Socialist Action /August 2000
ANC Leaders Put Aside Old Rhetoric
By CHARLIE VAN GELDEREN
John Saul, whose Toronto-based South African Report
played a big role in keeping the world informed about South African affairs
in the days of apartheid, has just left South Africa after a term teaching
sociology in the University of the Witwatersrand. He has come away bitterly
disillusioned.
As someone close to the movement for liberation,
he was fully aware of the tensions within it; about what might happen after
the overthrow of apartheid. "The [Stalinist] theories of 'colonialism
of a special type' and the "two-stage revolution,'" he writes,
seemed to signal as much.
He quotes from an article by the current president,
Thabo Mbeki, in the Canadian Journal of African Studies: "The ANC is
not a socialist party," Mbeki stated. "It has never pretended
to be one, it has never said it was, and is not trying to be. It will not
become one by decree or for the purpose of pleasing its 'left' critics."
Despite growing scepticism about the revolutionary
vocation of the ANC leadership in the early 1990s, supporters like John
Saul thought that enough energy had been released from below, not least
from the burgeoning trade-union movement, that radical and even socialist
outcomes were quite likely.
But Saul's conclusion, his balance sheet on the
"South African Revolution," is that "a tragedy is being enacted
in South Africa, as much a metaphor for our times as Rwanda and Yugoslavia.
... For, in the teeth of high expectations arising from a successful struggle
against a malignant apartheid state, a very high percentage of the population-among
them the most desperately poor in the world-are being sacrificed on the
altar of the neo-liberal logic of global capitalism....
"There is absolutely no reason to assume that
the majority of people in South Africa will find their lives improved by
the policies that are being adopted in their name by the present ANC government."
Saul then asks, "Is it the fact that ... capitalism
is everywhere hegemonic and socialism, as a world historic alternative,
has been more or less obliterated, which explains this outcome?"
He refers to the grim epigram of the Polish-American
theorist, Adam Prseworski: "Capitalism is irrational; socialism is
unfeasible; in the real world people starve-the conclusions we have reached
are not encouraging."
Capitalism is irrational? How else explain a situation
in South Africa (also true on a global scale) where the vast majority of
the people are desperate in their poverty in a wide range of the simplest
goods and services on the one hand, and a very large percentage of people
(most often the same people) are equally desperate for jobs on the other?
Why can't those two central pieces to the South
African puzzle simply be put together? Why must they be joined so indirectly
and inefficiently through the circuits of global capital and through the
process of generating surplus value (profits) for the few with the power
to dictate terms and guarantee their massive cut of the action?"
There is no need, John Saul contends, to be reminded
of these facts-not in a world where the share of the world's income of the
richest 20 percent of the world's population has risen to 85 percent, while
the share of the poorest 20 percent has declined to 1.4 percent. In South
Africa itself the already vast gap between rich and poor has continued to
widen since 1994.
"True," Saul writes, "a few more
Blacks have joined the whites at the top of the table. But is there really
much consolation to be found in that? Such outcomes are-there is no other
word for it-irrational....
"In the 'real world' of South Africa people
do starve."
Colin Bundy, vice president of Witwatersrand University,
acknowledged some years ago that to hold out the prospect of a socialist
transformation in South Africa required a "leap of faith." But
he continued, "To imagine that a milder-mannered capitalist order can
secure a decent future for the majority of South Africans-or that deracializing
bourgeois rule will meet the aspirations of exploited and oppressed people-now
that really requires a leap of faith."
What about socialism then? Saul states that "in
principle it makes a lot of sense, surely: From each according to their
means, to each according to their needs. Unfeasible?"
"Not very long ago," Saul continues,
"there were alternatives to neo-liberalism proposed in South Africa.
... Nelson Mandela's celebrated call for nationalizations on the very day
he was released from prison in 1990 (soon retracted in the name of accelerated
privatization).
"Recall, for example, growth through re-distribution,
a modestly radical proposal once used in ANC circles to suggest a possible
first step towards challenging capital and prioritizing the needs of the
vast mass of the population within the productive process."
The present governor of the Reserve Bank, Tito
Mboweni, stated in 1992: "The ANC believes that a strategy of 'growth
through redistribution' will be the appropriate path for the South Africa
economy. In our growth path accumulation depends on the prior redistribution
of resources. Major changes will have to take place in existing power relations
as a necessary condition for this new growth path."
Today even these rather moderate and vague proposals
have been forgotten. "Black empowerment" now means the creation
of a Black capitalist class, a Black bourgeoisie.
"Ours," says President Mbeki, "is
a capitalist society: the objective is the deracialization of the ownership
of productive property." That, he says, "is the key to the struggle
against racism in our country."
For those former liberation fighters who now sit
on the boards of the big corporations, this is the best of all possible
worlds. As Saul puts it: Where once they asked, "what can capital do
for us?" They now ask, "what can we do for capital?"
Socialist Action /August 2000 |