The African National Congress has made significant compromises to gain political power, argues Dale T McKinley in his new book
For three decades the dominant theoretical basis for the African National Congress’s liberation struggle had been cast within the necessity for the revolutionary seizure of power. Whether applied to the smashing of apartheid and the attainment of majority rule or as a springboard to a transition to socialism, the revolutionary seizure of power was presented as a necessary precondition for movement forward.
Years earlier, Joe Slovo had put it this way: “There is a distinction between the creation of the new state form and the building of a new socialist economic formation. The former is made possible by a revolutionary seizure of power; the latter, through the exercise of that political power by a class whose interests are unconditionally served by a socialist order.”
Historically, many liberal and neo-Marxist academics, as well as numerous alliance intellectuals, have conceptualised arguments for a revolutionary seizure of power in narrowly statist terms. As a result, the (autonomous) state is given the status of the struggle “throne”, leaving revolutionary (purposive) struggle cast in terms of a fight for a specific form (structure) of power rather than its foundation.
If such an approach is adopted, either theoretically or practically, a false dichotomy emerges between the political and the economic “sides” of revolutionary struggle. Political control of the state can be achieved with no corresponding transformation of the economic sphere; we only have to take one quick glance at the contemporary results of most third world political revolutions to see what kind of national liberation has been delivered.
In the historical context of the South African struggle such approaches have provided the basis from which to lend both revolutionary credence to purely political change and ammunition for bourgeois critics of any revolutionary struggle.
There is nothing implicitly statist in any struggle for revolutionary change. What is implicit, though, is that there must be a fundamental attack on the entrenched economic and political interests of capital (in whatever form) in order for there to be meaningful liberation.
As the ANC had put this quite clearly in the 1970s: “It is, therefore, a fundamental feature of our strategy that victory must embrace more than formal political democracy. To allow the existing economic forces to retain their interests intact is to feed the root of racial supremacy and does not represent even a shadow of liberation.”
And yet the cumulative effect of the strategic and tactical programme of the ANC, consummated in the post-1990 transitional period, has been gradually to demobilise the only constituency capable of leading and carrying through such a revolutionary struggle – that class of South Africa’s workers and unemployed.
The strategic primacy given to the achievement of a narrowly conceived national democracy has allowed a fundamental contradicton to permeate the South African liberation struggle: in the liberation struggle the ANC’s own base constituency have ultimately had to be fellow travellers with a whole host of powerful social forces whose fundamental interests are inimical to revolutionary transformation.
From a peculiarly romanticised attachment to classic guerrilla warfare, to a rhetorically heavy notion of insurrectionary people’s power, to social and political contracts with capital, the strategic thrust of the ANC’s struggle for national liberation has consistently underestimated and seriously undermined the potential and actual struggle of the people themselves.
More specifically, the political strategies of the liberation movement have led to a lack of recognition and incorporation of actual struggles on the ground.
What has made this cumulative strategy all the more removed from the possibilities of attaining a genuine transfer of power to the people has been the false separation, both theoretical and practical, between political and socio-economic change. For this reason, processes such as democratisation have taken on a narrow petit-bourgeois, nationalist and predominantly political meaning and context.
With such an approach there can be no real analytical or strategic distinction between national liberation struggles and socialist revolution. This perspective is thus left with no other option than to see socioeconomic change as secondary to the parallel struggle for political change (that is, it privileges the economic status quo – capitalism).
It is not surprising then that many movement leaders and intellectuals have claimed that the political changes brought about after the April 1994 elections (even if initially in the form of temporary co-governance with the National Party) have laid the foundation for fundamental social and economic change.
Indeed, the alliance’s Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) is pointed to as an example of ongoing policy formation that can deliver, at the very least, basic material needs to the people. And yet if analysed in the general context of the ANC’s strategic path (both past and present), it is not difficult to see that the potentialities of the RDP are inherently bounded by the very same logic and practice that infused previous phases of the liberation struggle.
Indeed, since April 1994 the ANC-led government has managed to turn the development programme into another tool of consensus politics, and in the process ditch its radical potential in favour of a more “realistic” free-market political economy that has little to offer South Africa’s workers and the poor.
A major contradiction that has permeated ANC politics is the unwillingness and/or inability to recognise that revolutionary struggle cannot be advanced by attempting to reconcile the priorities of the people with the priorities of capital.
Indeed, the same critique can be applied to many of the national liberation movements of the last 30 years. What makes a critical appraisal of the ANC’s liberation struggle so important though is the enduring (mis)perception that the character of the South African liberation struggle supersedes such contradictions. It is time this bubble was burst.
The macro-nationalist approach to struggle that has characterised Alliance politics to date has virtually institutionalised this contradiction.
This approach has led to the subordination of class organisation and politics. In turn, it has allowed the struggle for liberation to be infused by, and to accept, all those “antithetical forms of social unity” under capitalism. In these circumstances the mass struggles for revolutionary nationalist transformation are turned into little more than a struggle for petit-bourgeois reformism.
As Lenin argued in response to the economists of his day who wanted to divide political and economic struggles, the purpose of all revolutionary struggle is to integrate the two under revolutionary working-class leadership. Only then can the rich possibilities for fundamental transformation in society be realised.
Indeed, since April 1994, the ANC leadership has shown clearly its petit-bourgeois pedigree. Constantly prioritising the search for false unity between antagonistic class and social forces, it has managed to achieve, in less than three years, what it took most other post-independence liberation movements over a decade to accomplish. It has used its newly acquired political power to:
* substantively demobilise (and/or demoralise) much of its mass base;
* provide the foundation for the accumulative needs of a (corrupt) new elite;
* pave the way for international capital to exercise increased imperialist influence and control over the economic, cultural and social life of the country;
* reinforce class, racial and gender inequality.
True to its past, the ANC leadership has rationalised all of this in terms of the need to build “national unity” and to be “pragmatic” and above all, by reference to the lack of any “alternative”.
In simple terms, the ANC has been trying to have its cake and eat it.
The ANC and the Liberation Struggle, by Dale T McKinley, published by Pluto Press, will be available in late November. McKinley is the South African Communist Party’s information officer