\u201cThe dominant narrative of contemporary South Africa, almost a quarter of a century after the end of apartheid, enshrouds the country in a pall of pessimism. South Africa, in this narrative, is a failed experiment.\u00a0\u00a0 Its phoenix-like ascent out of its long nightmare of apartheid is a lie. Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu\u2019s fabled rainbowism is shown to be, if anything, utterly chimerical. All there is, goes the explanation, is a heap of hate<\/em>.\u201d \u201cRainbowism\u201d is contrasted with \u201cNon-racialism\u201d or \u201cA Non-racial Society.\u201d\u00a0 The difference is that in \u201ca Rainbow Society\u201d people of different races live together in peace and harmony, while in a \u201cNon-racial Society\u201d race does not exist; the truth is acknowledged.\u00a0 The truth is that there is no such thing as race.\u00a0 Humanity is one.<\/p>\n Soudien\u00b4s book documents some previously undocumented history. The members of the New Era Fellowship (NEF) were early anti-racist activists who took the wiser view: race does not exist.\u00a0 It is a lie made up for reasons that are ethically indefensible.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0The true causes of events are better understood when race is regarded as non-existent.\u00a0 Race cannot be a cause explaining events because it does not exist.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Why the fiction of race is made up is a result to be explained by analysing social forces that do exist.<\/p>\n Thus, the author writes on page 27:<\/p>\n Racism is the process that invokes the <\/em>[false] idea of biologically and socially distinct groups of people for the purpose of assigning them positions of inferiority or superiority<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Building on these insights, my thesis is that a non-racial society, or any non-polarized society, necessarily must be an unbounded society.<\/p>\n First, I will explain why a non-racial society must be an unbounded society in practical terms as simply as I can.<\/p>\n Then I will underline the significance of choosing to use the unusual word \u201cunbounded.\u201d<\/p>\n Simply stated:\u00a0 There are not enough jobs.\u00a0 There are not enough good jobs.\u00a0 There are not enough jobs that enable a person to live with dignity and security as a respected member of a community and of a family.<\/p>\n In several centuries of anti-racist struggles, it apparently often appears to many people that the reason why blacks (and other victims of discrimination) do not have good jobs is that there is prejudice against them.\u00a0 \u00a0The white world may be envisioned as a closed privileged heaven, where the blacks would be living too if it were not for laws and customs that keep them locked out of it.<\/p>\n Assuming that if it were not for racial prejudice, blacks could live like whites, forgets that<\/p>\n While I suspect that many blacks and many whites may have fallen into the illusion that only prejudice kept blacks out of the paradise where the whites lived, it is clear that the members of the New Era Fellowship did not.\u00a0\u00a0 Worldwide, most leaders of the struggle did not.\u00a0 In the early days, for the better educated, the end of racism had to be the beginning of socialism.<\/p>\n Why?\u00a0 Capitalism depended on the hegemony of the mental models of the ruling class ideology.\u00a0 That hegemony imposed a confused mixture of laissez faire<\/em> economics, the jurisprudence of the sanctity of contracts and of private property, and racism.\u00a0 Calling it hegemony means that its victims themselves believed it.<\/p>\n As more and more of the victims of the system became educated, acquired qualifications, and organized unions and other pressure groups, they demanded to be treated as first class citizens and sometimes succeeded.<\/p>\n But as far as I know, no intellectual believed that private sector capitalism was capable of generating an unlimited supply of dignified livelihoods to employ both the newcomers demanding their rights and the traditional privileged whites who expected to maintain the economic status they already had –or at least not lower it much, plus hopefully also creating employment opportunities for those who enjoyed the social status of being white but economically had little or nothing to show for it.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Capitalism was not up to the task of providing so much good employment \u2013even assuming that it was a task that South Africa\u00b4s capitalist leaders wanted to attempt to accomplish. \u00a0Anti-Stalinist socialism was the NEF\u00b4s preferred option for making a non-racial society an economic possibility.<\/p>\n But 2021 is not 1937 when the NEF began or 1960 when it ended.<\/p>\n In 2021 it is still true that to achieve a non-racial society a post-pure capitalist labour market must deliver livelihoods with dignity to all and humiliation to none. The alternative is, in Soudien\u00b4s memorable phrase, \u00a8heaps of hate.\u00a8 The USA is Exhibit One.\u00a0 South Africa is Exhibit Two.\u00a0 Exhibit Three is the UK where wavering on Brexit cost Jeremy Corbyn the votes of the anti-immigrant workers in the industrial midlands, the election, and his career.\u00a0 But unlike 1937, in 2021 non-Stalinist socialism, heavily influenced by Leon Trotsky, is not a live option.<\/p>\n In 1975-6, in his lectures at the Coll\u00e8ge de France, <\/em>Michel Foucault made the point that modern republican institutions claim to be founded on the rule of law, which in turn claims to be founded on a social contract that forbids the government to violate\u00a0 the rights of private property and commands the government to protect them.\u00a0 Such a contract never happened.\u00a0 Imagining it became the juridical basis of the European World System and later, due to the conquest of the rest of the world by European arms,\u00a0 of the Modern World System, because it expressed \u00a0the ideology of the winners of the civil wars in Europe of the 17th<\/sup> and 18th<\/sup> centuries<\/p>\n This is no small matter.\u00a0 It repeals Ubuntu. It repeals the traditional seven capital sins of Christianity.\u00a0 It repeals the seven pillars of Islam.\u00a0\u00a0 It cancels dharma.\u00a0 It condemns the social rights guaranteed by the Mandela constitution of 1996 to mainly remaining on paper because it is the government that is supposed to make those rights real, but the government is impoverished and deeply in debt.\u00a0\u00a0 The government is forced to finance itself with taxes paid by the poor like VAT while the principal wealth of South Africa belongs to private entities that are free to move it out of South Africa.\u00a0 The social contract sets in stone the doctrine that private property exists prior to community and prior to government.\u00a0\u00a0 It belongs to private entities that can move it and\/or themselves to another community or to the territory of another government.\u00a0\u00a0 By a mobility constituted by ethics and defended by law, wealth owners choose which norms they will acknowledge and which laws they will obey.\u00a0 Due to the contributions of Foucault, Thomas Piketty. \u00a0and many other recent scholars: knowledge of the historical origins, functions (facilitating commerce and protecting freedoms) and absence \u00a0of functions (meeting human needs in harmony with nature) of liberal ethics and jurisprudence, is much more complete in 2021 than it was in 1937 or 1960.<\/p>\n In the early 20th<\/sup> century a leading philosophical opponent of the bogus universal and eternal moral certainties of liberalism was the American pragmatist John Dewey.\u00a0 For Dewey, as for Emile Durkheim, no human group can survive without morals and spiritual practices. The reasons why a group has the norms it has are a mixed bag, an outcome of history that is never completely understood by anybody. They include class interest, religions, the teachings of sages,\u00a0 legends, psychological tendencies, historical accidents, and the fact that in many cases the norms really do function to meet human needs and to enable the group to cope with the challenges posed by nature and by enemies.\u00a0\u00a0 Institutions should be treated as hypotheses, to be confirmed or amended according to their consequences in practice.\u00a0 \u00a0In The Cape Radicals <\/em>Soudien mentions a visit by John Dewey to South Africa in 1937.<\/p>\n The occasion was a conference held under the auspices of the New Education Fellowship, which had as its objective the challenge of coming \u2018face-to-face with the general problem of the function of education in modern society.\u2019 (p.43) It took up the whole month of July 1937, dividing its sessions between Cape Town and Johannesburg.\u00a0\u00a0 The central issue was posed as two tasks for education: \u201creproducing the \u2018type\u2019 (the people and their culture) and of \u2018providing for growth beyond the type\u2019. (p.43) Phrased in these terms, the emphasis in 2021 must clearly be on the second, and on those intellectual traditions that welcome contributions from diverse cultures and indigenous knowledge systems.<\/p>\n In 2021 we face the real possibility of the extinction of the human species due to the destruction of the delicate balances of the biosphere that make life possible.\u00a0\u00a0 This was not an issue in 1937 and was only beginning to be an issue in 1960.<\/p>\n Two more statements I believe to be true in 2021 are:<\/p>\n The advance of technology and a greater awareness of the advantages of using relatively simple traditional green technologies are making it possible to supply the material requirements of dignified livelihoods for every human being.\u00a0\u00a0 Technically, sustainable dignity for all will be feasible.<\/p>\n In 2021, whatever may have been the case in the past, there is nothing that would be more to the interest of the rich and powerful than an end to poverty.\u00a0\u00a0 I believe this is an objective fact, and that increasing numbers of the rich and powerful know it.<\/p>\n A short answer to why a non-racial society is necessarily an unbounded society is that bounded thinking and bounded practices will not get us there.<\/p>\n Any number of laws against racism, and any number of constitutions declaring the existence of a non-racial society, will not get us there.\u00a0 As long as there is one person humiliated to the core, and as long as there is one person who has lost out in today\u00b4s fierce competition to win a legal dignified livelihood, who sees others of other ethnicities winning the economic game, we are in danger.<\/p>\n As John Dewey observed in 1908, and as recent psychological research has confirmed, \u00a0\u00a0the concept of the equality of human beings, like the concept that everyone should enjoy dignity and security, share in the general prosperity, and contribute to the common good, is not natural.\u00a0 It is not an instinct.\u00a0 It must be taught and learned.\u00a0 Thinking within the narrow bounds of local common sense must be unlearned.<\/p>\n When markets do what they do best, but still are far from providing dignified livelihoods for all who need them, the unbounded solution is non-market livelihoods..\u00a0 What are non-market livelihoods?\u00a0 And what financing and\/or in-kind talent and material resources make them possible?\u00a0 When you start to count them, and to study them, you find that they are innumerable, as many as the survival strategies of our ancestors thousands of years ago, as many as the stars in the night sky, as many as the social innovations our descendants will create that we now cannot yet imagine.<\/p>\n These few remarks may be sufficient to suggest that the word \u201cunbounded\u201d \u2013whatever its other appropriate uses may be\u2014 describes a society loving enough and imaginative enough to include all and to exclude none.<\/p>\n _____________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cRainbowism\u201d is contrasted with \u201cNon-racialism\u201d or \u201cA Non-racial Society.\u201d The difference is that in \u201ca Rainbow Society\u201d people of different races live together in peace and harmony, while in a \u201cNon-racial Society\u201d race does not exist; the truth is acknowledged. The truth is that there is no such thing as race. Humanity is one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[772,459,610,552,103,1218],"class_list":["post-177958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial","tag-apartheid","tag-equality","tag-inequality","tag-race","tag-racism","tag-south-africa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177958"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177958\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n(Crain Soudien, The Cape Radicals:\u00a0 Intellectual and Political Thought of the New Era Fellowship 1930s-1960s.\u00a0 <\/em>Johannesburg; Wits University Press 2019, p. 16.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n
On the Use of the Unusual Word \u201cUnbounded\u201d<\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/howard-richards.jpg\")
<\/a><\/em>Prof. Howard Richards teaches in the EMBA program at the University of Cape Town.\u00a0 He is a member of the\u00a0<\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/strong><\/a><\/em>. He was born in Pasadena, California but since 1966 has lived in Chile when not teaching in other places. Professor of Peace and Global Studies Emeritus, Earlham College, a school in Richmond Indiana affiliated with the Society of Friends (Quakers) known for its peace and social justice commitments. Undergraduate work at Yale.\u00a0 J.D. Stanford Law School, MA and PhD in Philosophy from UC Santa Barbara, Advanced Certificate in Education-Oxford,\u00a0Ph.D. in Educational Planning from University of Toronto. Books:\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>Dilemmas of Social Democracies\u00a0with Joanna Swanger,\u00a0<\/em>Gandhi and the Future of Economics\u00a0with Joanna Swanger,\u00a0<\/em>The Nurturing of Time Future, Understanding the Global Economy,\u00a0<\/em>The Evaluation of Cultural Action,\u00a0Following Foucault: The Trail of the Fox (with Catherine Hoppers and Evelin Lindner),\u00a0(on Amazon as an e book), <\/em>Unbounded Organizing in Community (with Gavin Andersson, also on Amazon),\u00a0 <\/em>Rethinking Thinking\u00a0(with Catherine Hoppers),\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>Hacia otras Economias\u00a0co-edited with Raul Gonzalez,\u00a0<\/em>Solidaridad, Participacion, Transparencia: conversaciones sobre el socialismo en Rosario, Argentina.\u00a0<\/em>Available free on the blogspot lahoradelaetica.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"