The stresses and strains of our times

The stresses and strains of our times

I spent most of the first half of this year in Stellenbosch, South Africa. I had taken off time from the routine to have some quiet so I could think, read and write. But it also gave me the opportunity to reflect on a country I heretofore knew very little about by way of direct experience and encounter. 
South Africa is a nation of incredible contradictions, at once immensely endowed, just as the rest of the African continent is vastly rich, but also simultaneously afflicted by socioeconomic epidemics. It is a country of two worlds, actually more. 
In Stellenbosch where I lived, it is a different world from the Khayelitsha sprawling neighbourhood of Cape Town where the wretched of the earth reside in decidedly undesirable conditions. 

But this is not just about South Africa exclusively, although that country’s level of socioeconomic inequality is one of the worst in the whole world. All across the globe, there are different worlds that people inhabit, the world of those who are well-off and a different world of the majority who are pulverised and living on the margins. This is scarcely new.  But it appears that the capitalist exploitation of our times has spawned new forms of alienation and impoverishment. It is being powered and propelled by the internet and digital forces that are the newest sources of inequities.

The last time this phenomenon reached a climax, the world faced a world war in 1914 and a repeat in 1939. Writing from a Marxist intellectual tradition about the tragedy of the two world wars, the philosopher and political theorist Karl Polanyi pointed to the commodification of human labour and the attendant struggles for a livelihood. 
Reducing human beings to commodities in the marketplace, initially as slaves and later as wage labourers, meant that vast masses of the public across the world were alienated from the production processes and were disarticulated from the very society they inhabited. 
These disarticulated populations are cannon fodder for all sorts of agendas and ideologies including violent extremist entrepreneurs and populist politicians in poor and rich countries alike. 

From pools of supplies for street protests to suicide bombers and AK-47 wielders, there are enough foot soldiers to take the war to the upper classes and the elites who otherwise enjoy the comfort and trappings of skewed world order.  Whether in Somalia or Yemen, in DR Congo or Cameron, on the streets of Iran or Sri Lanka and in the cyberspaces of European citizens, the motivations and inspirations are surreally similar and sobering. This is nothing short of a call to rethink the foundations of the ideals and realities of our times. Our world is not one for all.
Faced with these daunting questions and challenges, as an academic I retreat to the world of ideas and thoughts to hopefully make sense of the stresses and strains staring at us. I have always found cover in the arguments and exhortations of the Indian thinker, Pankaj Mishra, a fast and furious critique of the western world’s liberal agenda, just like my teacher, Partha Chatterjee. 

Like other Indian and South Asian thinkers, Mishra provides a balanced and compelling approach to understanding the world precisely because he was born and raised in India but has lived and worked in the western metropole thereby experiencing firsthand the west’s hypocrisy and empty promises of modernity. 
The short of it here is that western modernity and the liberal worldview promises equality, freedom and material prosperity to the masses of young people who end up gasping for anything but those promises of modernity. This applies to so-called advanced western societies as much as the underdeveloped communities of the global south. 

These arguments may sound somewhat abstruse (although I’m up late in the night trying to form them), so I have to exit and face up directly to the issues. Today, our world is in the throes of the same grievances and alienations that have dotted human history and given us two disastrous world wars. 
The core issue is the refusal to embrace and promote our shared humanity, to pursue programmes that enhance broad prosperity and wellbeing. Europe appeared to have taken seriously the lessons of World War II when the welfare state system took root in the 1950s and 60s, a phenomenon manifests in socially progressive education and healthcare policies programmes of newly independent countries like Uganda in the 1960/70s. 

But this trend and trajectory came to an end at thebest of military coups in Africa and the rise of right-wing populism in the West in the 1980s and 90s. After a brief pushback in 2000/the 2010s especially in Latin America and Europe, we seem to be back to right-wing populist clamouring for the purity of Europe and Western white supremacy. For Africa, the writing is on the wall, as it has always been.  We shall return to this next.

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