkers, and the Poverty Datum Line, 1971–1973’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 33, 2 (2007), 401–403.

34. Study Project of Christianity in Apartheid Society. SPRO-CAS was a joint venture of the Christian Institute of Southern Africa and the South African Council of Churches. Macqueen, ‘Collaboration and Debate,' 4. SPRO-CAS I consisted of a series of committees which analysed the social problems of apartheid, completing its work in 1971. SPRO-CAS II worked to develop strategies for change: A. Stadler, ‘Anxious Radicals: SPRO-CAS and the Apartheid Society’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 2, 1 (1975), 102–103.

35. The label appears to have originated with Tony Morphet. In his article, ‘Brushing History against the Grain,' Morphet described the Durban Moment as the confluence of Turner's articulation of his theory of participatory democracy in The Eye of the Needle, Biko's writings defining the theory and praxis of Black Consciousness, T. Dunbar Moodie's analyses of white power which would result in the seminal monograph The Rise of Afrikanerdom, and Mike Kirkwood's reinterpretation of South African English literature (92–93). See T. Morphet, ‘“Brushing History against the Grain”: Oppositional Discourse in South Africa’, Theoria, 76, 2 ([1990], 89–99).

36. The Suppression of Communism Act 1950 was frequently used by the government to silence anti-apartheid activism. Persons prosecuted under the law were not necessarily Marxists or sympathetic toward any Communist countries or regimes. Put differently, ‘Communism’ in the sense of the statute did not necessarily have anything to do with how the term was commonly (or theoretically) understood.

37. The Institute for Industrial Education (IIE) was a distance learning project launched in May 1973 by Turner, Foszia Fisher, Eddie Webster, David Hemson, Beksisa Harold Nxasana, and Omar Badsha among others to provide courses in labour organising. In spite of its official status as a correspondence school under the Bantu Education Act, the IIE did provide in-person classes. Its effectiveness at training organisers was questioned by the leadership of the recently formed Trade Union Advisory Coordination Council (TUACC) and after 1974 the project was subsumed by other TUACC organs: Keniston, Choosing to Be Free, 111–114. (See also L. Gaum, ‘Institute for Industrial Education’, South African History Online, http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/institute-industrial-education-iie, accessed 13 June 2016.)

38. Macqueen, ‘Collaboration and Debate’, 7–11.

39. A. Nash, ‘The Moment of Western Marxism in South Africa’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 19, 1 (1999), 67–68.

40. Ibid., 68–70.

41. Turner, The Eye of the Needle, 93–94.

42. Or, to view it through a Millsian lens, the social interconnectedness created by organising would engender the imagination necessary to achieve revolutionary conscientisation.

43. SIGTUR evolved in part from the Sociology of Work Programme at the University of Witwatersrand, which was begun by Eddie Webster in 1983 to advance an agenda of ‘radical reform’: M. Burawoy, ‘Southern Windmill: The Life and Work of Edward Webster’, Transformation, 72/73 (2010), 3–6.

44. R. Lambert, ‘Organic Public Sociology and the Labour Movement: A Biographical Reflection’, Labour & Industry 19, 1-2 (2008), 99.

45. The term ‘neoliberal’ can be a confusing one to the casual observer, particularly in the North American context where ‘liberal’ most commonly refers to centre-left, social democratic policy preferences. The liberalism referred to here is a putative latter-day version of free-market principles applied writ large to the global economy.

46. Seidman argues that apartheid-era state-centric industrial development increased socioeconomic inequality and created regulatory capture by cementing the already tight bond between government and industry: see G.W. Seidman, Manufacturing Militance: Workers' Movements in Brazil and South Africa, 1970–1985 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

47. R.A. Dahl, ‘Business and Politics: A Critical Appraisal of Political Science’, American Political Science Review, 53, 1 (1959), 1–34; T.J. Lowi, The End of Liberalism: Ideology, Policy, and the Crisis of Public Authority (New York: Norton, 1969); J. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984); M. Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1985).

48. These practices compare to the concept of structural violence posited by J. Galtung, ‘Violence, Peace, and Peace Research’, Journal of Peace Research, 6, 3 (1969), 167–191.

49. Seekings and Nattrass have charted South Africa's economic trajectory before and after democratisation and persuasively argue that the more things have changed since 1994 the more they have remained the same: J. Seekings and N. Nattrass, Class Race, and Inequality in South Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).

50. This has long been a characteristic of First World societies, recognised in the literature decades ago by Weil and further elaborated by post-war American social scientists Riesman et al., Whyte, Marcuse, and, of course, Mills himself (in White Collar): S. Weil, The Need for Roots (London: Routledge, 1952); D. Riesman, N. Glazer, and R. Denny, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Emerging American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950); W.H. Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956); H. Marcuse, Reason and Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 1941). R.D. Putnam has demonstrated the extent to which Americans, and by extension, contemporary Westerners, continue to live in disengaged social isolation: R.D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). In a similar vein, Dandaneau describes the hurdles of cultivating sociological imagination in a culture of alienated individuals: S.P. Dandaneau, Taking it Big: Developing Sociological Consciousness in Postmodern Times (London: Sage, 2001).

51. Albert and Hahnel posit that rather than the kind of centrally planned economy favoured by socialists and social democrats, which create and perpetuate socioeconomic inequities of their own, industrial self-management via workers' and consumers' councils afford the best possible means of creating socioeconomic democracy: M. Albert and R. Hahnel, Political Economy of Participatory Economics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 23–31.

52. Debray referred specifically to the failure of the peasant revolt led by Tupac Amaru II in colonial Peru; however, the strategic lesson for oppressed peoples is arguably universal: R. Debray, Revolution in the Revolution? Armed Struggle and Political Struggle in Latin America, trans. B. Ortiz (New York: MR Press, 1967), 29.

53. Piper has suggested a return to the 1970s strategy of working through the churches as a means of organising for social change in contemporary South Africa: see L. Piper, ‘From Religious Transcendence to Political Utopia: The Legacy of Richard Turner for Post-Apartheid Political Thought’, Theoria, 57, 123 (2010), 77–98.