The Guptas: Same Same but Other
There’s a great Matt Taibbi line that sums up the way truthers obscure the banal machinery that really drives the world political order: ‘In 9/11 lore the people who staff the White House, the security agencies, the Pentagon and groups like PNAC and the Council of Foreign Relations are imagined to be a monolithic, united class of dastardly, swashbuckling risk-takers with permanent hard-ons for Bourne Supremacy-style “false flag” and “black bag” operations, instead of the mundanely greedy, risk-averse, backstabbing, lawn-tending, half-clever suburban golfers they are in real life.’
When Bill Clinton understood that he’d have to contend with garden variety greed and vested interests, that he was subject to the dreary supremacy of financiers and unelected technocrat, he famously complained: ‘You mean to tell me that the success of the economic program and my re-election hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders?’
Not George Soros and the Rothschilds’ secret cabal of moneylenders (we can throw in a couple more anti-Semitic tropes), but the hegemony, as even Bill Clinton could see, of neoliberal orthodoxy.
Truthers and denialists then - this is the frustrating irony - frequently deploy superficial bullshit that conceals more fundamental problems; problems which the denialists often faintly echo and distort.
Yes, Big Pharma are greedy and manipulative and selectively release results, and strict bio-medical interventions are not always the best way to deal with public health issues, but it’s impossible to deal productively with those nuances when otherwise rational people deny HIV causes Aids.
But while our ways of doing science are imperfect, deference to expert opinion combined with tough-mindedness about outside influences can steer us, at least, away from total disaster.
But what do we do when the conspiracy is the truth, only more so?
Have the Gutpa’s really captured the state or, as Andile Mngxitama suggests, is this all just a smokescreen for the depredations of ‘white capital’?
The truth is that it’s both. That’s obvious enough, at least as long as we choose to sustain that duality. But are the Guptas’ operations really qualitatively different from the everyday working of capital, or do they rather represent capital’s logical conclusion? There’s a lot at stake in denying the latter and affirming the former.
You’d think commandeering Waterkloof would be bad enough to fully occupy our attention, but recall how much of our ire was directed at the sheer crassness of the event, the gauche Sun City wedding, the grandiose blue light convoy for guests.
Is it because we’re so conditioned to elites having their way with us that we feel a need to exoticise these foreigners who don’t known the meaning of tasteful extravagance?
Don’t they know the fitting way to display wealth is to hold your wedding at a 300-year-old Stellenbosch wine estate at which the bride and groom arrive on horseback accompanied by an electric string quartet playing the theme from Titanic. You know, something classy.
Don’t these crude Indian (the xenophobia is no coincidence) know that you discreetly cultivate thought leaders and fund bursaries and networks? You don’t start your own newspaper and make government pay for advertising while everyone is looking. And you never, ever appoint ministers yourself. That’s what the threat of capital flight is for.
The fact is the Guptas don’t stand outside of ordinary capital. Rather, as capitalists, they have broken the tacit code of conduct on which capitalism’s ideology rests.
They’ve also broken laws, destroyed the credibility of the state and, in the ultimate betrayal, concentrated wealth amongst a faction, not a class. For this they deserve prison.
Unless they know something we don’t, which they likely do, they have made one enormous tactical error. By appearing to stand outside of the ordinary elite class, they appear as crooks and not regular beneficiaries of the immutable status quo, which makes them vulnerable. For if we think recourse is possible, then it is. You can coolly email orders for the extrajudicial killing of striking miners, but when you cross that line it’s critical that you comport yourself with the dignity of the financier class.
The fact that the Guptas aren’t really different from capital at large, that they are, in fact, the same but more so, really gums up the dialectic works.
When we finally overcame government recalcitrance on HIV treatment, two things happened. Millions of people directly benefited and health care policy became more rational and effective. But also important, we could then move onto broader questions about integrating treatment into broader healthcare strategies. Defeating Aids denialism saw a clear end to an epistemic impediment to reasonable inquiry.
The backlash against the Guptas is different. The family has indeed betrayed capital, but not by grabbing too much of the pie. That’s just business. Rather, their brazenness risks lifting the veil, showing that the whole system is rigged, that public participation in drawing up policy is a sham.
But now, a miracle. In defining the Guptas as other (as tacky interlopers or as heroic antagonists of white capital), we feel the manoeuvres of elites not as the entrenchment of their power but as an act of popular resistance!
The worst part of this illusion is that it’s true. Yes, we do need Gordhan to restore credibility and order, sure it’s essential to reaffirm the integrity of organs of state and reassure investors. The alternative is untenable. But that’s also because in so doing we’ve limited what alternatives there are. The forces of reaction are now somehow intermediaries of the popular will.
Now we can delight in the calculated non-spectacle of Gordhan and Ramaphosa taking buses and flying economy, while we anxiously await the pencil necked milquetoasts from Moody’s to tell us whether our workers are still allowed to strike and how much healthcare spending to cut.
In a way, it will be a shame to see the Guptas go. For a brief moment, we were able to believe the forces that had captured our state were almost interesting.
