Vishnu Padayachee: A teacher above all
- Adam Habib
He was my friend and mentor, serving as a bridge between an emerging generation of activist academics and an older generation of more established ones.
[Guest speaker Professor Adam Habib's speech at the launch of the book Political Economy and Critical Engagement in South Africa: Essays in Honour of Vishnu Padayachee, edited by Professors Rajend Mesthrie, Robert van Niekerk, and Imraan Valodia.]
I first met Professor Vishnu Padayachee when I got to the University of Durban-Westville in the early 1990s.
He was also one of the first persons who stewarded me in the institutional politics of the University of Natal some ten years later, a very different institutional space from UDW. He assisted with the supervision of my doctorate in the mid-1990s but was also a two-decade long research collaborator on resistance and the politics of economic policy making. Even now after so long and after having jointly researched and published in the area, I am not sure we entirely agreed. He was partial to the policy process - its debates, deliberations and navigating these - while I was focussed on the power differentials of social actors and how these could be remoulded and even manipulated to determine alternative outcomes.
In this difference you can understand the real Vishnu. He was the quintessential insider-outsider, institutionalist and activist. He was friend and active participant of the social movement and then the advisor to the vice chancellor. He was a manager of the academic department, but simultaneously stewarded an insurgent research centre on social movements. He was a trustee of the most established public and private financial institutions and yet remained the most trenchant critic of establishment economics.
There was no schizophrenia or hypocrisy here. Instead, it was a profound understanding that institutional and societal change requires both the passions and the pressures of the street and the transformative reformer and change maker within the institution. It is only when the former is harnessed by the latter to develop and implement new policy that social change is effected. Neither can effect change on its own especially in the contemporary world. And neither is the harnessing of street passions neat and easy. It requires to be deliberated with and challenged, other interests need to be consulted, trade-offs need to be negotiated, and the outcome is rarely what was originally imagined.
It is this simple, yet profound understanding and practice of politics that is missing in the progressive community across the Global North and South. And herein lies the challenge of our time.
Polarisation is the key descriptor of our historical moment. It defines the politics of both the global and national. Progressive communities defined in their most expansive sense have not been able to puncture the polarised bubble and heal the divides. Indeed they may have contributed and consolidated to the very divides by specific forms of political advocacy and conduct. The net effect is a world spiralling out of control with deep-seated economic and social inequalities, alienation of the young, and paralysis of political systems at the national and global level.
The polarised character of our moment is defined by four elements. First, is the deep-seated structural character of economic and social inequality. It is ironical that this has occurred at the very moment when production systems have so deeply integrated across the world. But the integration of productive systems have been accompanied by significant deregulation and financialisation, and a technological revolution, the combined effects of which have been to produce significant enrichment on the one end and immiseration on the other. This has occurred at both the global and national level partially masking the economic and social inequality across the world.
The deep-seated inequalities has provoked not only significant class but also generational polarities. Traditional working-class communities in the Global North have found their share of national income erode significantly. Similarly, the inflationary effects of enrichment across the world has enabled a real estate bubble, negatively impacting on young people’s ability to enter the property market. This together with the financial debt inherited from new regimes of university and higher education financing has provoked significant alienation of young people. This is the first generation since the Second World War that deeply believes that their lives will be worse than that of their parent’s generation. The behaviour provoked by this alienation has eroded the social pact between generations, compromising social welfare regimes including pension and medical aid systems.
The economic and social inequalities have enabled the rise of ethnic and opportunistic political entrepreneurs who have tapped into these popular discontents to advance a politics of polarisation and hate. This has manifested across the world in both the Global North and South, eroding democratic systems and accountability and giving rise to new forms of authoritarianism. A new breed of political actors - Trump, Johnson, Farage, Wilders, Le Pen, Modi, Netanyahu, Bolsanaro, Malema - have emerged across the world, as have a new set of issues, migration, abortion, affirmative action, national development and national jobs, culture wars. Liberal and social democratic politicians have responded by both doubling up on some social issues and becoming responsive to others like economic nationalism. The net effect was to transfer some of the polarisation onto the global system.
Polarisation among and within nations is occurring at the very moment when the global system needs to coherently respond to transnational challenges like war, climate change, pandemics, food security, and equitable access to natural systems like water and energy. The profound distrust engendered among nations not only between East and West, but also North and South has bedevilled climate change negotiations, or the solutions of transnational challenges like pandemics and war. Both the Russian-Ukraine and the Israel-Gaza wars have polarised relations between nations cementing not only former divides between East and West and North and South, but also dividing nations especially in the West. The result is increasingly the rise of a new Cold War with multiple global and regional dimensions.
Progressive intellectuals, activists and politicians and organisations have been found seriously wanting in this historical moment. Relying on old formulas of political action and resistance, they have consolidated divides rather than healing them. Much of this has had to do with an insufficient appreciation of the need to develop a politics that speaks to multiple audiences and balances competing priorities. This involves aligning class interests of white working-class communities with those of diasporic communities, or balancing the imperatives of transformation and inclusion with those of professional excellence and efficiencies. In the global playing field such balancing of interests involve aligning the development needs of nations in the majoritarian world with the climate change imperatives at the global level. In thematic area after thematic area progressives have been found wanting in the creation of a sensible politics that advances the interests of multiple communities.
But the practice of progressive politics has also been challenged for its failure to apply rules and policies consistently across the divides. Not only has this involved indulging crude populist politics of anarchist and extreme left groups including violence, political intolerance, harassment of individuals and cultural and racial chauvinism within diasporic communities, while not doing the same for similar behaviour among groups that they abhor, but it has also not proactively deliberated on the parameters of peaceful protests and what to do when malevolent individuals repeatedly violate these boundaries for their own personal or group agendas.
All of this suggests that there is an urgent need to redefine the agenda, contours and practices of progressive politics. There is also an urgent needs to break out of a politics defined by chauvinists and extremists of all camps, and to enable reformers within these communities to reach out and form alliances with their peers in other communities. Most importantly it requires developing a politics that understands the importance of grappling with trade-offs and sequencing reforms so that they have a snowballing effect of progressive change. Ultimately progressive change must be understood and practised as an accumulative process of continuously evolving inclusion of marginalised communities.
It is this agenda that should animate and define the agenda of public institutions and universities. And it is this agenda that Vishnu instinctively understood and practised as is attested to in so many of the chapters in this edited collection. It is also this philosophy, perspective and practice of Vishnu that I would like to explore with the editors: Rajen, Imraan and Robbie.
Professor Adam Habib is the former Vice-Chancellor and Principal of Wits University and currently the Director of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
Vishnu Padayachee was a Distinguished Professor and Derek Schrier and Cecily Cameron Chair in Development Economics at the School of Economic and Business Sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand. He passed away in 2021.