Leadership Quote by Joe Slovo

Even the cruelest regime needs a story about itself. Slovo’s line isn’t a moral observation so much as a political x-ray: power can’t run on batons and budgets alone; it needs a narrative that turns coercion into common sense. By saying “demonstrated,” he borrows the cool authority of proof, as if ideology were not a theory but an empirical necessity. The provocation is in “not even the most inhuman.” You might assume brutality makes ideas irrelevant. Slovo argues the opposite: inhuman systems are especially dependent on ideas because they must constantly explain away their own violence.

The subtext cuts two ways. First, it’s an attack on liberal complacency that treats ideology as something other people have. Slovo implies that claiming to be “non-ideological” is itself an ideology, a camouflage for entrenched interests. Second, it’s a warning to revolutionaries: if you dismantle one order, you don’t escape ideology; you replace it. That matters because ideology doesn’t just justify authority after the fact. It trains citizens in advance to consent, to doubt their doubts, to interpret suffering as necessary, temporary, or deserved.

Context sharpens the edge. Slovo, a senior figure in the South African Communist Party and an anti-apartheid strategist, watched apartheid survive on more than police power: racial theology, “separate development,” and Cold War anti-communism provided the alibis. He also saw socialist states, claiming emancipation, harden into bureaucracies with their own sanctifying myths. The quote reads as a sober brief against naïveté: if you want a humane system, you don’t just seize institutions. You contest the stories that make institutions feel inevitable.