— It worries me more and more. — The back of his hand fell on the dossier. — These young people seem to grind on, doctrinaire in the old style, the old catchwords, while the socialist world — our model — the real socialist world, it's changed so much. People there have fought and died to get rid of most of the means the young comrades are still starry-eyed about using after liberation. We have the principle we must be led by the people. right, and it's the masses in Eastern Europe who've overthrown the regimes that were supposed to be led by them!
It's the people's choice and will! How can we not recognize that? Not trust them? Do we really want to 'achieve' policies these uprisings prove to have perpetuated misery and poverty? When those who've lived with them are making them obsolete?—
— You're talking about the unemployed, the camp-follow-ers — the school-boycott generation, going on at gatherings.? And you owe them so much they must be given the platform. Well, and yes, it's true, there're also a few whites, the fossilized Stalinists—
— No, no. Even among us. the needle jumps back and you hear the same record. And of course it's still what works best with crowds. We're not innocent of using it. particularly with the youth and the workers. It's still what seems to them the answer to their frustrations. The secular promised land. What they want to hear. So. And there're still fellows here who, when they're talking about giving the land back to the people, mean some kind of forced collectives. It doesn't matter to them that these have been abandoned everywhere because they don't work — people don't work productively in that structure. It's been proved over seventy hard years! Doesn't that mean anything? And the others, shaking their heads because the Constitutional Guidelines update the Freedom Charter— we've moved on, thirty-five years since Freedom Square, for god's sake — but they sneer sell-out because there's recognition of private property along with land redistribution, a mixed economy with nationalization. So they're outraged that anyone should be allowed to own a family home. Still dreaming our people's democracy will be able through god knows what miracle — you tell me! — to provide state garden suburbs for the workers, when no other regime has succeeded in this, not one, when it's been the great failure of socialism we ought to have the confidence to admit if we want to live as socialists of the twenty-first century.
Because that's what we already should be. The twentieth's thinking is the past. Finished. Viva, viva socialism. Which one? Which one are we shouting about? The dead one? We'll take the best of it and move on. Must. Don't they see, won't they see? The Soviets, the whole of Eastern Europe, even China— there's a new assessment — yes, that's what comes out of the uprisings, isn't it, Hannah, that's what it really is, quite scientific enough, on the analysis of concrete evidence! — it's a whole new understanding of our human needs and how to go about trying to realize them. And it's not what the capitalist world rubs its hands over, it's not what they think; we're not being taken over. It's not revisionism — but here you get that old parrot accusation.—
She stirred beside him. — Change the way they think. again. I don't know. It's not so long since you learnt to change the idea you had of yourselves as powerless against whites. The old Left did it, by god! Thank god. Only the old Left. Now new realities to be accepted. It's going to be hard for many, looked at from here. It means the loss of absolutes— you know what I mean? I'm a missionary's granddaughter. It makes people feel insecure. You can screw up the courage to do what you have to do to get rid of the old structures that hold you down if you can believe there's a paradise on the other side. You die for freedom only if there's the political equivalent of eternal life to come — which is liberation as promised in the old socialist writ, not in some compromise with a mixed economy, people with money — whites, and bourgeois blacks! — still owning property on land the whites stole by conquest! That's how it will seem!—
— But the writ's being rewritten! That's the point! People have been willing to die now for that. We've got to wake up and realize it, if it's to mean feeding and housing and educating our people in freedom! Giving the generations of uprooted people and refugees somewhere to live instead of somewhere to run from— There.
The reference lay between them like the name of the recently dead brought up tactlessly before the bereaved. I could have cut my tongue out, the offender says, not meaning it, because reference to the loss is something those concerned will have to accustom themselves to, anyway.
Hannah broke in quickly. — Is this being taken up with the cadres?—
— Not as it should be. No. There's no interest in what's happening outside. Except at the top — leadership — of course. Here and outside, negotiations go on on the basis that the world's changed. How else. But we keep it to ourselves. No-one wants to talk about it except insofar as it affects our allies' attitude towards our struggle. With the cold war melted down, will they still see our enemies, here, as theirs? There's no real open debate on what else the big changes outside mean to our ideological thinking. Nothing! We're afraid to talk about it for fear it weakens our hold on people. Afraid that if we can't offer the old socialist paradise in exchange for the capitalist hell here, we'll have turned traitor to our brothers!—
She sought his hand as a good friend: she had wanted, hadn't she, never to give up their friendship for any other intimacy, and he had confirmed it never would be. You are the only friend I ever had. If his opinion did not count for what it should, for some unknown reason, some momentum lost, it was an injustice that did not recognize his worth. A good man.
— This country's always been way ahead in industrial and technological development, considering its history, and way behind in ideas, political culture. British liberalism tottering on with its form of racism long after it was overtaken by Boer nationalism with its form of racism, white power hanging on long after it's been defeated everywhere else; I hope to god we're not going to cling to something that's had its day, when we take over. If the old socialism's dying, let's admit it and make sure we can find our liberation in the new Left that's coming.—