In her historical novel, A
Place of Greater Safety, which is played out against the backdrop of the
Great French Revolution through an illuminating character analysis and
synthesis of three of that revolution's most prominent personalities, viz.,
Maximilien Robespierre, Georges Jacques Danton and Camille Desmoulins, Hilary
Mantel imagines the following conversation between Lucile Desmoulins and
Danton:
So has the Revolution a philosophy, Lucile wanted to know, has it a future?
She dared not ask Robespierre, or he would lecture her for the afternoon on the General Will: or Camille, for fear of a thoughtful and coherent two hours on the development of the Roman republic. So she asked Danton.
"Oh, I think it has a philosophy," he said seriously. "Grab what you can, and get out while the going's good."
This sentiment, I make bold to say, puts in the bluntest
possible way the dominant sense of disillusionment and disbelief that most
middle class South Africans have when they feel compelled to "whine"
and complain about where we appear to have landed in post-apartheid South
Africa. All the heady hopes which even
those who were not in or of the Congress Alliance had in 1994-95 seem to have
turned into ash. There are few thinking
South Africans today who would be prepared to say that they are happy with how
things have turned out.
Because the title of my talk is bound to raise all kinds of
expectations about its content, it is essential that I state clearly at the
outset that I shall not wander off again into the well-trodden paths that are
supposed to bring the excited novice to an understanding of the relationship
between the "bourgeois democratic" and the "socialist"
revolutions or, even more superiorly to the realization that "the
revolution" is permanent and that the first necessarily "grows
over" into the second under the conditions that obtain in
semi-industrialised or newly industrializing countries. These debates are as relevant today as they
were at the beginning of the last century.
I do not for one second wish to deny the importance of getting
conceptual and strategic clarity in this domain. For, without such clarity, we do no more than
tap about in the dark in the hope of finding by chance a route out of the
suffocating maze of the world capitalist system. I shall, however, have occasion to refer to
this subject briefly when I discuss the illusion of the "National
Democratic Revolution".
In the Marxist paradigm, the word "revolution" has
very precise meanings. Most often, it is
used to refer to a "social revolution", i.e., the displacement of the
rule of one class by that of another, usually by violent means, i.e., in the
course of a civil war or an armed struggle.1
Thus, for example, the Great French Revolution formally put an end to
the rule of the feudal nobility and the clergy in France and, later, in the
rest of Western Europe, and the Great October Revolution ended the rule of the
Tsarist aristocracy and of the incipient Russian bourgeoisie. It ought to be clear to everyone here tonight
that, in South Africa, we have not, in this very precise sense, experienced a
social revolution. If anything, the
post-apartheid state is more capitalist than its apartheid parent. To deny the continuity between the apartheid
capitalist state and the post-apartheid capitalist state, as some people
actually do, is a futile and quixotic exercise.
A "political revolution", in this context, refers
to what we would nowadays term "regime change". That is to say, certain fundamental changes
in the form of rule and of the institutions of the state machine are brought
about without, however, a concomitant change in the fundamental power relations
at the level of the economy and of the management of the repressive apparatuses
of the state. In my view, what we have
experienced in South Africa during the past two decades is precisely such a
political revolution. For reasons of
focus, I shall refer only briefly to the third social dimension, i.e., the
"cultural revolution", important though it is to grasp the integral
but intricate relationship between these three aspects of any revolution.
Why and how the regime change came about is not the focus of
my address this evening either. There
have been many scholarly analyses, biographies of significant actors as well as
insightful journalistic articles and documentaries on the transition from
apartheid to post-apartheid South Africa.
Read together, these provide us with a range of perspectives, which help
us to make sense of the often bewildering events of the period. Instead, I want to talk about the fact that
most South Africans, certainly most oppressed and exploited South Africans,
feel that they have been, if not betrayed, then certainly misled. And, because I do not believe that political
action is a monopoly of so-called politicians, I want to talk about what we can
do in order to get out of the state of shock into which we have been
driven. I want to talk about what we can
do to find again that vision of a different South Africa that inspired all of
us in one way or another regardless of what political tendency we belonged to
at the time. For I believe that if,
through discussion and practical action, we can again visualise that other
South Africa, we will very soon put behind us the barbaric and vulgar universe
in which we are forced to try to survive with dignity today.
Let me also make it clear that in spite of the implication
in its title, I have no idea what "the finished revolution" would
have looked like or what it will look like.
Revolutions, I think, are never completed. Radical social transformation, even when it
is imperceptible in the here and now is a continuous and complex process. But, even though this is an essential part of
the meaning of revolution, this objective process has to be articulated in
concrete programmes and strategies for any kind of revolution to
eventuate. The success or failure, the
"completeness" or otherwise of the revolution we speak of in South
Africa can only be measured against the extent to which, roughly, the set of ideas
and programmatic demands that have guided all sections of the national
liberation movement since the axial period, 1928-1945 approximately, and which
were refined and differentiated according to the ideological predispositions
and class position of the different tendencies within the broad movement,2 were
realized in the course of the 80 years that have elapsed since then. Without reducing the complexity of
contemporary South African history to some simplistic formula, I believe one
can say without any distortion that the discourses of the national liberation
movement were characterized by the intersection of nationalist,
liberal-democratic and broadly socialist paradigms and that the particularity
of one or other political tendency was determined by the ways in which its
exponents blended or interpreted these three discursive strategies, each of
which, of course, derived from and reinforced specific class interests, whether
or not the social actors involved were conscious of these.
Since the main burden of my talk concerns the developments
after 1994, it seems to me most realistic and, in an important sense, also
fair, to take as the point of departure for my analysis the general demands of
the Freedom Charter, which guided the political strategy and tactics of the
Congress Movement since 1955. Given the
decision to negotiate a deal with the apartheid regime rather than getting
entangled in a 100 years war, such as that raging in Palestine,3 the leadership
of the Congress Alliance had to make definite decisions about which of the
demands of the Charter could be put on the back burner, as it were, in order to
make a deal acceptable to the economic and political elites of the old
regime. Today, it is obvious to all who
wish to look that the fundamental concession was made with the agreement not to
touch the existing property relations except for the virtually unimplementable
provisions about land restitution and the clauses referring to affirmative
action. To put it differently, these
agreements deliberately restricted the horizon of the "revolution" to
the conditions that prevail in any bourgeois democracy. This means that the middle-class leadership
of the Congress Movement were albeit "temporarily" in effect
abandoning their pro-poor and pro-proletarian comrades and the mass of its
working class members and supporters.
This is where the theory of the "National Democratic
Revolution" was called upon to play a useful mediating role. At the crucial moment, i.e., when the actual
concessions were being made, the NDR found its programmatic expression in the
now forgotten "Reconstruction and Development Programme" (RDP). The simple, clear language of former
President Mandela's version of it is how most of the oppressed and exploited
masses understood the promises made by the leadership in the early 1990s:
The ANC drafted a 150-page document known as the
Reconstruction and Development Programme, which outlined our plan to create
jobs through public works; to build a million new houses with electricity and
flush toilets; to extend primary health care and provide ten years of free
education to all South Africans; to redistribute land through a land claims
court; and to end the value-added tax on basic foodstuffs. We were also committed to extensive
affirmative action measures in both the private and public sectors. This document was translated into a simpler
manifesto called "A Better Life for All", which in turn became the
ANC's campaign slogan. (Long Walk to
Freedom, p. 605)
Mandela goes on to emphasise that he regularly reminded his
audiences that "freedom" would not translate into some kind of
Cinderella-like overnight change into prosperity. In essence, he was truthfully warning his
people that now the class struggle would become brutal and unrelenting. Unlike some of his left-wing comrades, he did
not try to sell this straightforward fact as a so-called "National
Democratic Revolution".
But, before I expand on this matter, let me say a few words
about individual psychology and shifts of social or class positions. I should like to phrase this as simply and
authentically as possible, since it is at this level that resentment and
hostility are engendered when one criticizes a movement, such as the Congress
Movement, that has become so powerful and hegemonic in South Africa. I do not doubt for one minute that most, if
not all, members of that movement sincerely believed in the ringing trumpet
tones of the Charter: The people shall govern; There shall be houses, security
and comfort, and so forth. It is probable
even that many, but certainly not the majority, of the leaders considered that
the deviations from the trajectory which the Charter seemed to suggest, i.e.,
away from the race-based capitalism of more than 100 years towards some kind of
African socialist or at least social democratic future, were no more than
tactical adjustments necessitated by the realities of the political terrain at
the end of the 20th century after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is impossible to guess at how each of the prominent
individuals actually came to terms with the psychological dissonance caused by
the need, as they saw it, to carry out one or more ideological
somersaults. Not all of them were as
public and as forthright as Mandela himself, especially in his famous U-turn
with respect to nationalization as the policy of the ANC. The biographies of many of the actors
undoubtedly provide some insight into this matter. All I wish to stress here is
that any blanket statement about "sell-out" and "betrayal"
could only be made at the most general and abstract level against the
background of the avowed previous ideological or programmatic positions of the
individuals or groups of people concerned.4
I want to say as clearly as possible that apart from
incorrigible revolutionary socialists, such as myself and many others who were
routinely maligned as "ultra-Leftists" or even more
anachronistically, as "Trotskyites", the bourgeoisie and a few of the
leaders of the Congress Alliance were clear that the 1993-94 agreements were in
essence about stabilizing the capitalist state and system in South Africa and
creating the conditions for its expansion as a profitable venture. Examples of this understanding are today
easily accessible even though they are, for obvious reasons, condemned as
prejudiced, false, malignant and even "unpatriotic" by those who are
now the powers that be. A few of the
more significant statements will suffice to make the point. As early as 24 April 1991, almost 20 years
ago, John Carlin, the South Africa correspondent of The Independent wrote:
Mr. Mandela and the other "moderates" in the ANC leadership [. . .] believed that the government and the ANC would be equal partners in the voyage to the "New South Africa", that apartheid would go and they, as the natural majority party, would glide into power. . . . In one sense [that] trust was not misplaced. Mr. de Klerk will remove apartheid from the statute books. [. . .] But this was never the issue; he knew from the day he came to power that this was what had to be done. The real issue was to retain power, to perpetuate white privilege and the economic status quo after apartheid had gone. (Cited in Dale T. McKinley, The ANC and the Liberation Struggle: A Critical Political Biography, 1997, p. 122)
Of course, de Klerk also miscalculated on the dynamics of
the negotiations but the essential point remains true. Today, thanks
particularly to Professor Terreblanche's summary of the hidden negotiations
about the economic aspects of the negotiated settlement, we know that there was
no innocence on the side of the leadership of the ANC and of prominent leaders
of COSATU and the SACP, in spite of disagreements on policy, which fact became
evident most dramatically with the eventual imposition of the policy of
GEAR. Chapters 3 and 4 of Terreblanche's
book ought to be compulsory reading for any remaining doubting Thomases in the
former liberation movement. We cannot
thread our way through the intricacies of the debates and the manoeuvres that
led to the shifts in the approach of the ANC leadership. The following statement gives a crystal clear
picture of what actually happened.
At stake was not only the economic policy of a
democratically elected government but also the nature of South Africa's future
economic system. Given that South Africa
was the most developed country in Africa, the stakes were extremely high, and
the negotiations were strategically hugely important for the corporate sector. For almost 20 years all the joint attempts of
the corporate sector and the NP government to find a new accumulation strategy
had been unsuccessful. After almost 20
years of prolonged stagflation, the latter was desperate to convince the core
leaders of the democratic movement what the economic ideology and economic
system in a democratic South Africa should be.
The strategy on which the corporate sector and the ANC
agreed during the informal negotiations in 1993 can be described as the fourth
phase of the AAC-led [Anglo-American Corporation -- NEA] search for a new
accumulation strategy. [. . .] The main characteristic of every phase of the
AAC-led search for a new accumulation strategy was that the supreme goal of
economic policy should be to attain a high economic growth rate, and that all
other objectives should be subordinated to this. By convincing ANC leaders to accept the AAC's
approach, the corporate sector in effect persuaded -- or forced -- the ANC to
move away from its traditional priority, namely to uplift the impoverished
black majority socially and economically.
(Sampie Terreblanche, A History of Inequality in South Africa 1652-2002,
2002, pp. 95-96)
Although it is tempting to dwell on the details of this
shift, I think the essentials are clear enough.
There ought to be no doubt in anyone's mind after a close reading of
this text that, and why, the bourgeoisie, the self-same capitalist class of
yesterday, is in command of all the strategic positions, no matter what the
"democratic" posturing of the politicians might be. And, although it would be an
oversimplification to maintain that the ANC at the beginning of the 21st
century has become a party of the capitalist class, it ought to be equally clear
that the bloodletting and the cruel battles that are currently tearing the
organization apart are precisely about how soon it will become such a party
rather than the supposed broad church, as which it continues to be marketed by
the bureaucratic leadership. The sketch
I have given, without any attempt on my part to join all the dots, does, I
think, explain to a large extent why we have been catapulted into the ugly
world of modern-day capitalist barbarism with its devastating features of high
and growing unemployment, increasing social inequality, horrific violent crime,
racist and xenophobic dog-eat-dog conflicts, among many other things. This is very far from the almost utopian
revolutionary euphoria with which most South Africans, unaware of what had been
agreed upon in the devilish details of the negotiation process, had so proudly
cast their votes on 27-28 April 1994.
I cannot resist the temptation to cite one of my favourite
texts in order to illuminate the dilemma of the governing party. President Zuma and his team are reaping the bitter
fruits of the negotiated settlement.
They find themselves in the tragic situation described by Friedrich
Engels in the memorable paragraph in The Peasant War in Germany:
The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of the class which he represents, and for the realization of the measures which that domination implies. [. . .] Thus he necessarily finds himself in an unsolvable dilemma. What he can do contradicts all his previous actions, principles, and the immediate interests of his party, and what he ought to do cannot be done. In a word, he is compelled to represent not his party or his class, but the class for whose domination the movement is then ripe. In the interests of the movement he is compelled to advance the interests of an alien class, and to feed his own class with phrases and promises, and with the asseveration [solemn assertion -- NEA] that the interests of that alien class are its own interests. Whoever is put into this awkward position is irrevocably lost.
Enter the National Democratic Revolution, i.e., the smoke
and mirrors of the so-called Left in the Congress Alliance. Let me say it very clearly: the new South
Africa has brought about fundamental changes in the form of rule and in the
institutional furniture of the capitalist state. The realm of freedom has been expanded beyond
anything that most people imagined in the 1960s, and millions of people have
been lifted out of abject pauperism to some level of human dignity. The struggle has not been in vain in any
sense of the term. But, the struggle
continues. After 1994, and especially
after 1996, it is no longer a struggle for national liberation. It is a class struggle "pure and
simple" or, in good South African English: finish en klaar. The inverted commas are necessary because one
cannot discard overnight the birthmarks that are imprinted on the new body
politic by the old order. Social inequality
continues to be reproduced objectively largely as racial inequality in spite of
the continued growth of the "black" middle class. Racial prejudice, inequalities justified on
alleged cultural, linguistic, ethnic or nationality differences, all the things
that defaced colonial-apartheid South Africa, persist even if in attenuated
forms. They will require decades,
perhaps centuries, to become completely irrelevant.
The attempt to frame the class struggles in which we are now
engaged in terms of the so-called NDR is no more than tilting at
windmills. To put it bluntly: for the
leadership of this NDR to be an integral part of a bourgeois government while
pretending to conduct a revolutionary struggle against the capitalist system is
the merest political buffoonery. Workers
and other poor people can be got to mouth and repeat all the heroic phrases
that are supposed to give expression to the demands and aspirations of this
"revolution" but, at some point, they will realize that they are
being sold a dummy. What is at issue
here is not the value or the socio-historical impact of the day-to-day
struggles being waged by the working class and other strata of the urban and
the rural poor. That does not depend on
the misleading discourses of the NDR that is supposed to guide their
struggles. The real danger is that the
goal, the destination, of these struggles is being described and presented in
terms that necessarily limit the horizons of the class struggle to the bourgeois
universe. Strategically, this can only
lead to the consolidation of the social democratization of the workers'
movement in South Africa, a process that began with the tying of the main trade
union federation to the goals and modalities of the Congress Alliance in the
mid-1980s. In doing so, a vital part of
the workers' movement was agreeing to the leadership of the liberation movement
by the nationalists, as opposed to the socialists. The SACP had gone even further by allowing,
indeed compelling, its members to become card-carrying members of the ANC. Things can change, of course, but, as I see
it, the SACP is currently not an independent political formation.
Theoretically, we are once again faced with a concept of the
state that makes any movement beyond capitalism inconceivable. I have neither the time nor the inclination
to enter into this particular debate in any detail in this address. Suffice it to say that the question can be
formulated quite clearly in terms that Rosa Luxemburg first made famous in her
essay on Reform or Revolution, published in 1900, i.e., 110 years ago. In her own words:
[. . .] [People] who pronounce themselves in favor of the method of legislative reform in place of and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal. Instead of taking a stand for the establishment of a new society they take a stand for surface modification of the old society. If we follow the political conceptions of revisionism, we arrive at the same conclusion that is reached when we follow the economic theories of revisionism. Our program becomes not the realization of socialism, but the reform of capitalism; not the suppression of the system of wage labor, but the diminution of exploitation, that is, the suppression of the abuses of capitalism instead of the suppression of capitalism itself. (italics in the original, Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution, pp. 49-50)
·
Another way of putting this is the proposition
that, in Gramscian terms, the class struggle gets stuck, as it were, in a war
of position in the belief that these manoeuvres in themselves constitute a
transformation of the capitalist state and society into a socialist society and
a workers' state. (See Daniel Bensaid,
Revolutionary Strategy Today, p.30).
This, as I see it, is the tendency of much that is put forward as the
programme of the NDR, quite apart from the fundamental sleight of hand
perpetrated by those who are busy stabilizing the capitalist system in South
Africa while they pontificate at the same time about the "fundamental
transformation" of our society. By
way of example, I refer to the resolutions of the 1997 COSATU national conference,
all of which remain on the agenda in 2010.
- · building a robust anti-capitalism, which means a relentless criticism of capitalism; building working class hegemony in many areas such as sport, culture, values, the media and most importantly (sic), in politics; and tirelessly upholding a vision of full equality (and not just constitutional equality), including gender equality;]
- · rolling back the market -- water, education, shelter, healthcare are basic human rights, not commodities. Everyone should have a right to these things, regardless of whether they can afford them. We should not allow the market to dominate in meeting the basic needs of people;
- · transforming the state -- a powerful public sector is a crucial component of socialism, but should not be big for its own sake. Our vision is that it should be developmental and facilitate participation and consultation; it should be more responsive and accountable, and the higher, bureaucratic echelons should be reduced;
- · advancing and experimenting with other, non-capitalist forms of ownership such as cooperatives and "social capital" (eg. Workers' pension and provident funds);
- · transforming how work is organized and managed -- toward worker control and worker self-management. The actual conditions of the workplace should change, so as to empower working people;
- · strengthening worker organization -- in addition to trade unions, there are other organizations in which workers are active, and these should be part of a socialist programme. (my italics, COSATU/SACP publication, Building Socialism Now: Preparing for the New Millennium, p. 68)
While few left-wing people will disagree with any of this,
except for the give-away phrase about "transforming the state", it is
clear that these objectives are put forward in the mode of Bernsteinian
revisionism and that, as a consequence, they can at best lead to what I have
already referred to as the consolidation of social democracy in the workers'
movement. The entire strategy depends on
a notion of the state as being essentially neutral.5 The final disillusionment will come, of
course, when the repressive apparatuses of the state, instead of supporting the
exploited classes and other oppressed strata, turn their weapons on the masses
to protect the interests of the capitalist class. The response of police personnel to many of
the so-called service delivery protests prefigures what I am saying here.
On the other hand, this is not an inevitable outcome, as the
history of every successful revolution attests and we are probably decades away
from any such scenario at this moment.
However, not to postulate consistently and as a matter of daily
practical political education the need to end the rule of the local and
international capitalist class, as eccentric as that may appear to be at
present, is to disarm the working class and its allies ideologically before the
decisive battles are fought.6
So, what should we be doing, those of us who consider
ourselves to be on the Left and as being committed to bringing about that other
world which socialists across the globe and across the centuries have
envisaged? I want to address this
question briefly at a general, rather than at an operational level, since this
is not a forum for the discussion of tactical issues.
In a sentence, I would say that we have to find the
ideological and organizational means to build the counter-society that
insulates the oppressed and exploited from the undermining and disempowering
values and practices of bourgeois society.
This goal must once again become an integral part of the class struggle
against exploitation and oppression.
Today, because of the massive pollution of the popular consciousness by
means of (mostly) American consumerist culture, this is a much more difficult
task than it was for those who fashioned -- in struggle -- the mass social
democratic parties and workers' movements of Europe towards the end of the 19th
century, or of some of the mass parties of the newly industrializing countries,
including, incipiently, the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa during
the 1970s and 1980s.
In order to get to the orientation I wish to suggest, I want
to put forward a number of propositions that have to be borne in mind.
Firstly, for reasons that I assume need not be spelled out,
the collapse of the USSR and of its satellite states in Eastern Europe
catapulted the pro-socialism forces in the world into one of their most
deep-going and enduring crises. In
particular, I think, there can be no doubt that the credibility of the
socialist project as the only viable alternative to capitalism as a world
system has been called into question.
The very fact that the majority of human beings in the second half of
the last century equated socialism with what had come into existence in the
Soviet Union has once again raised the question of what we mean by the
concept. This is not new, of
course. At the end of the 19th century,
similar debates were conducted among, especially, socialists in Europe, notably
in the German Social Democratic Party.
However, we live in an entirely different world today and the question
has, therefore, to be approached with the new technological and ideological
environment in mind. I realize, of
course, that most of us have ready answers to this question but I believe it is
essential that we find a different language in which to articulate these
answers. Otherwise, our cliché-ridden
formulae will continue to alienate the popular consciousness. We have to use traditional as well as modern
media in order to disseminate these answers in diverse and innovative forms
among all of humanity. Stories, utopias,
novels, plays, songs, rapping, even soapies, we need to experiment with all of
these forms, and more, in order to get our message across more effectively.
Secondly, the caving in of layer after layer of former
so-called socialists to the pressures and enticements of neo-liberal bourgeois
norms and aspirations, which has been one of the most melodramatic political
developments of the late 20th century, has temporarily weakened the socialist
forces numerically and intellectually but, in the longer term, has also laid
the foundation for a much more solid political edifice built with the will and
the knowledge of many dedicated men and women.
Clearly, the question that we have to consider here is something along
these lines: how do we, among other things, maximize the acceptance of the need
by the majority of people in our societies to base their lives and their
aspirations on the principle of sufficiency (André Gorz)? The question implies an understanding of the
moral economy in an industrial environment, a countering of the capitalist myth
of "economic rationality" and a reintegration of the, if you wish,
pre-industrial, pre-capitalist values based on the notion that "enough is
as good as a feast".7 This approach
has obviously been reinforced by the insights derived from the researches of
ecological science and activism. It is
from this ideological mindset, formulated in political programmes of principle
and practical action plans, that the motivation and the passion will be
generated to oppose, and, therefore, not to emulate, the acquisitive and
status-seeking desiderata which are the stock-in-trade of the capitalist
system.
We need as a corollary to this to spell out what we mean in
practice when we proclaim that socialism is a process, not an event. For example, in the educational domain,
should we not place the spotlight firmly on pre-school education and,
consequently, universalize this phase of education as a defining component of
any modern democracy? (It goes without
saying that we have to work out all the curricular and training implications of
this proposal).
Thirdly, there is very little doubt in the mind of any
serious revolutionary socialist protagonist that the form of organization, the
party, for short, that will lead or guide the struggle for socialism in the
world has once again become a point of debate.
This is so because of the elitist pretensions, authoritarian ethos and
undemocratic practices that have often come to be associated with so-called
vanguard parties of the working class.
It ought not to be necessary to say that this is a fundamental question,
one that requires from all of us total honesty and intellectual integrity,
since the fact that socialist activists are -- ideally -- people who have
specialized in the study of society and of history necessarily equips them with
a certain kind of knowledge that others either don't have or do not consider to
be essential to their "happiness".
Because of the social power that this knowledge endows us with, which,
incidentally, is not very different from the power that technocrats such as
civil engineers or nuclear scientists have, we are called upon to display
higher levels of social responsibility than most "ordinary" people,
something that recent history has taught us not to take for granted at all.
Fourthly, we find ourselves in a strategic impasse. Both theory and history tell us that
socialism in one country is impossible.
Yet, the domino effect of socialist revolutions seems always to be
interrupted by imperialist machinations and direct intervention. Hence, at the international level, where one
always has to begin any analysis, the strategic question today is: what do we
have to do in order to prevent the isolation of any socialist revolution such
as that which is underway in Latin America?
This question is not about not fighting against your own bourgeoisie, as
some wiseacre tried to tell me at a recent conference; it is about ensuring
that your own efforts at the national level can be sustainable once they
eventuate in successful overthrow of the existing system. It is also about the most effective practical
manner of countering the paralyzing sectarianism of the Left. It is only when all revolutionary socialists
in the world act together (in international brigades, large-scale boycott and
sanctions campaigns against aggressor nations, etc.) that some of the edges
that make it impossible for left-wing people to act in concert will begin to be
rubbed off.
Let me add a few points with respect to political economy
issues at the beginning of the 21st century.
The centrality and dominance of the U.S.A. in the world economic
landscape, though it continues to shape events and political economy processes,
is beginning to become less taken for granted than even five years ago. This situation is most visibly manifest in
the decline of the dollar and the zig-zag rise of the euro. Besides the ever more obvious inter-imperialist
rivalry between North America and the European Union, we are witnessing the
appearance on the world stage of the Asian capitalist giants of China, India
and Indonesia, as well as of the more established capitalist regimes of Japan,
South Korea, Malaysia-Singapore and an assertive Russia. The new dynamic that these relations have
inserted into the world capitalist system has been exhaustively analysed by
many Marxist and other progressive scholars.
It will suffice, therefore, if I highlight a few issues that appear to
me to be relevant to our present context.
Firstly, the dominance of finance capital is clearly a
high-risk situation as far as the system as a whole is concerned. The latest series of crises triggered by the
collapse of the so-called sub-prime market in the U.S.A. demonstrates this most
clearly. Not only the banking system of
the U.S.A. but those of all countries have been put in jeopardy and are relying
on their central banks (i.e., their taxpayers) to bail them out.
Secondly, and related to the first point, the bull markets
of the past decade or more have been demand driven, i.e., based on consumption
that is itself the result of the expansion (over-expansion) of credit. This situation is unsustainable and the
continued creation of ever more sophisticated credit-creating instruments
(especially the plethora of loyalty cards and smart cards for their not so
smart "owners") is a recipe for the deepest possible recession and,
ultimately, depression. This predictable
fact has produced the usual oracular pronouncements about the collapse of
capitalism from all manner of Marxist and other socialist analysts. It is my view that we should avoid this
eschatological tendency, since it really does not enrich our understanding of
how the system actually works. We cannot
at one and the same time say that the system will not collapse of its own
accord and, without any reference to whether or not the subjective factor, i.e,
the leadership, the party and all that that implies, is adequately prepared to
deliver the final blows, predict its "inevitable" fall. The so-called resilience of the capitalist
system, as we know from especially the world and other wars of the last century
is based on its "creative destruction" of resources through, among other
things, primarily investment in the military-industrial complex and the conduct
of war on the most threadbare of "justifications". If any person on earth still doubts the truth
of this proposition after the exposure of the official lies about the so-called
weapons of mass destruction in Saddam's Iraq, nothing will convince them. Not even two years ago, George Bush was
embarrassingly stopped from publicly pushing in the direction of preparing for
a similar war scenario in Iran by his own "intelligence service"
releasing a report that shows clearly that Iran had given up any notion of
producing nuclear arms as far back as 2003!
Of course, a realistic assessment of the prospects for
successful anti-capitalist-imperialist actions by large masses of exploited and
oppressed people in many different parts of the world does not mean that one is
suggesting that socialist revolution is not on the immediate agenda. In Latin America, as I have pointed out, such
a leap across the ideological and political hurdles that have been placed so
very deliberately and effectively in the path of the workers of the world has
become decidedly possible, even probable.
Thirdly, from the point of view of the economic South of the
globe, the entrance of China and India as major investors in infrastructure and
consumers of raw materials and other commodities has the potential of
re-establishing a "neutral" space for the elites that is not
dissimilar from that which made it possible during the Cold War for a Nehru, a
Nasser, an Nkrumah and others to strut large on the world stage, whatever their
nationalist and personal attributes might have contributed to their
stature. Block formation such as that
manifest in the EU, AU, ASEAN, ALBA and other similar entities, is, in Manuel
Castells' terms, initially a form of resistance to "globalization" by
the elites. It implies the manifest
rejection of the new international division of labour imposed by the
international financial institutions on behalf of the U.S.A. hegemon on the
rest of humanity.8 It can, however, only
succeed in the long run if it manages to create what he calls "project
identities", i.e., if the generality of the population identifies with the
newly created block. This is the reason
for the discussion about a European identity and for the ongoing discussion in
South Africa of the question: Who is an African? For the Left, it poses the question (in
Africa, for example) whether we can and should give new meaning to the
pan-African project, i.e., as a left project that is implacably opposed to the
capitalist-imperialist basis and the elitist ethos of NEPAD and all its
ancillary formations. I believe that
this is a fundamental question for socialists in Africa, one the consideration
of which we can no longer defer.
Fourthly, the increasingly coordinated strategies of the
world capitalist class via entities such as the World Economic Forum as well as
the yawning gaps between the rich and the poor that are the direct consequence
of the neo-liberal economic orthodoxy and its barbaric practical instantiations
in most countries of the world, especially in the economic South, have given
rise to a world-wide protest movement that has come to be associated in the
main with the World Social Forum and its geographical offshoots with the catchy
motto/slogan to the effect that Another world is possible, reminiscent of
Schiller's Ode to Joy eternalized in the Chorale of Beethoven's 9th
symphony. Now, whatever else the WSF
might be, it is universally acknowledged that it is not, and should not try to
be, a new International. It does, however,
by implication raise many questions about the international coordination of
revolutionary socialist and other working-class activities.
Any illusions individual socialists or groups of socialists
may have had about the class nature of most co-opted regimes, especially in
Africa, have been dispelled by the blatant and abject subordination of the
South African liberation struggle to the dictates of international and domestic
capital. Africa's position in the
international division of labour has been very firmly defined as supplier of
certain raw materials, especially oil, gas, precious metals and plantation
goods such as sisal and cotton. Only
South Africa itself has a sufficiently diversified economic structure to
withstand to some extent the devastating consequences of essentially monocultural
economies. As has been pointed out by
authors such as John Saul and Colin Leys in numerous publications, the
situation of the urban and especially the rural poor in most of Africa is
exacerbated by the fact that all previous populist notions of
"African" socialism have been discredited, most of them even before
the implosion of the USSR. In spite of
this, of course, the sporadic and sometimes sustained protests and uprisings
against the IMF and World Bank imposed austerity regimes, most prominently in
Zimbabwe in recent years, but equally so in Zambia, in Uganda, Senegal and
elsewhere, are a sign of the latent force of anti-neo-colonial and
anti-capitalist resistance, of the potential of the second chimurenga. These actions have highlighted the need for
[. . .] nation-wide movements and/or parties through which such local groups and initiatives can ultimately unite to confront the political and economic power of the transnationals and the states that back them.9
For this reason, as well as others, the direction that the
class struggle takes in South Africa during the next few years will be crucial
to the rest of the continent. Currently,
because of all the smoke that is being projected by SACP sleight of hand as a
raging fire of revolutionary "transformation" of the ANC into a
quasi-socialist party, there appears to be much confusion. However, the position can be stated clearly
and simply. The working and unemployed
masses are voting with their feet.
Whatever their lingering loyalties and ever more feeble hopes in the
myth that "the ANC will deliver", however big the gap between
political consciousness and material practice, the thousands of township
uprisings, countrywide strikes and serial metropolitan protest actions have one
simple meaning: WE REJECT YOUR POLICIES AND YOUR PRACTICES AS ANTI-WORKER AND
ANTI-POOR. It is, in my view, a misnomer
to refer to these stirrings of self-organisation of the working class as an
expression of "collective insubordination",10 even though their immediate
impulse is usually reactive rather than proactive. They are saying very clearly and very loudly
that the appeal to nationalist, blood and soil rhetoric has lost its power and
that we are standing on the threshold of a politics that will be shaped by a
heightened sense of class struggle. It
is this understanding that should inform our analysis and our estimation of the
prospects for a more principled socialist-orientated direction of the struggle
in South Africa.
The Biko generation inculcated positive values of
self-respect, self-esteem and self-consciousness into the young people at
schools and at higher education institutions as well as older people in
communities and in workplaces. They did
so because they understood that the slave mentality is the proximate source of
the sense of disempowerment, despair and political apathy that keeps the
oppressed in thrall. Above all, they
understood intuitively that power is not simply the control of armed force,
legitimate or otherwise. Hence, they
undertook community development programmes and mobilised people at the
grassroots in order that they might survive in the menacing environments of
apartheid South Africa. Under the banner
of the slogan You are your own liberators! the Black Community Programmes
empowered whole communities across the entire country. Together with the evolving modern labour
movement inside the country, it was this war of position that eventually put an
end to the apparently linear curve on which the apartheid regime thought itself
to be proceeding ever upwards. There is
no doubt, of course, that the struggle against racial oppression in all its
reprehensible forms compelled everyone to focus on the overriding objective of
throwing off the yoke of racism. The
mistake that many made was to assume that the end of apartheid would bring
about the end of class exploitation.
Let us try, however briefly, to sketch some of the
consequences of applying the principle of sufficiency as the major moral force
shaping post-apartheid South Africa, a principle that can create the kind of
unifying vision, based on the paramountcy of working class interests. To begin with, in the domain of education,
where the state and other public institutions can legitimately intervene, the
content, orientation and delivery of the curriculum at all levels of the system
would be changed fundamentally. The
psychological, pedagogical, ideological and emotional revolution implied by an
approach that does not glorify individual or group domination while allowing
for the full development and flowering of the potential inherent in each and
every human being can be imagined and extrapolated very easily. Individual brilliance expressed and deployed
on behalf and for the benefit of democratically legitimated groups at different
levels of society will continue to be one of the drivers of all social
progress, including economic development.
In the domain of the media and especially advertising, we would be rid
of the brutalities and socially disreputable messages which subject us to the
domination of capital. Adverts like one
that is currently popular in South Africa which claims that everyone wants to
be a "winner" and in the "first team", rather than a
"deputy-chairperson" or a "benchwarmer" -- or words to that
effect -- would become as absurd and counter-productive as they are from the
point of view of a more humane social order.
The glorification of the ostentatious consumption and high life of
so-called celebrities in politics, culture, sport and even religion would cease
to be the supposedly inspiring models of "the good life" that they
are marketed as being in television programmes such as Top Billing and
others. All domains of life would be
affected in the most profound possible way.
What a drab and boring vision, I hear the privileged strata
exclaiming. On the absolute contrary, I
should like to respond to my imagined detractors. Artists, designers, architects, urban
planners, in fact all creative individuals and agencies will be faced with the
challenge of finding the optimal ways of expressing and realising the entire
range of possibilities in every domain of life.
This will be the terrain of competition, not for individual glory and
unequal reward but precisely for the common good, the old-fashioned
commonwealth!
Is this no more than John Lennon or Vladimir Lenin's
dream? How do we begin to initiate and
incrementally realise this vision and this set of values? Besides the ongoing political and economic
class struggles, in which we are willy-nilly involved and by means of which we
attempt to create and to consolidate more democratic space in the short to
medium term, we have to go back to the community development tasks that the BCM
initiated so successfully, if not always sustainably, owing to the ravages of
the apartheid system.
We have to rebuild our communities and our neighbourhoods by
means of establishing, as far as possible on a voluntary basis, all manner of
community projects which bring visible short-term benefit to the people and
which initiate at the same time the trajectories of fundamental social
transformation, which I have been referring to.
These could range from relatively simple programmes such as keeping the
streets and the public toilets clean, preferably in liaison with the local
authority, whether or not it is "delivering" at this level, to more
complex programmes such as bulk buying clubs, community reading clubs,
enrichment programmes for students preparing for exams, teachers' resource
groups at local level, and, of course, sports activities on a more convivial
basis, etc. It is important that I
stress that wherever possible, the relevant democratic authority should be
asked to support the initiative. On the
other hand, the community and its community-based organisations must remain in
control of what they are doing. This is
the difference between South Africa today and South Africa yesterday. As long as, and to the extent that, we have a
democratic system, there is no reason why any of these programmes have to be
initiated as anti-government initiatives.
Any representative democratic government would welcome and vigorously
support such initiatives, since they are pro-people and, in the current
context, pro-poor initiatives.
There are already many of these initiatives and programmes
in existence. They will, if they are
conducted with integrity and not for party-political gain, inevitably gravitate
towards one another, converge and network.
In this way, the fabric of civil society non-government organisations
that was the real matrix of the anti-apartheid movement will be refreshed and
we will once again have that sense of a safety net of communities inspired by
the spirit and the real practices of ubuntu, the "counter-society" I
referred to earlier, that saved so many of us from being destroyed by the
racist system. Today, the struggle is
much more obviously being conducted as a class struggle against exploitation
and unconscionable as well as totally unnecessary and unjustifiable social
inequality, manifest in the miserable lives of the vast majority and the vulgar
parading of wealth and comfort of the few.
Viewed from a different angle, the question we are
confronted with is whether the revolutionary Left cadres will be able to find
the requisite solution to the organizational question so that the debilitating
and paralyzing fragmentation that has marginalized them can be overcome before
this passionate resistance of the workers is transformed into the kind of
passive resistance we associate with most other post-colonial African states or
the nightmare scenario of race war and ethnic cleansing that we saw in Kenya
not so long ago finally overwhelms us.
The strategic and tactical implications of this proposition are numerous
and radical; among other things, we shall have to find practical answers to old
questions in a new context, questions such as:
What kind of party or organization should be created out of
the confluence of all our political tendencies and traditions in order for the
socialist alternative to be firmly rooted within this evolving social
base? What are the core issues around
which a programme of transitional demands and an action plan can be formulated
in a democratic process?
How can such a programme be connected to and informed by the
essential task of rebuilding our communities and our neighbourhoods on the
basis of cooperativist and collectivist values of ubuntu, of sharing and
caring? How do we align ourselves
politically with COSATU and with the other union federations or with individual
unions?
How do we work with the rest of the African working class,
especially in southern Africa? What
position do we take with regards to the World Social Forum? How do we relate to other left-wing
international formations without getting encoiled in the sectarian knots or
getting sidetracked and lost in the maze of largely irrelevant apologetics that
constitutes the stuff of the debates among these sects?
There are, as we speak, a few serious national initiatives
underway, all of which are posing these and other relevant questions from
slightly different perspectives. I think
I have spoken, and speak, in the spirit of Strini Moodley and his comrades when
I express the hope that we will find unity in action even as we try to find new
ways of seeing the struggle for another world and another South Africa.
Notes
1 In the language of
Marxist theory, revolutions become inevitable when the relations of production
are outstripped by the development of the productive forces in a given social
formation.
2 My book, One
Azania, One Nation: The National Question in South Africa, published
pseudonymously in 1979, was one of the first attempts to deal with this period
comprehensively.
3 This is the real
meaning of Mandela's biographical reference to how he came to his crucial
decision to steer the ANC towards accepting the need to negotiate. (See Long Walk to Freedom, p. 513-515.)
4 In the
cut-and-thrust of politics this language is taken for granted but when one sets
out to explain a historical phenomenon, a different discourse is essential.
5 I cannot take up
the question of the so-called developmental state here but my critique of that
fashionable concept would proceed along similar lines.
6 Occasional
references to this scenario do appear in the literature and, I am sure, in the
speeches, of COSATU and SACP activists.
They are, however, negated by the anti-revolutionary practices of most
of the leadership of those formations.
7 We have to bear in
mind, of course, that today abundance is no longer a utopian vision.
8 It should be noted,
of course, that all of the mentioned formations, except for ALBA, are based on
a vision of reforming the international institutions that keep guard over the
international division of labour.
9 Colin Leys, cited
in John Saul, The Next Liberation Struggle. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
in Southern Africa, Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2006, p.
284.
10 Celestin Monga,
cited ibid, p.49.
