The Repressive State Apparatus and the Ideological State Apparatus

There are people in power, using that power for a privileged lifestyle and as a goal in itself. Secondly there is a majority with much less power, in a non-enviable position. The people in power have an interest in keeping things the way they are, while one would suppose that the people with less power, and consequently less wealth, would want to change the set-up so they get their fair share, and have a dignified exisitence. Also a change in society to make us more productive would increase the whole cake for everybody. That seems beneficial for all, but That is not necessarily the case. The privileged now have a lot of power. Making society more productive would require limitations to that power, and the people who spent a career gaining power are not likely to give it up voluntarily.

They can exercise their power with physical violence, and they make sure they have the means to do so. For this they have the Repressive State Apparatuses (RSA here does not mean Republic of South Africa, but Repressive State Apparatus). There are the police, the army, the justice system, prisons. In name these would serve the interests of society but in practice they serve the ruling class. The police are used to kill dissidents like Robert Chasowa and the demonstrators in 2011. The justice system keeps the poor on remand for unlimited time, and the rich buy themselves out with bail or bribes.

This physical repression however is expensive and can only go so far. It is much cheaper and more effective to keep the population in control without the exercise of physical power. For this the ruling class uses the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs). These are the media, the school, the church and such. They keep the population in line by indoctrinating them with the norms and values of the ruling class. Of course the government (personified by the President) has control over public media and public schools. Even private media and private schools are owned by the rich: a poor person cannot afford to start a newspaper or television station. The state controls the content of exams, which controls the content of lessons in schools. So the ruling class has control over all these institutions. They use this control to adjust our mindset to their advantage.

Probably the most effective ISA is the education system. Here we learn at a young age, when our minds are still easy to mold into the shape useful for the ruling class. In school we learn skills useful for the ruling class: if we can calculate we can do their administration for them. If we can write we can spread the ruling class ideology in newspapers. If we can operate electronics we can spread ruling class ideology via radio and television. But there is another dimension, which is more useful for the ruling class: in school we learn to obey the powerful. We are punished with low grades or sometimes even physical violence if we don’t do as we are told. We learn to not question authority, to not investigate why we are in such an un-enviable position. We learn that we need to do as we are told, that it is our own problem that we live in such bad conditions, and that (no matter how bad the economy) we need to start a business if we do not have an income. And we learn that we get fired for asking questions. Our school system conditions us for the interests of the ruling class.

We need to change that. We need a school system that stimulates our imagination, that encourages independent thinking, that teaches us to question: why do others have power over us? Why do some have so much and do so many have so little? What is patriotism? Why does someone have the power to tell me what to do? Why does someone have the power to order his Police to shoot at us with live ammo? Why can we vote only for ruling class candidates? Why are we represented so badly? Why should we be represented by rich old men, instead of ruling ourselves?

We need education for critical consciousness. There are methods for this available.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

We could do it if we chose. But what we do is walk in line to stay out of trouble. Consequently we do not develop, we stay with the same situation: a ruling class that steals our hard earned money, places itself above the law, does not represent the population and lives an opulent lifestyle. And a population that for the most part lives in abject poverty. That is not the way our life should be and we should teach our upcoming generation to ask the hard questions, and to draw the consequences. To be patriotic, which is not afraid to stand up and say the truth. Not afraid to organize. Not afraid to protest. Not afraid to question the status quo that is good only for the ruling class: the rich, the powerful, the privileged.

 

Democracy and education

We need to improve the quality of our democracy. Unfortunately it is unlikely we can achieve this overnight. We need a population that is equipped to be critical of leadership, and capable of organizing resistance against unjust rulers. We Africans used to have these types organisation before they were violently suppressed by slave trader, colonizer and one party regime.

Democracy goes beyond the ballot box. In a democracy we have the right of expression and the right of assembly. We have a right (and a duty)to organize against an unjust ruler, also when elected in free and fair elections (which our rulers are not: elections here may be called free by some, but no one can hold that they are fair).

To be critical of leadership, our population needs to be equipped with the right skills: critical thinking and a just suspicion against power and the violence that power is built on. Fear of the powerful is a bad quality for a population. We need to equip our children with the means to be critical of any authority, and the skills to evaluate the performance of the powerful. Also they need the skills to organize against unjust rulers.

To make this a wide spread quality among the population, the education system seems the best vehicle for building these skills in the population. The way to do this is called “critical pedagogy”. The pedagogy both builds critical thinking skills, and is critical of old fashioned methods of rote memorization that still are wide spread in our education system, even in Teacher Training Colleges.

Teachers need to be equipped with skills to teach higher order thinking skills (HOTS) in their students, from the first day on, starting in kindergarten, and going all the way up to PHD level. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-order_thinking

Methods to do this are available and can even be downloaded for free. A classic (that was revered by the ANC in the struggle against Apartheid) is called Pedagogy of the Oppressed, written by Paulo Freire from Brazil.

https://selforganizedseminar.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/freire_pedagogy_oppresed1.pdf

He is not from the West, so he knows about neo colonialism and post colonialism from the same side as we do.

We need to reorganize our education system and adjust our exam system for this. That means that exams should not test for memorization of facts. This is an outdated type of exam that does not help our students function well in the 21^st century. Exam questions should be open and address HOTS, rather than facts. Our teachers should be educated to teach self organization, creative thinking, critical thinking. This means students should not be made to listen to endless lectures, but asked to perform tasks like investigating, research, cooperation in student groups, discussions with reporting. They should be asked to access critical texts, and compare different viewpoints on issues. They should be made familiar with diversity (gender, race, class, sexual orientation, religion etc) at a young age.  Then, by researching by themselves and in groups, and reporting to class, they inform each other as well as the teacher.

Knowledge is not a neutral object that can be passed from an all-knowing teacher to an un-knowing student, it is a social phenomenon that is constructed in cooperation and dialectics. Our African culture is a great background for this type of learning, where we can actually outperform Western students, who have been raised on individualism and top-down models of society. We, from the day we were born, have learned to work communally, and to cooperate for the good of the collective. This same culture should be harnassed in our education system, to improve student performance, the skills of our work force and the critical thinking that makes our democracy function optimally.

Malawian history: a tragedy in slow motion.

In 1964 we were excited: we got independence, and we were going to throw of the yoke of the colonizer’s oppression. Little did we realize: the British colonizer was being replaced with a stooge, a man who had spent most of his life in the West, the US but more recently in England. He had taken over the Victorian values of the colonizer. Look at his clothes: the three piece suits and the hat were totally outdated in England by that time. Look at the clothing he imposed on us: long skirts for women, and covering up. This was not Malawian or even African, it was Victorian British. Just when the British were throwing off this old fashioned morality of prudishness combined with sexual molestation (in Britain as much as here in the dance camps). Like the large majority of the first generation of post-independence African rulers, Kamuzu did not reform the state. The same oppressive institutions were unleashed on us as under the colonial rule.

The purpose of the post-colonial state is to serve the interests of the former colonizer, who needed cheap raw materials for his industry. And Kamuzu delivered for the former colonial power, mostly tobacco but also tea, coffee, ground nuts sugar and other agricultural produce. The ruling class lived in corrupt opulence at the cost of the population, who were kept uneducated and in abject poverty. In exchange for political support during the cold war, and cheap tobacco, Kamuzu got the backing of the former colonial state, which allowed him to murder democracy, and oppress the population with his thugs, the “Young Pioneers”.

We suffered under the double oppression of both political rights (democracy, freedom of expression and other political rights were heavily oppressed) as well as economic rights. We were kept poor and uneducated so we did not have the means to revolt against his (and the colonial masters’) oppression.

By the time the cold war was over, the early 90s, Kamuzu did no longer serve the interests of the colonial master, so he was no longer given their support. We got nominal democracy, but only insofar as this served the interests of the colonial master. The ruling elite stayed the same: Bingu and Muluzi had been in the government machine under Kamuzu and they followed the same policies.

Cheap labour gave cheap raw materials for the colonial masters and kept the population poor. Muluzi made primary education free, but made sure the quality suffered so much the population still did not have enough development in the thinking to revolt. Muluzi served the colonial masters by privatizing, which by then was the fashion for the ruling class to enrich itself at the cost of the population. (It took about ten year for the neo liberal fashion of Margaret Thatcher to reach Malawi). David Harvey calls this accumulation by dispossession.

The first term of Bingu brought some relief for the population: he had dumped the UDF which had sponsored him into power, so he had less interests to serve, and he could afford to do something for the population which was subsidizing agricultural inputs. The ruling class allowed this for one term, but he clearly felt the need to turn 180 degrees right after his reelection, and made sure that all gains were erased and the population suffered under corruption and oppression (bad laws and such). And when we exercised our constitutional right to assembly and expression, Bingu unleashed his fire power on us and had 20 unarmed demonstrators killed.

Nothing much has changed since then: the post-colonial state still serves the interests of the ruling class via a neo patrimonial set up: the rulers place themselves above the law, and democracy is no more than an election between different groups of ruling class thugs.

The neo patrimonial set up is this: the population has no recourse to the law when they have been done wrong. All they can do is beg for mercy or a favour. Favours are dished out only on condition of political support for the ruler in question, and the population remains dependent on the favours. The judiciary and the legislative are dependent on the executive, who are dependent on the President. There is an enormous personal power vested in the President, who appoints people in all key positions (head of police, head of ACB, head of judiciary, and a whole host of heads of para statals and such). This ensures that the President does not have to answer to the law, and shields his favorite friends from the law also. We do not even have the right to know: the President illegally stopped implementation of the Access to Information law!

On the other hand, the poor have no way to exercise their judicial rights: they can be on remand for unlimited time, when their file is kept away because they have no funds to bribe anyone to retrieve it.

The state sells cheap tobacco and other raw materials to the colonial masters, and there is constant bickering between international capitalists and the local ruling class over the amount stolen in the process. The local ruling class wants to take as big a chunk as possible, the international capitalists want everything for themselves. When the elephants fight, the grass is being trampled upon.

The set up of the post colonial state serves the ruling class and their international backers, it oppresses the population. The ruling class knows very well that a well educated and reasonably wealthy population is not in need of continuous favours, which would blow the bottom from under the neo patrimonial power they are imposing on us. So they make sure the funding for education is being lowered every year and that the economy does not take off (corruption, red tape, inefficiency, excessive import and export levies and restrictions, excessive regulation). This way they keep us poor and dependent on their favours, legal or illegal.

This creates a situation of a pressure cooker, with the pressure mounting and mounting, with no release valve. The ruling class (political elite, closely allied business community and top civil servants) does not allow the least relief from economic hardships for the population: on the contrary, they keep the inequality going up (see the GNIN coefficient). This means in practice that they get richer and we get poorer. This way, the top-down state (the ruling class)  loses its ability to contain the justified rage of the population.

Before this explosion happens we need to change the state, form a state that serves at least a little of the needs of the population, for it to keep some semblance of legitimacy. Currently the State is quickly losing its legitimacy: it imposes taxes on us, exposes us to continuous extortion of bribes and delivers no meaningful services in return.

We need to deconstruct the neo patrimonial logic that keeps us oppressed, and demand a change towards a meaningful democracy. A form of the state that serves us all, and not only the foreign capitalists and their local henchmen.