Who is fooling who?

Living under the paradox of totalitarian rule

Lars Dahlström

When the globe was still divided into the First, the Second, and the Third Worlds some
twenty years ago the common understanding amongst most of us, who lived in the First
World, was that the Second World was a pitiful place to live in, because it was organised
according to totalitarian rule. During that time some of us in the First World, who
believed in international solidarity and social justice, searched for practices and places
to develop possible alternatives to a capitalist world order at home, but also in the
Third World where these alternatives were most urgent.
Therefore, I found myself as a volunteer and educator in Southern Africa trying to
make a difference together with village teachers in Botswana and by joining forces with
other concerned citizens like Patrick van Rensburg and his brigades movement in
Serowe (van Rensburg, 1984); an exiled group of South African cultural workers in
Gaborone called Medu1 working against the apartheid regime across the border in
South Africa; and the community group Molo Songololo operating in the townships
outside Cape Town. I often visited the UNDP office in Gaborone to borrow the film
‘Generations of resistance’, a documentary of the historical struggle against apartheid in
South Africa from Chief Bambata, the Revonia trial that sent Mandela and others to
Robben Island, the killings in Sharpville, to the school boycotts.2 I brought that film to
the villages and showed it on the outside walls of the school buildings in the evenings as
an enlightening educative act. I also celebrated the first annual independence of
Zimbabwe in Bulawayo in 1981 and started to work for the liberation movement South
West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO) two years later to educate the Namibian
teachers and children living in exile at a refugee camp in Angola during the raging wars
in the region. This was in the 1980ies.
Today, more than twenty years later, the world is different. The Second World, the
communist Eastern bloc, has collapsed and entered the global financial and capitalist
markets. We are told that we live in a global era that at times is rhetorically
characterised as a global village. This state of affairs is said to be the end of history,
meaning that capitalism through liberal democracy is the final stage of development, if
we believe Fukuyama’s assessment (Fukuyama, 1992).
Yes, the world is different! The brigade movement was effectively silenced as it
was a threat to the common understanding and operations of markets and vocational
education. The South African culture group in Gaborone was killed by bombs planted by
the racist agents operating across the borders of South Africa. Molo Songololo3 lives on,
under the economic oak of charity, as an enduring effort to support children at the Cape
Flats against the killing waves of the economic tsunamis. SWAPO has become the ruling
political party in Namibia celebrating market ideologies and recently also World Bank
policies in the field of education.
If we for a moment pretend to believe in Fukuyama’s assessment, we still have to
ask ourselves if this is the dreadful final stage of development as we also have in close

1More information on Medu (roots)is available at

http://kaganof.com/kagablog/2010/02/02/medu-and-the-culture-of-liberation/
2 The film is available at www.villonfilms.com
3 See the Molo Songololo website at http://www.molosongololo.com

1
memory the bursting of the latest financial bubble and its devastating effects for
ordinary people or if humanity deserves a better destiny? We can also pose the
question whether the hawkers on the financial market will pump up another financial
bubble and when that bubble will burst? However, the only valid assessment that
makes sense today is that humanity is in danger, unless a different road is outlined for
the future.
International solidarity has also changed its character. For example, the Swedish
International Development Authority, Sida, once a respected supporter of social justice
and solidarity, has followed in the footsteps of the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund, and is today more of a megaphone for Swedish trade and market
expansions through its ‘newspeak’ agenda of poverty reduction4 and its move from
“education by educationalists to education by neoliberal management” (Callewaert,
2006, p. 127). The few remaining areas in Sida’s support to education that are not
directly related to trade and market expansions are today marginalised to the extent
that even long-serving staff at Sida make public calls for a renewed education policy
(Lind, 2010).
Referring back to the time of the divided globe during the cold war era, we can see
that the totalitarian rule of the collapsed Second World has been replaced by a new
totalitarian rule for the whole world. The new rule is the tyranny of the market
operating according to neoliberal doctrines. These doctrines can be summarised as
restrictions-free movement of capital, goods, and services; minimised public costs for
social services such as education and health care; deregulations of working life
including the reduction of unionist powers; privatisation of state-owned enterprises,
goods, and services; and the marginalisation or redefinition of concepts like the public
good, community, social justice, and solidarity, according to the newspeak agenda. All
these efforts are carried out with a false freedom slogan to generate more profits for the
owners of capital, under the blessings of the state that has forgotten its social functions
and replaced these functions with more of repressive measures in terms of surveillance,
control, and policing. (Martinez and Garcia, 2000; Hill, 2010)
The totalitarian aspects of the neoliberal agenda have also influenced political
systems in the West, where we praise ourselves for our views and practices of
parliamentarian democracy and multiparty elections. However, multiparty elections
have been redefined and political parties are reshaped accordingly, no matter their
original political profiles being conservative, liberal, social democratic, or socialist.
Today they all praise the expansions of markets into new spatial and social fields as a
way to reach political power by accepting the neoliberal common sense about
commoditisation. Political differences have been reduced to variations of common
neoliberal themes, while the election processes have been minimized to a choice
between individuals, rather than a choice between political visions of the ‘good society’.
Now we can start to identify a paradox that reminds us of the Second World, because of
the way political elections are played out today. The following is showing the way.
At present, I work together with a group of doctoral students from one of the few
remaining communist countries and one-party states. The other day we talked about
the upcoming Swedish elections in September 2010, when the present government, the
conservative bloc - the alliance - combining traditionally conservative, liberal, and
centre parties is challenged by a newly defined left wing bloc - the red & green -
combining the environmental party, social democrats, and the former communist party.

4 See the GSN bulletin text dated 2009-09-02.

2
None of these blocs are challenging the neoliberal agenda, but will compete to form the
new government on issues of cosmetic differences and the winners will be the
individual candidates who make the best impressions on the media shows, while the
internationally recognised welfare systems in Sweden are collapsing. I asked my
doctoral students how their elections are carried out and the story they told made me
realise that their system is probably fairer and freer of illusions than the system we
have in the West under the neoliberal hegemony.
Elections in this communist country are carried out under the following premises.
People in the whole country, even in towns, are divided into community villages of
roughly 250 - 400 families. The election system is organised around these villages. Each
village must come up with names of persons that the villagers want to be their political
representatives. These names are sent to the party that selects a number of candidates
larger than the seats available in the political forums for the region and the nation. The
selected candidates have to visit all villages in the community to present themselves
and to inform the villagers what they want to accomplish if they are elected. An
interesting aspect of this political campaigning is that a candidate is only allowed to tell
the villagers what they want to accomplish if they are elected and are not allowed to
criticise other candidates and their political agendas. On the voting day, the villagers
cast their votes in the ballot boxes and the candidates who get the largest number of
votes are elected.
Election systems in Western countries work today in an almost similar way even
though we formally practice multiparty elections. For example, in Sweden the different
regional party districts select the candidates for the elections and sometimes the
regional party leadership decides autocratically who the candidates will be as we have
read in the Swedish media recently.5 A minority of citizens are involved in this process
as memberships in the political parties are going down, unless you are a member of the
group who see politics as a career opportunity. Further on, candidates can arrange
individual campaigns to boost their own image and message to the electorate. Add to
this that party politics in Western countries converge to a large extend into issues of
variations within a common hegemonic neoliberal policy. An example of an issue that is
of concern for Swedish political parties, at least on the left side, is how much and what
kind of profit can be acceptable in a privately owned school that builds its economy on a
state financed voucher system, while this is a non-issue for the right wing alliance. The
question whether the state should subsidize private schooling with taxpayers’ money
and by that undermining the public school system is never asked.
The paradox is that the Western multiparty election system has been transformed
unnoticed under the present neoliberal hegemony to a system that is close to the one
that we all along have said is the counterforce and contradiction to our western view of
democracy – the communist one party system! Everything seems to be allowed in the
name of neoliberal totalitarianism, so the question is, who is fooling who? Or as John
Pilger (2002) referenced it "To be corrupted by totalitarianism, warned George Orwell,
one does not have to live in a totalitarian country."
There is hope even though we live in a pitiful world filled with paradoxes – history
continues.

5See for example, article titled ‘Lämnade s-möte i protest’ (Left the socialdemocratic meeting in
protest) at www.pitea-tidningen.se/nyheter/senaste_nytt/artikel.aspx?Articleid=5249037
published 17 March, 2010.

3
References
Callewaert, Staf (2006) Looking back, but not in anger. In Lars Dahlström & Jan
Mannberg (Eds) Critical Educational Visions and Practices in Neo-
liberal Times. Global South Network Publisher. Umeå University.
Pp. 127-132.
Fukuyama, Francis (1992) The End of History and the Last Man. Penguin
Hill, Dave (2010) Educational Perversions and Global Neoliberalism. In Wayne Ross
& Rich Gibson (Eds) Neoliberalism and Education Reform. Hampton
Press. Cresskill. Pp. 107-144.
Lind, Agneta (2010) Mångdubbla biståndet till utbildning (Multiply aid to education).
Published 15th February, 2010 at www.omvärlden.nu
Martinez, Elisabeth. & Garcia, Arnoldo. (2000) What is neoliberalism? A brief definition.
www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/econ101/neoliberalDefined.
html
Pilger, John (2002) The New Protest Movement. Downloaded from
http://www.zcommunications.org/the-new-protest-movement-
by-john-pilger
Van Rensburg, Patrick (1984) Looking Forward From Serowe. The Foundation for
Education with production. Gaborone.