Jeremy Cronin: CROSSFIRE
Isn’t it time to get Crossfire cross-firing? I am going to take a few pot shots at my friend and comrade, Pallo Jordan – with whom, on most things, I mostly agree. But first some anecdotal background.
At the gold summit at the end of February, I was sitting in a Braamfontein hotel conference room among colleagues from the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM).
Out of sheer frustration, as we listened to a long input from the chair of a new black mining group, African Rainbow Mining (ARM), we were over-indulging in the mint imperials in the glass bowls in front of us.
I had hoped that ARM’s Patrice Motsepe would brief us on the pioneering ways in which his group was operating to extend the life of otherwise doomed marginal shafts.
Perhaps ARM was reorganising the workplace, training workers to improve productivity and job satisfaction? Perhaps, it was slashing at the overheads of the traditional mining groups, with their vast corporate headquarters?
We were to be disappointed. Motsepe chose to go on and on about ubuntu, his roots in the struggle, his family background, and the endless evocation of “the logic of our black culture”.
At this point I received a scribbled note from an NUM organiser, torn from one of those otherwise useless 5-page mini-pads found in conference rooms (along with the mint imperials). “What you think comrade? Lots on the logic of black culture, nothing on the logic of capital accumulation!”
In last week’s column, Jordan wrote movingly about the 86-year history of the African National Congress. Then, for some reason, he chose to end this sweeping overview with an appeal to “the emergent black bourgeoisie”, as if somehow, like Georg Hegel’s Prussian bureaucracy, it stood at the end of history.
“History offers it a rare opportunity to set a new agenda of corporate social and civic responsibility. South Africa’s future depends on policies that will tap all our country’s human and material resources,” he wrote.
He even bestowed upon this emergent bourgeoisie an epochal and continental vocation. “Two years hence we enter the third millennium AD. We have arrived at a moment when, for the first time in more than three centuries, the political sovereignty of the peoples of Africa is not under threat.”
Now, to be fair to Jordan, all of this is located within a context of uncertainty. The emergent black bourgeoisie, he notes, may choose to follow the paths of the Randlords, or the ethnic Broederbonders of Sanlam.
Therefore, in the name of 86 years of ANC history, the coming millennium and an implied “African renaissance”, he is appealing to them to choose a different course.
Noble sentiments, but there is much that is profoundly misdirected in all of this.
In the first place, it is simply not correct to assert that, for the first time in three centuries, the political sovereignty of Africa’s peoples is “not under threat”.
Yes, formal European and settler colonialism has ended, thank heavens. Yes, Jordan is careful to qualify sovereignty with the word “political”. But, in many respects, African political sovereignty is extremely frail – mainly because one cannot separate political and economic sovereignty.
Two decades of harsh structural adjustment programmes have rolled back post-independence social and democratic gains in many African countries. These programmes have enforced the brutal slashing of social and development budgets. In the face of all this, an emerged African bourgeoisie has typically played a supine, neo-colonial role.
As a result, the means and the policy options available to many “sovereign” African states have been drastically curtailed. With political power hollowed out, politics (including multi-party politics where it exists) in much of Africa is less about national developmental agendas, but often reduced to struggles between ethnic elites, warlords competing to control enclave economies with the backing of this or that external force.
Lest we fall into the same scenario, I agree with Jordan that we must engage strategically with the emergent black (and indeed emerged white) bourgeoisie in our country. But we must do so on the basis of reality.
The likely trajectory of an emergent black bourgeoisie turns, in my view, less around moral suasion and soul-brother talk, and more around the structural possibilities and constraints of their new powers and privilege, and upon which social forces are able to exert hegemony over them.
I agree with Jordan that we should encourage the black bourgeoisie not to model itself on the old Randlords, or the Sanlam Broederbonders. More to the point, we need to recognise that those options are objectively not available to them in any case.
There is now a different global, continental and national balance of forces. The Randlords, with the backing of a British colonial army, could carve out a space called South Africa to suit their own agenda. The Sanlam Broederbonders, in the context of a Cold War global divide, could carry forward the next wave of South African development (and under-development), working in tandem with an apartheid state.
An emergent black bourgeoisie in South Africa can either choose to be a neo-colonial adjunct or take its place within a development process led by other social forces.
Which brings me back to the gold summit. Last year, 30 000 miners were retrenched and 10 000 dismissed. On average, one miner directly supports at least five other people. Job losses on this scale, in the space of one year, are a national (indeed regional) calamity.
The Chamber of Mines has tended to approach the problem from the narrow tactical perspective of cutting losses for shareholders. The government has, by and large, fiddled around. A social plan to retrain and counsel workers facing retrenchment has been sitting in the doldrums at Nedlac.
It took a trade union, the NUM, to convene the crisis summit. It was the NUM that, over many months, developed a multi-pronged and creative package of proposals – to save jobs and shafts where possible, to counsel, retrain and find alternative work where not.
The package is based on real experience – for instance, the pioneering work being done by the Mineworkers Development Agency in fostering local development centres and a network of co-operative projects.
It was also the NUM that proposed a high-level gold crisis committee, and the rapid adoption of the social plan.
The gold summit resulted in agreement, specific in many cases, general in others, on all of the above. Government and the chamber expressed commitment to the resolutions of the summit, and both saluted the NUM’s leadership role.
I think Jordan is wrong to imply the emergent black bourgeoisie is our prime hope for setting “a new agenda of corporate and civic responsibility”. Without indulging in proletarian romanticism, I am convinced that the energies for setting new agendas, even in the boardrooms, are coming from elsewhere.
Yes, we need to engage the moral, patriotic (and profit-seeking) sentiments of Motsepe – and Bobby Godsell. But, at the end of the day, it will be clear-headed, developmental plans, spearheaded and backed by the political and economic muscle of progressive forces, including the government, that will make the difference.