John SeilerSOUTH AFRICA, LIMITS TO CHANGE: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF TRANSITION by Hein Marais (Zed/UCT Press, R150)
Hein Marais is not the first observer of post-apartheid South Africa to point to the burgeoning African professional and entrepreneurial classes and their conspicuous consumption patterns. The recent book Comrades in Business captures this dynamic pithily in its title, although the bulk of that book has little or nothing to do with the blackening of the formal economy.
Marais goes to the heart of the problem: a misplaced macro-economic policy, whose “trickle- down” imperative will not achieve equitable development but will produce a polarised society of black and white “haves” and a vast majority of mostly black “have nots”. His detailed critique of both the continuing failure of international neo-liberal economic policies and of the growth, employment and reconstruction (Gear) programme that is the South African state’s version, underlies his conclusion that a Keynesian policy would be more appropriate for this country.
His political sympathies go to the grassroots activists of the 1980s – unionists, church, and community organisers – absorbed willynilly into the constraining structures of the African National Congress and (to a lesser extent) the South African Communist Party, stifling their independent thrust, at the same time as the apartheid regime brought to a climax its unblinking and inhumane repression.
By the late 1980s, both sides were seriously weakened. The National Party and much of the business community was ready for “the leap into the unknown”, believing that de facto political and economic power could be held. But as the negotiations proceeded, it became obvious that the NP had no clear strategy about political concessions. At the same time, the ANC saw the taking of political power as the prerequisite to and guarantee of winning the economy and civil society: “The political/ideological project of nation-building became paramount and supplanted – or at least overshadowed – the socio-economic features of the crisis.”
That said, Marais does not see the negotiations as a “sellout” to either whites or capitalists as a class. Good intentions were at work. It was vital to establish “a new basis for social consent”, but “what mattered were the terms on which inclusions and assimilation occurred”. In fact, since the negotiations, and especially since taking political power in 1994, “the ANC has been assimilated into a web of institutional relations, systems and practices tailored to service the interests of (in the first instance) white privilege and (in the final instance) the capitalist class.”
Marais reminds us that in 1990 the ANC gave serious attention to an alternative macro- economic policy. While its title, “growth through redistribution” suggested a socialist underpinning, it required no more than a Keynesian role for government: the selective utilisation of government funding and human resources to encourage labour-intensive industrial production focused on domestic consumption.
The ANC threw out the language and most of the approach by 1992, in part because of public bemusement at the images presented in various scenarios emanating from the business sector. “Growth through redistribution” was painted as destructive of genuine development prospects, opposed to economic freedom, and the senior ANCleadership was beguiled by these arguments.
Marais re-examines the reconstruction and development programme (RDP), which he believes might still serve as a framework for transformation. Its original formulation, the Base Document, grew out of National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa)discussions and became Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu)policy in 1993 and ANC policy just before the 1994 election. But by September that year, the RDP White Paper showed a substantial retreat from the redistribution emphases and towards neo-liberal assumptions, including an implied “trickle-down” approach to the reduction of inequity.
Nonetheless, the Base Document remains a transformation benchmark, even for some in government, although they seem wedded to the “futile bid” of grafting its principles on to Gear, whose thrust moves in a contrary direction. To make it work would require “systematic challenges that summon the involvement of a broader range of popular organisations” both on the “high road” of countering the broad assumptions of neo- liberal macro-economic policy and the “low road” of collectively focusing on specific policy areas where inequities need quick and massive redress-schools and tertiary institutions, fragile industries like textiles and mining.
Marais gives almost no attention to the growing efforts coming from within the ANC government to provide foundations for equitable service delivery (presumably seeing them as palliatives), arguing instead that initiative must come from Cosatu and NGOs (although he is trenchant in his assessment of their organisational and leadership shortcomings) with the SACP providing the only political party channel for such a basic shift in perspectives and priorities.
In fact, contestation about macro-economic policy, socio-political culture, and the shape of the nation being built is the best we can hope for in the years and decades to come. Interest-based politics – if it cuts across the now-dominant electoral dividers of party loyalty, race and ethnicity to build strong, competing coalitions – is the only practical vehicle for this extension of political democracy into the economic realm.
There is a compound irony involved. First, the very idea of “conflict” as both inevitable and even productive runs against the grain of ANC public rhetoric. Second, the conflict will focus on “class”, another concept seldom mentioned publicly by the ANC. The socio- economic classes involved will not be the grimly determinative ones of much Marxist analysis. People will change their minds and their positions. Parties will form, re-form, and die.
At the very end of the book, Marais speaks glowingly of “new forms of organisations that will accompany and even spur this process of renewal, particularly at grassroots level”. Not all these challenges to legitimacy will bring greater political democracy, but most deserve nonpartisan encouragement.
The 1999 local government election provides the first opportunity to do so. Only at this level will constituencies be feasible. Of course, it should be a central priority for the embryonic Independent Electoral Commission, whose statutory brief has a seven-year framework and thus goes beyond the practical difficulties of administering the next round of elections.
And it demands widespread support from South Africans, regardless of their party preferences.