Jaspreet Kindra
The African National Congress has spoken out against the building of a “black bourgeoisie” – contradicting the stance taken by President Thabo Mbeki on the issue. The shift in the party’s stance is spelled out in one of its discussion documents for the ANC general council in Port Elizabeth next month.
The party appears to have had a rethink on its strategy to build an exclusive black capitalist class, reasoning it could be exploited by those seeking to enrich themselves – or used as a “front” to further interests of white capital.
The ANC document says the creation of a black bourgeoisie free of corrupt malpractices, without the direct intervention of the state, is impossible.
A black bourgeoisie riddled with corruption would have a “fatal impact on the building of a democracy representative of the people as a whole.
“Rather, it [the party] should pursue policies which aim at maximising the number of South African black communities and nationals who can share in the economy and, while improving their own material conditions, gain capacity to help determine the direction, pace and depth of our economic transformation.”
The building of a black bourgeoisie, or a patriotic capitalist class, has been one of the mainstays of Mbeki’s plans to restructure and deracialise the economy and society.
Only six months ago, while addressing the annual national conference of the Black Management Forum, he underlined the challenge of the formation of a “black capitalist class, a black bourgeoisie” as “an important process of the deracialisation of the ownership of productive property in our country”.
Mbeki said: “Our lives are not made easier by those who, seeking to deny that poverty and wealth in our country continue to carry their racial hues, argue that wealth and income disparities among the black people themselves are as wide as disparities between black and white …
“In other words, so it is being suggested, the issue of the disparity in wealth is purely a class question, as it would largely be in a country such as Germany, and not an element of the national question as well.
“All this frightens and embarrasses all those of us who are black and might be part of the new rich. Accordingly, we walk as far and as fast as we can from the notion that the struggle against racism in our country must include the objective of creating a black bourgeoisie.”
While calling for the need to support black entrepreneurs, Mbeki had cautioned against including those who “rent themselves out to white business people to win government tenders” or for their own personal enrichment.
And these concerns are echoed in the ANC discussion paper. The document, which will be up for discussion at the party’s strategic conference, also criticises “elements against transformation”, who have developed “innocuous ways of subverting transformation” in the face of the “overwhelming moral and political legitimacy of our new order”.
These include: “Setting up intelligence and armed networks parallel to and within the state to sabotage change or aggravation of such social problems such as crime; it may entail underground efforts to undermine the country’s economy.”
It also entails disrupting investor confidence and the currency, “deliberate acts of corruption driven not merely by greed; sabotage of the programme for delivery; wrecking government information systems; illegal and malicious acts of capital flights and so on”.
What these forces seek to achieve, says the document, is to “derail, reverse, delay and at the end of the day prevent the fundamental transformation of our society, so as to end up with a system in which the social privileges of apartheid are retained, in a somewhat modified form”.
To defeat this agenda, the “national democratic forces” – which is the tripartite alliance of the ANC, the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions – must take “action with resolution to transform the state and ensure that the forces against transformation do not set the battle of ideas”.
It spells out that the democratic state is developmental and transformative in character. The document says: “It is for this reason that we must fight against the liberal concept of ‘less government’, which, while presented as a philosophical approach towards the state in general, is in fact aimed specifically at the weakening of the democratic state.
“The purpose of this liberal offensive is to deny the people the possibility to use the collective strength and means concentrated in the democratic state to bring about the transformation of the South African society.”
Another of the party’s documents, entitled Uprooting the Demon of Racism, criticises opposition parties for having built a discourse on “equal opportunity” which denies that the playing field is not level.
While dwelling on that it says: “Another dimension has been the tendency to try and explain the national contradiction (sometimes even within our own ranks) as no longer between the historically disadvantaged (African, coloured, Indian) and whites, but rather to refer to this contradiction as between the African majority and other national minorities (whites, coloureds and Indians).”
This analysis, according to the document, has led many coloured people to believe “they are caught in the middle between black and white” and has caused the Indians to exclude themselves from political engagement.
Sections of the media, like the opposition, see themselves as the “protectors of South Africa’s liberty” against the “natural inclination of a predominantly black government to dictatorship and corruption”.