Waiting for the barbarians

To change the world, first change your heart. I realised this one day as I stood in the squalor of a South African township and looked back to the city, where I saw the decline of the West.

If you turn a funnel upside down and stick a check valve in its stem, you have a graphical representation of apartheid. The funnel sucked the output from a large base into a few hands, and the valve closed to keep it there.

Obviously, those at the bottom resisted this. Without the numbers to keep them down, those at the top needed to peel off some foot soldiers. So, as if to say, 'Let's rob your neighbour and share the loot', they slid the check valve down the stem.

Pledging to reserve certain jobs to whites, South Africa's capitalists separated white workers from the African majority. The check valve was slapped not only on the labour market, but also at the entrances to white suburbs, which got the best schools and public services, entry for non-whites being strictly controlled by passbooks.

This arrangement gave apartheid a sufficiently large base to endure for decades, with working-class whites manning the security services that crushed township rebellion. But it was a trap - a comfort trap, if you will. It repressed the black majority, but also left the privileged minority at their rulers' mercy. Because not only did the townships grow angry, businesses got hungry. As the gap between white and black wages widened, and foreign sanctions choked off their exports, white owners eventually found they needed black labour.

political power

So: make new friends and chuck the old - although, let's face it, 'end apartheid' makes for better copy. Township leaders were lured from their communities with the spoils of political power and corporate directorships (under the wholesome-sounding rubric of 'Black Economic Empowerment'). White workers, too pricey to compete with black labour, were left to hustle in the streets of Cape Town and Johannesburg. And since they had earlier turned their backs on their black brethren, who would now take up their cause? The comfort trap snapped shut on them.

While cheap black labour reinvigorated South African business, outside the small unionised black working class, living standards scarcely improved. The gap between rich and poor has actually widened in post-apartheid South Africa. Same funnel, new foot soldiers.

Although embellishing it with some of their loopier obsessions, apartheid's architects were simply using the blueprint of Western imperialism. When Europe's workers started turning against capitalism in the 19th century, the funnel of empire allowed the continent's rulers to use the fruits of colonialism to buy them off. The funnel even survived the end of empire, when an American-dominated global trading regime continued steering the disproportionate gains of trade to Western countries. There, passports and visas, rather than passbooks, locked up the best jobs and services.

Township labour

But this global apartheid was destined to fail, and for the same reasons. Once First-World workers cost 60 times more than their Third-World peers, Western firms grew hungry for 'township' labour. Their governments, keen to kick-start growth and share the gains with their constituents, found allies in Third-World corporate and political elites. And so was born neoliberal globalisation.

The funnel shifted yet again. Western workers, unable to compete, were hammered. But middle-class homeowners gobbled up cheap imports and the easy credit that was fuelled by the inflated profits of a global plutocracy - at least until the housing bust. Then the middle classes got the boot, in what we call 'austerity'. Meanwhile, in the townships of the global economy, a corporate and bureaucratic elite did well, but everyone else learned to live on the edge.

All that was noble in the Western tradition, like liberty and equality, got buried under our selfish hunt for riches. Persuaded to turn on our neighbour and look out for number one, we walked right into the trap. We blame some evil Other, some foreigner at the gates, when it is we who are the barbarians.

That meant, I then understood, we still have the power to change our world. But to do that, we must free ourselves from this trap of selfishness. There's no point trying to have it all if we lose everything we hold dear.

John Rapley is a political economist at the University of Cambridge and an adjunct professor at Queen's University. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and jr603@cam.ac.uk.