Franco Barchiesi
ELITE TRANSITION: FROM APARTHEID TO NEOLIBERALISM IN SOUTH AFRICA by Patrick Bond (Pluto/University of Natal Press)
Studies of the South African democratic transition have seen in the past few years the consolidation of a powerful, academically established orthodoxy, whereby studies of a progressive, social- democratic origin have risen to prominence. Notable among these are most of the essays in the recent Trade Unions and Democratisation in South Africa, edited by Eddie Webster and Glenn Adler. Common to this trend is the praise of socio-political compromise as the basis of South African democratisation. It is here assumed that compromise and reduction of social conflict necessarily imply the most promising possibilities for “win-win” solutions for state, labour and capital.
A current of critical studies has lately emerged to challenge views of the transition held in this academic mainstream. Differently from the previous ones, these latter are often produced by small, radical publishing houses at the university’s margins. Works like Dale McKinley’s The ANC and the Liberation Struggle, Hein Marais’s South Africa: Limits to Change and Ashwin Desai’s South Africa: Still Revolting debunk in different ways the myth of a South African “miracle” based on mutually advantageous negotiated settlements. Rather, these researches contribute to show how political compromises concealed substantial continuities with the past in social and economic power structures and in policy orientations, while “transformation” has increasingly coincided with the constitution of new elites that largely recycle the old ones. It is precisely to the elite character of the South African transition that Patrick Bond, from the University of the Witwatersrand’s School of Public and Development Management, dedicates a welcome new addition to this current of critical studies.
Bond’s Elite Transition does not resort to abused clichs of the African National Congress’s “sell-out” to explain continuities and retreats in the “new” South Africa. He rather chooses a longer term approach where it is argued that the rise of the ANC to power is the culmination of slow internal shifts that made the party credible for domestic and international capital. At the same time this confirmed a socio-economic context historically marked by the predominant role of financial corporations, while the rise of new elites promoted by the ruling party guaranteed legitimacy to such continuities.
The other side of the coin is however represented by a persistent “uneven development” marked by huge areas of local, social, gendered and racial exclusion as a legacy of a growth path oriented to the financial profits of a limited minority. The ANC’s acceptance of this trade-off, however, did not go uncontested, in Bond’s argument. This was testified to by the degree of labour and social movement mobilisation around the demands of the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) well after the negotiated compromises had steered the country down the road of macro- economic conservatism.
Possibilities for a “people-driven” RDP were, however, undermined by a style of technocratic decision-making endorsing market-driven expansion and corporate profitability as keys to economic growth and social delivery. What Bond calls the “suffocating love from newfound friends” -from big business – ultimately expropriated from progressive forces even the words and concepts to define social change. This led to what the book adequately captures by defining the current government as “talking left, acting right”.
Bond’s work is an essential and invaluable contribution to current discussions on the transition. His arguments present with great freshness and richness of detail the inexorable advance of a logic of socio-economic restoration that questions the rigid politeness of mainstream academic models of the “negotiated transition”. His passionate accounts and readable style make this a compelling text for the general public, while providing one of the deepest and most sophisticated analyses of the policy process in democratic South Africa available to date.
Yet important problems are also left open by Bond’s book. The depth of detail sometimes militates against a more general argument which would address crucial questions. Why did the neoliberal technocratic elite rise to prominence in the ANC and the government? Which social forces acted, at the level of the ruling party, of the political system and of the class structure at large, to facilitate that outcome? Why were social contracts used (quite effectively) to that end?
Bond’s answer privileges the role of personality and expertise, and the ANC is debated more at a decision-making level than in relation to its constituencies. More could be said on the reasons why, for example, a powerful social actor like organised labour became increasingly subordinate inside the tripartite alliance’s macroeconomic approaches. Bond’s admitted choice of focus on the “big picture”, leaving to the readers’ sources the “micro- level experiences of the daily life”, is justifiable in a context that remains fluid and constantly changing. But, on the other hand, it is precisely at that micro-level that the current situation, with its paradoxes, inequalities and retreats, is largely accepted.
The mechanisms of this acceptance and the nature of the ideological appeal of the ANC constitute important, unresolved challenges for future research. Finally, much is left to further debates by Bond’s conceptualisation of alternatives to the current socio-economic order. His advocacy for going back to the “true”, people-driven RDP is supported by a climate that sees waves of anti- neoliberal social movements connecting on a global scale. Yet the book’s exhaustive list of such movements leaves open two questions: who in the specific South African situation are the social subjects and the lines of conflict that can open a space for an alternative? What is the effective capacity of anti-neoliberal social movements to relate to these subjects?
Resistance to neoliberalism is not just a matter of contesting interpretations of the RDP, but it lives in communities’ radical struggles. Critical research on social change in South Africa still has to find new ways to relate to these processes.
Franco Barchiesi works in the Sociology of Work Unit of the department of sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand