A few weeks ago I attended a function in Pretoria where I met two men, one from China and the other from Singapore. They were polite conversationalists interested in the socio-economic challenges faced by us South Africans. What struck me about our conversation is that the man from China said something really profound and to my utter surprise the Singaporean agreed wholeheartedly.

Your problem here in South Africa, he said, is that you will never be able to solve the triple challenges of your people for as long as you continue to subscribe to a Western democratic system. The problem with the ANC, he continued, is that they will forever talk left but walk right because that is what Western democracy dictates.

I realised that the man from Singapore would indeed naturally agree because that is exactly what they had to do to get to where they are now. They had to suspend the basic rights of their people in order for their government to directly intervene in the economic trajectory of the country.

I always hear people lamenting about how amazing the Singapore journey has been, but seldom do they talk about the gross infringements suffered at the same time.

As for China, we all know the story. The Chinese man reminded me that about 20 years ago, South Africa was by far more advanced than China. Its infrastructure, human resources capacity and its connectedness with the world was far superior to that of China. Today, he says, the narrative is different. He contends that it is because China adopted its own style of governance and asked this straightforward question: What is in the best interest of the Chinese people?

Were we too quick in 1994 to embrace Western-style democracy? I wonder.

As I was conversing with the two gentlemen, I could not but wonder about The Tailor of Ulm.

The story is about young tailor who lived in Ulm in Germany, who imagined that human beings could fly. He dedicated his life to this pursuit, studying owls and birds in order to better understand the inner workings of flight. He finally built a contraption that could only be described as akin to a modern day glider and persuaded the king and his princes to watch while he attempted to fly off a nearby hill. Needless to say, he plunged tragically to his death. Oh, but what an imagination.

Many years later, Berthold Brecht wrote a poem in 1934 in honour of the tailor of Ulm.

Ulm 1592

Said the Tailor to the Bishop:
Believe me, I can fly.
Watch me while I try.
And he stood with things
That looked like wings
On the great church roof-
That is quite absurd
A wicked, foolish lie,
For man will never fly,
A man is not a bird,
Said the Bishop to the Tailor.

Said the People to the Bishop:
The Tailor is quite dead,
He was a stupid head.
His wings are rumpled
And he lies all crumpled
On the hard church square.

The bells ring out in praise
That man is not a bird
It was a wicked, foolish lie,
Mankind will never fly,
Said the Bishop to the People.

— Berthold Brecht, The New Reasoner, 1957

I thought of the tailor and his flying antics because here you have a man who imagined the impossible and died in pursuit of that imagined future.

I guess the point is clear. In order to pursue a brighter and better future, first you must be able to imagine it, second you have to work very hard towards achieving it and third, you must pursue it against all odds at times.

So when we ask the question, is Western democracy a stumbling block towards our imagined future of a better life for all, then we must do the necessary, even in the face of the people saying “the tailor is quite dead, he was a stupid head”.

The point is that we must reimagine a new way of governing. The current system of Western democracy does not work for us. But what then can be that alternative future or that alternative system?

Can it be a Marxist alternative or perhaps our very own “Socialism with South African characteristics”? In his 2011 book The Tailor of Ulm, however, Lucio Magri presents a depressing conspectus of the present state of Marxism. While in Brecht’s parable the Bishop was proved wrong and the tailor right, the allegorical reading in relation to communism produces some disturbing questions:

Can we be sure that if the tailor of Ulm had been crippled rather than killed by his disastrous fall, he would immediately have got to his feet to try again; or that his friends would not have tried to prevent him doing so?

And second, what actual contribution did he make to the subsequent history of aeronautics?

In relation to communism, such questions are especially pointed and difficult — above all because, at its theoretical formation, it had claimed to be not an inspiring ideal, but part of a historical process already under way, and of a real movement that was changing the existing state of things. Communism therefore always entailed a factual test, a scientific analysis of the present and a realistic prognosis of the future, to prevent it dissolving into myth.

In other words, between Lucio Magri (a prominent Italian communist) and Slavoj Zizek (a Slovenian philosopher) what are we to make of our imagined future?

Marxists always use the analogy of the egg to demonstrate their point about revolution and why it is inevitable. They say the shell of the egg remains static and intact. This, they say, represents the social structure of our society, in our case capitalism or private property relations, while the embryo inside represents the other social forces in society, in particular the working people.

The latter is not static and is ever-growing within the confines of the outer shell or social structure, and indeed, a perfect harmony can exist between the two social strata for some time. But Marx warns us that in time, friction and/or tension emerges and that gives rise to revolution.

We observe in South Africa and elsewhere in the world of the growing impatience on the part of the people.

The wealth gap, inequality gap, poverty gap and unemployment gap is ever-increasing and they will have none of it any more. Like the tailor of Ulm, they imagine a better future.

And so we see the increase in service delivery protests in Mzansi, the desperate vote of the conservative elements in Britain for Brexit and the rise of fascism in most of Western Europe, the US and of late, Brazil.

Capitalism is in crisis the world over, people, and if we think 2008/9 was a global meltdown, wait and see the next capitulation.

Can we be like the tailor of Ulm and reimagine a different future? Or have we resigned ourselves to the capitalist epoch and all its fault lines? DM