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| Rethinking the South African Crisis |
The
publishers describe the book as follows:
“Rethinking the South African Crisis revisits longstanding debates to shed new
light on the transition from apartheid. Drawing on nearly twenty years
of ethnographic research, Gillian Hart argues that local government
has become the key site of contradictions. Local practices, conflicts
and struggles in the arenas of everyday life, feed into and are shaped
by simultaneous processes of de-nationalisation and
renationalisation. Together they are key to understanding the erosion
of ANC
domination, and the proliferation of populist politics. This
book provides an innovative and forceful dialectical analysis of
the ongoing, unstable and unresolved processes through which the crisis
in South Africa is playing out. It also suggests how Gramsci’s concept
of passive revolution, adapted and translated in relation to present
circumstances, can do useful analytical and political work in South
Africa and beyond.”
Rethinking
the Transition from Apartheid
By
Gillian Hart
This
is an extract from the first chapter of Gillian Hart’s latest book
Rethinking the South African Crisis: Nationalism, Populism,
Hegemony which will be released in August 2013.
***
In
Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South
Africa (2002a) I argued that local government was emerging as a
key site of contractions in the first phase of post-apartheid
restructuring (1994–2000). Over the decade of the 2000s, I maintain
in this book, it has become the key site of contradictions. Broadly
speaking, local government has become the impossible terrain of
official efforts to manage poverty and deprivation in a racially
inflected capitalist society marked by massive inequalities and
increasingly precarious livelihoods for the large majority
of the population. Ironically, attempts to render technical that
which is inherently political are feeding into and amplifying the
proliferation of populist politics.
While
local government contradictions have their own specificities, they
cannot be understood simply in local terms. ‘Neoliberalism’ –
understood as a class project and manifestation of global economic
forces, as well as a rationality of rule – has become the dominant
frame for many critical understandings of post-apartheid South
Africa, but it is inadequate to the task.i
In
this book I suggest that the turbulent, shifting forces taking shape
in the arenas of
everyday
life need to be situated in relation to simultaneous practices and
processes of de-nationalisation and renationalisation. Deeply in
tension with each other, de-nationalisation and re-nationalisation
enable new angles of understanding the transition from apartheid.
At
the moment when former president F.W. de Klerk unbanned the ANC and
other liberation movements in 1990, the ‘South African nation’
was deeply in question. Quite literally, it had to be conjured into
existence from the rubble of a deeply divided past. At precisely that
moment, powerful South African conglomerates were straining at the
leash to break away from confines of any sort of national economy and
reconnect with the increasingly financialised global economy, from
which they had been partially excluded during the 1980s by the
heightening crisis of the apartheid state.ii
De-nationalisation
refers to alliances through which corporate capital defined the terms
of reconnection with the global economy, as well as to the forces
unleashed in the process. As such, it encompasses but extends beyond
the extremely conservative package of neoliberal macro-economic
policies set in place in 1996. The most compelling
analysis of changing relations between corporate capital, the global
economy and the South African state highlights what Ben Fine and
others call the minerals energy complex that has shaped capitalist
accumulation in South Africa since the minerals discoveries in the
second half of the nineteenth century, and that remains in force
today. This analysis, as we shall see, directs attention to the
heavily concentrated character of South African corporate capital;
the highly advantageous terms on which these conglomerates engineered
their re-engagement with the global economy after the fall of
apartheid through their relations with strategically placed forces in
the ANC; how the conglomerates have restructured and de-nationalised
their operations; massive and escalating capital flight; the
formation of a small but powerful black capitalist class allied with
white corporate capital; understandings of the ‘economy’ fostered
through these alliances; their ongoing influence over ANC government
policy; and multiple ways these forces continue to play into and
intensify brutal inequalities and the degradation of livelihoods of a
large proportion of the black South African population.
It is
important to emphasise that de-nationalisation does not refer to
political intervention in the ‘economy’ conceived as a separate
sphere. It signals instead the simultaneously economic, political and
cultural practices and processes that are generating ongoing
inequality and ‘surplus’ populations, and the conflicts that
surround them.
De-nationalisation
focuses attention on the historical and geographical specificities of
southern African racial capitalism and settler colonialism, their
interconnections with forces at play in other parts of the world, and
their modes of reconnecting with the increasingly financialised
global political economy in the post-apartheid period. The forces of
de-nationalisation continue to shape the present – but they can
only be understood in relation to, and deeply entangled with,
practices and processes of re-nationalisation. One can, I suggest,
discern three key dimensions in which re-nationalising practices and
processes have taken place.
First
are inclusive discourses of the ‘rainbow nation’ associated with
Nelson Mandela that Ari Sitas (2010) calls ‘indigenerality’ –
the liberal, ecclesiastical discourse of forgiveness that made
possible the negotiations to end apartheid, and found further
expression in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Discourses of
inclusion were not just imposed from above – like the ‘national
question’ discussed below they had (and to some degree still have)
popular appeal. Yet, as Sitas argues, they abstracted from and
papered over historical geographies of racial oppression,
exploitation and racialised dispossession – and were falling apart
by the end of the ‘Mandela decade’.
A
second key dimension of official post-apartheid re-nationalisation is
found in the ANC government’s immigration policies and practices.
Indigenerality and rainbowism coincided with what Jonathan Crush
(1999a) calls ‘Fortress South Africa’ – the ANC government’s
latching onto apartheid-era immigration legislation premised on
control, exclusion and expulsion. The Aliens Control Act was repealed
in 2002, but the bounding of the nation through immigration policy
and practices – as well as popular vigilantism, abuses by police
and brutal detention of ‘aliens’ – have ramped up and fed into
xenophobia.
Third,
the most important elements of post-apartheid nationalism are
embodied in the keywords of the ANC Alliance: the ‘national
question’ and the National Democratic Revolution (NDR). The NDR
refers to the first stage in a two-stage theory of revolution adopted
by the South African Communist Party (SACP) in 1962 and subsequently
by the ANC, in which the overthrow of the apartheid state would
inaugurate a phase of bourgeois national democracy that would pave
the way for the second-stage socialist revolution. This aspect of
re-nationalisation highlights that it is not a separable ‘political’
process, but is crucially about making the case for accommodation of
the inequalities of post-apartheid capitalism as a transitory
phenomenon, to be superseded by the (ever-retreating) second phase.
Forged
in the context of fierce debates over race, class and nationalism
since the first part of the twentieth century; elaborated during the
anti-apartheid struggle; and reworked in the context of the
transition, these terms carry deep popular resonance. Within the ANC
Alliance, the NDR has become an increasingly vociferous site of
contestation in which articulations of race, class, sexuality,
gender, custom and tradition figure prominently.iii
Practices
and processes of de-nationalisation and re-nationalisation,
understood in relation to one another, are crucial to comprehending
the amplifying tensions and contradictions through which the ANC’s
hegemonic project has been unravelling over the past decade. ANC
hegemony hinges crucially on official articulations of
nationalism
and claims to moral authority through leadership of the liberation
movement – an authority that has severely eroded over the decade of
the 2000s. At the same time, many popular struggles over the material
conditions of life and livelihood that erupt in local arenas are
simultaneously struggles over the meanings of the nation and
liberation, now rooted in a profound sense of betrayal – struggles
that can and do move in dramatically different directions.
Taken
together, the dialectics of de-nationalisation and re-nationalisation
define the contours of postapartheid South Africa’s passive
revolution. This concept comes from Antonio Gramsci, the Italian
scholar-revolutionary jailed by Mussolini in 1926 until shortly
before his death in 1937. Gramsci initially used it to interpret
how
the Risorgimento (the national unification of Italy in the latter
part of the nineteenth century) played into the rise of fascism. In
the course of his Prison Notebooks he extended and elaborated
the concept, and suggested its wider relevance.iv Passive revolution
refers not just to a top-down seizure of power by the bourgeoisie in
the face of challenges from below. Rather, it involves the overthrow
of some older social forms and the institution of new ones, combined
with a deliberate and structural pacification of subaltern classes –
it combines, in other words, both a ‘progressive’ or
‘modernising’ revolution of sorts, and its passive deformation
(Thomas 2012: 35–6).
Part
of what is illuminating about the concept of passive revolution is
its deeply spatio-historical and comparative character that is
helpful in thinking about forces at play in South Africa in relation
to those in other regions of the world – in terms of their
specificities and interconnections. For Gramsci, passive revolution
was not an
abstract
model that can simply be applied or against which specific ‘cases’
can be measured. The challenge, both analytical and political, is to
rework – or as Gramsci might have said ‘translate’ – it in
relation to the forces thrown up by a different set of circumstances.
I will suggest that developing a concept of passive revolution that
is adequate to contemporary challenges requires building on Gramsci’s
work, but also moving beyond it with the help of Franz Fanon (2005
[1963]), Henri Lefebvre (1991 [1974]), and strands of feminist
theory, as well as in conversation with
debates
over post-colonial nationalisms.iv
First,
though, let me situate this book (and its title) in a longer lineage
of debate and analysis of South African conditions that draws on
Gramsci. In 1981 John Saul and Stephen Gelb published The Crisis
in South Africa (updated by Saul in 1986), which represented the
first Marxist analysis of the reformist thrust by the Botha regime in
the
late 1970s and early 1980s. Serious economic difficulties in the
1970s had, they argued, deepened into an organic crisis, forcing
capital and the apartheid state into a desperate search for
palliative measures. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s (1981) reading of
Gramsci, they anticipated that capital’s ‘formative action’
would run aground because co-optation was far too limited and
exclusionary to pre-empt the demands of the mass of the population.
Reformism did, however, provide new space for political organisation
and opposition, and new grievances around which to organise.
The result would be growing coalescence of community and workplace
struggles against a system with no claim to legitimacy. At the same
time, the closeness of the exiled liberation movement to mass
struggles in the townships meant that the ANC was unlikely to accept
anything short of a fundamental redistribution of political and
economic power.
What
Saul and Gelb did not foresee, as Sitas (2010: 35) points out, was
how the corporate bourgeoisie would fight for their own ‘revolution
within the revolution’ – aided, of course, by the collapse of the
Soviet Union and the global triumph of neoliberal forms of
capitalism. Revisiting Saul and Gelb’s arguments, Carolyn Bassett
(2008) focuses on how South African corporate capital wrung
concessions out of the ANC in the early 1990s, as well as shaping
understandings of the economy, and defining the terms of their
re-engagement with the global economy – an
account that is broadly in accordance with that of a number of other
analysts discussed more fully in Chapter 4.
Corporate
capital, she maintains, has been too successful, winning so many
concessions and giving up so little in terms of supporting reforms to
benefit the majority that the reform programme is inherently
unstable. Bassett also invokes
Gramsci’s theory of passive revolution – which she defines as
‘change imposed from above designed to maintain the economic and
political system’ with only passive consent from the masses – to
argue that the ANC has been forced to rely on ‘domination’ rather
than ‘hegemony’ to consolidate the new order (2008: 185–6).
In a
broadly similar analysis published at the same time as Bassett’s,
Vishwas Satgar (2008) drew on passive revolution – which he defined
as ‘a non-hegemonic form of class rule’ – to argue that what he
calls an Afro-neoliberal class project within the ANC has used
restructuring and globalisation of the South African economy to advance
its interests, while at the same time demobilising popular forces and
blocking fundamental transformation.
Hein
Marais sharply contests this analysis, arguing that the ‘“passive
revolution” schema paints a tantalising but simplistic picture’
(2011: 398). Maintaining that ‘one of the great feats of the
transition has been the marshalling of sufficient consent to avoid
social instability’ (2011: 399), he insists as well that seeing the
South African transition as an example of reform from above ‘plays
down the extent to which popular energies and organisations
eventually helped to shape the terms of the political settlement and
bring about key new arrangements’ (2011: 399).
This
debate turns around an excessively narrow understanding of passive
revolution in terms of domination as opposed to hegemony. In Chapter
6 I address these and other issues related to passive revolution,
pointing to the uses as well as the limits of the concept, and
suggesting how it needs to be translated in relation to
post-apartheid South Africa.
In
addition, along with a number of other critics of the post-apartheid
order, Bassett’s and Satgar’s focus is on what I am calling
de-nationalisation. The dynamics of de-nationalisation are crucially
important but insufficient for grasping the turbulent forces driving
the ongoing crisis in contemporary South Africa. Of great importance
as well are multi-dimensional practices and processes of
re-nationalisation that, operating in relation to de-nationalisation,
are linked to the erosion of ANC hegemony and the ramping up of
populist politics.
i
Elsewhere (Hart 2008) I have argued that analyses of neoliberalism
in terms of class project, economic policy and governmentality
remain necessarily partial, since they take hold on terrains that
always exceed them.
ii
With the crisis of apartheid in the 1980s, the combination of
sanctions and exchange controls ‘gave rise both to conglomeration
across the economy . . . and the expansion of a huge and
sophisticated financial system as cause and
consequence
of the internationally confined, but domestically spread, reach of
South African conglomerates with AngloAmerican in the lead’ (Fine
2008: 2). See Ashman, Fine and Newman (2011: 12) for a fuller
discussion of this process. In 1990 when the ANC was unbanned, five
colossal conglomerates – encompassing mining and related
manufacturing, banking, retail and insurance operations –
controlled 84 per cent of the capitalisation of the JSE (Chabane,
Goldstein and Roberts 2006: 553).
iii As
discussed more fully below, I am using the term ‘articulation’
here in the dual sense of ‘linking together’ and ‘giving
expression to’ in a way that is closely attentive to issues of
language and translation (Hart 2007; Kipfer and Hart 2013).
iv In
recent years there has been a surge of renewed interest in passive
revolution in different regions of the world, alongwith
some intense debate over its contemporary relevance that I reference
in Chapter 6.
