Ideological oxymoron syndrome

Ironies abound in our wonderfully exciting country. My friend and colleague Carla calls it the “Ideological oxymoron syndrome”: a continuing series of them in fact.

The govt is weathering what seems to be almost a 'perfect storm': A national civil service strike that is moving to a violent phase. What started as a wage negotiation has moved to a form of confrontation that the workers will lose, simply because it is in their interests to lose. No good has yet come, regrettably to some, from any old style socialist takeovers of modern economies.

In the meantime we are all on the dance floor playing this increasingly deadly minuet of minimalist movement, as a government elected by “the people”: the party of liberation and freedom, has behaved with a rigidity of mindset that was at times close to Verwoerdian. There have been a few eerie déjà vu moments from government statements over the past few weeks. An ideological oxymoron is inevitably a contradiction inherent in the outcomes of ideological positions.

The ENatis traffic foul up is slowly being sorted out, slowly being the operative word, nonetheless it is being sorted [I ultimately got to the place when it was eventually open [see blog: "To the average Joe blogs aren't cutting it." ] and it took only 37 minutes from entrance to exit with licence disc.

My regular bloggees will recollect a blog some years back when I described a day in the city paying for the licence: and how it took around six minutes from in to out… an experience I subsequently discovered to be a norm. So technically, in my mind at least, a thirty-seven minute time passage getting my car registration disc was around seven times slower than my more common experience over the past few years… Then in the middle of the now almost tedious “Succession struggle” to decide the future leadership of the ruling party, interest rates went up by fifty points…. We’re all still digesting that... the outcome of this will be oxymoronic in the extreme one suspects. 

Milk is an short supply [and suddenly it’s a global shortage which seems weird given the amount of subsidies paid to European producers… anyway…] and the price of meat is rising as fast as the price of maize. Information from rural regions suggests that the price rises are resulting from an overall decline in commercial agricultural activity. In part this is the outcome of farm murders [apparently averaging one every thirty six hours], mass stock thieving: way beyond what I described in my 1996 novel The Buffalo Hunters. Undoubtedly some of it results from the yet to be successful land transfers that have been taking place as part of the land restitution programme. The final nail though seems to be commercial, resulting from oligopolies abounding in every sector of the country… The effect has been to strangle the productive capabilities of too many farmers. So an attempt to allow market forces to play [subject to intense social regulation] results in market concentration which suits a short-term socialist agenda at the expense of long term growth…another example of ideological oxymoron syndrome [IdOxSy] in action wreaking its unintended outcomes.

We won the rugby matches though, notwithstanding the unhappiness in disparate quarters with selection procedures. Luke Watson the pugnacious player from the big flat-mountain place down south did not quite bring it off and took a blow to the ribs that allowed his coach to dump him with a politically respectable excuse.

In a sense he shot his bolt. He’ll do better next time, which may be a while. If you are one of the new global readers browsing through this blog and none of this makes sense don’t feel bad. Once you mess with the free flow of any activity it becomes less and less predictable and convoluted. The whole game code[Professional Rugby in this case] is an ideological oxymoron in evolution. The dynamic tension here contained within the conundrum could win us the World Cup this year. The next four games will be the markers.

Back at the media front one sees that they [ the govt] have raised their offer to the strikers. 7 and a bit and the strikers are down to 10 with some unions starting to waver. The teachers in particular are wavering. They know that they are society's most despised citizens and they are cringing at the thought of being even more contemptuously treated than they are ... like a klapdog abused wife taking solace from her husbands momentary smile. The week has been punctuated with violent outburst of language from trades union leadership and unctious public pronouncem,ent in the form of paid advertising messages from the government exhorteing the workers to be reasonable.

To add fire to the fuel, yesterday a prominent and controversial educationist was murdered. It may have been a random event? Huge numbers, at least forty and sometimes fifty are murdered daily around the country at large, so, high profile murders are almost inevitable, and are frequent enough to wonder if there aren’t patterns: sub groups eking out agendas. But if it was random it came at a good time for the strikers and a bad time for the government.

One also remembers that last year’s National Security workers strike saw more than sixty murders of workers associated with the strike [or not]. To date this bloggist has no recollection that anyone has ever been arrested and charged for the murder of even one of those now forgotten workers. A school principal, especially one as controversial as the late Mr Karvelas was an excellent target; and the effect was that almost every school in the city was closed today: well according to anecdote anyway… The news mass media sources are playing gatekeepers with such information as this, and the masses become increasingly reliant on rumour and disturbance.

And so the pot bubbles merrily as two allies get their knickers in a knot in classic Marxian format. This entire spectacle is so gloriously; ideologically oxymoronic, that it is orgasmic.

The workers are angry. This strike is about more than just money. It is about rage. A great many people from the formerly disadvantaged part of our society are seeing fat rewards going to some comrades and thin rewards going to most.

What is the point of winning the revolution if you don’t get rich?

How quickly the new mother forgets the pain of childbirth in the quickening rush of a new life. The child though is no longer an infant. Like me, the bloggist here, chronologically sixty but due to the intervention of fate soon to be a teenager; the country is now in those tempestuous years we call the Teens… and the worst of all those years is this fourteenth year: this year of our perfect storm.

The workers have a case. The country’s inflation targeting exercise is a necessary but ultimately illusory instrument. Core inflation* is high. We pretend to have forgotten about core inflation and mumble about CPIX. The latter is simply a measure of how much Core inflation is rising. And Core inflation eats away at value inexorably.

[*For those who are confused Core inflation is a measure of the value that is constantly eroded in a society by all kids of price increases, especially for those that are not accompanied with increased productivity and output… so the Enatis catastrophe contributes to Core inflation through the 6% reported decline in vehicle sales during April May, this cost must be carried somewhere, usually bin the form of otherwise unjustified general price increases. Another example would be the cost of time wasted by tens of thousands of people queuing for no purpose, to renew licences and so on] Multiplied together with say costs of murders, heists, traffic jams, electricy burn outs like the one that has been affected about two million people east of me for two days now and so on and so on. The much-vaunted CPIX rate merely measures the rate of expansion and contraction of the Core Rate, which no one mentions.]

Core inflation takes in also the cost of errors made by newly emancipated affirmatively advanced persons many of whom have great knowledge and limited experience… The cost of gaining that experience, what Fred calls “School-fees” is in the core inflation figure.

Over time the workers wages have more than failed to keep up with inflation and many feel, justifiably, that they are worse off now, after years of work than they were years back. Their work, and keeping up with the market economy, has become a Sisyphean task: a treadmill on which we all run faster and faster to stay in the same place. And they [the workers] are enraged by these things they are not sophisticated enough to understand.

So as my final example of an ideological oxymoron I must ask you the reader to arbitrate on this speculation. It is possible that the moral imperative behind the BEE* campaign has run up against the economic reality of the market place so loved of market fundamentalists like myself. [*For offshore readers: BEE is a legal requirement in South African businesses, to employ people who were disadvantaged under the former evil apartheid system in preference to other, possibly even better qualified persons, whose ancestry was more privileged. In America {USA} it is called Affirmative Action.] Is it possible that the artificial shortages of top-level management at affordable incomes have been distorted by a shortage of affirmatively qualified and competent persons? [The question discounts for the moment the controversial counter-question of whether the national scarce skills problem is an urban myth or not] Could it be that instead of a pyramid of incomes growth with the worst paid at the bottom, and the best paid at the top there is an unnatural bulging of income about three quarters of the way up: fattening the point of the pyramid. Thus, giving the pay structure of the traditional organisation chart more of the appearance of a Pouter pigeon than a traditional pyramid.

The bulge results from over-compensation to obtain and retain the services of legally mandated persons who are in general short supply… so Market forces naturally work to force up their price. Less privileged peers on the same ladder see this and demand [and get] parity. Many of these latter are also in short demand in a global economy that is also short of scarce skills. This adds leverage to their pay, although by global standards we are badly paid. [I suppose we all stay for the sunshine.]

On the other hand the jobs at the bottom of the system are so commoditised that they have no value and since they can be performed more or less by an unlimited supply of anyone, pay scales are at historic lows in terms of so-called “fair” compensation and purchasing power. Again the market works its deadly way. More ideological oxymorons of a different hue.

Oddly though, those jobs that are relatively scarce at the lower end of the system do not attract a premium payment and this is an anomaly that can only be explained by the upper bulge that starves even the most skilled first level worker from gaining added value from their labour.

I find the contradiction inherent in this circumstance to be so monumental that it becomes inexplicable; and can only confirm that once the architects of an economic policy direction [ie a government acting on its policies] have intervened in the natural workings of a market on a sufficiently large scale, that all subsequent responses will become increasingly unpredictable. I have said before in my blogs that this BEE strategy will be a close run thing, this strike and the rising level of acrimony displayed therein, is an indicator of just how close run it may still turn out to be.

Viva bloggers.