Wrecking Ball

WRECKING BALL Why Permanent Technological Unemployment, a Predictable Pandemic and Other Wicked Problems Will End South Africa’s Experiment in Inclusive Democracy by Stu Woolman TERMS of USE This electronic version of the book is available exclusively on the NISC website for free download to use in research or private study. It may not be re-posted on book or other digital repositories that allow systematic sharing or download. For any commercial or other uses please contact the publishers, NISC (Pty) Ltd. Print copies of this book as well as e-Book versions available for online ordering from the African Books Collective and Amazon.com. © NISC (Pty) Ltd WRECKING BALL Why permanent technological unemployment, a predictable pandemic and other wicked problems will end South Africa’s experiment in inclusive democracy Wrecking Ball explores, in an unprecedented manner, a decalogue of wicked problems that confronts humanity: Nuclear proliferation, climate change, pandemics, permanent technological unemployment, Orwellian public and private surveillance, social media that distorts reality, cyberwarfare, the fragmentation of democracies, the inability of nations to cabin private power, the failure of multinational institutions to promote collaboration and the deepening of autocratic rule in countries that have never known anything but extractive institutions. Collectively, or even severally, these wicked problems constitute crises that could end civilisation. Does this list frighten you, or do you blithely assume that tomorrow will be just like yesterday? Wrecking Ball shows that without an inclusive system of global governance, the collective action required to solve those wicked problems falls beyond the remit of the world’s 20 inclusive democracies, 50 flawed democracies and 130 extractive, elitist autocracies. Flawed democracies and autocracies that already struggle to produce goods necessary for their own citizens to flourish, are simply incapable of committing to international arrangements that address the existential threats posed by the decalogue of wicked problems. This then is our children’s inheritance: Dystopias far, far worse than the polities that we ourselves have known. What, if anything, can mitigate the harms that are our legacy? Wrecking Ball offers, as an answer, a ground-breaking analysis of South Africa’s political economy. It demonstrates that this country’s elitist and extractive political and economic institutions not only make resolution of ongoing domestic crises unattainable, likewise, they make meaningful responses to wicked problems impossible. Smart people think they have all the answers. Without laboring under any such illusions, Martin Luther King Jr eloquently opined: ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.’ But what will happen, King would acidly ask, if we continue to dawdle, and simply run out of time? Wrecking Ball similalry operates under no such ‘smart’ pretenses, and undeterred and unmatched ventures into terrrains traversed by truly great political economists: Smith, Ricardo, Marx and Keynes. By knitting together what we all know to be the facts, with cutting edge theory in economics, sociology, history and political science, the book paints an unflinching portrait of where we are, and where we are headed. Are we ready to be honest with ourselves about the likely future of this overheated, overpopulated planet? WRECKING BALL Why Permanent Technological Unemployment, a Predictable Pandemic and Other Wicked Problems Will End South Africa’s Experiment in Inclusive Democracy Stu Woolman NISC (Pty) Ltd: Makhanda, South Africa First edition 2021 Text and the work copyright © the author 2021 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. The author and the publisher have made every effort to obtain permission for and acknowledge use of copyright material. Should an inadvertent infringement of copyright have occurred, please contact the publisher and we will rectify omissions or errors in any subsequent reprint or edition. Published in South Africa on behalf of the author by NISC (Pty) Ltd, PO Box 377, Makhanda, 6140, South Africa ISBN (print): 978-1-920033-72-9 ISBN (eBook): 978-1-920033-73-6 ISBN (pdf): 978-1-920033-76-7 Copy editing and project management: Peter Lague Design, typesetting and layout: NISC (Pty) Ltd Cover image: ZargonDesign/E+ via Getty Images Printed by Digital Action (Pty) Ltd DEDICATION To my dear friend, George Abraham, for a decade of discussions about the pitched battle between the extractive, elitist political and economic institutions that dominate our lives and the rather riven and embattled democratic polities to which we both remain committed. With respect to the title of this work, as George would be quick to agree, it refers to far more than novel technological advances and their disruptive consequences. The title reflects a common pattern playing itself out across a host of domestic and global crises. About these commonalities, George has shared his granular understanding of the array of wicked problems surveyed in this book with generosity and without ego. I hope that this book does justice to his capacious imagination and his ability to impose some degree of explanatory order on an extremely chaotic world. Because people who couldn’t imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn’t need to imagine, because they already were. … That evil wasn’t glamorous, but just the result of ordinary half-assed badness, high school badness, given enough room, however that might happen, to become its bigger self. Bigger, with more horrible results, but never more than the cumulative weight of ordinary human baseness. [In the end, there were] … no comets crashing, nothing you could really call a [full-scale] nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of them there were, how they’d changed things just by being there. William Gibson The Peripheral (2015) Understanding is never ending and therefore cannot produce final results. It is the specifically human way of being alive; for every single person needs to be reconciled to a world into which he was born a stranger and in which, to the extent of his distinct uniqueness, he always remains a stranger. Understanding begins with birth and ends with death … Causality … is an altogether alien and falsifying category in the historical sciences. Not only does the actual meaning of every event always transcend any number of past ‘causes’ which we may assign to it, this past itself comes into being only with the event itself. Only when something irrevocable has happened can we even try to trace its history backward. The event illuminates its own past; it can never be deduced from it. Hannah Arendt ‘Understanding and Politics’ Essays in Understanding (1954) ‘It ain’t over, til it’s over.’ Yogi Berra (1973) ‘But when it’s over, it’s over.’ Richard Adelstein (1985) vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS To the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), and the Elizabeth Bradley Chair in Ethics, Governance and Sustainable Development, for affording me the time to poke around in areas of interest more closely aligned to the real world in real time, and Dean and Professor Wesahl Domingo of the Wits Law School for pushing me to finish and to share my work. To Professor Firoz Cachalia, for his unstinting support, his comradeship, his unlimited intellectual curiosity, his willingness to talk for hours and hours until the last cappuccino and grappa are served so as to better my partial and inadequate understanding of South Africa and to temper my pessimism with hope; his modelling of personal, academic, moral and political integrity; and finally, his willingness to throw his weight as Director of the Mandela Institute behind me and this project. To Professor Theunis Roux, who read two different versions of the manuscript, led a public panel discussion, provided copious notes and, after a final phone call, nudged me toward an institutional analysis of the suite of problems addressed in this work – a form of analysis that provides the book with greater explanatory power. To Professor Penny Andrews for organising the first ‘book talk’ at New York Law School in November 2019 and thereby creating an incentive to finish a first draft. To Wesleyan University and Professor Don Moon, for providing me with a room with a view as a visiting scholar, as well as the time to complete a large part of this work. To Professor Richard Adelstein, of Wesleyan University, for whom I keep writing variations of the same book. He pushed me to think ‘big’, while also reminding me that ‘small is beautiful’. He – along with too many other Wesleyan professors who deserve mention – taught me to gaze beyond my own parochial horizons, and to treat all other sentient beings as possessed of intrinsic worth. To Ruth Kruger, whose sustained and hard-nosed engagement with this book makes me appear far sharper than I truly am. To Mike Schramm, my publisher, for believing that this book contains ideas worth sharing, allowing me to develop those ideas over time, and forcing me to get the book out there at the right time. To Professor Jon Klaaren, for continuing to believe in my commitment to experimentalism, development theory and small wins – even if they may not generate the bigger wins that South Africa requires. To Justine Neke, for cleaning up my act and making this particular performance so much better.

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