John Saul, veteran Canadian anti- apartheid activist and widely published author on Southern African affairs, reflects on his recent stay in South Africa
After a term teaching sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand, my strongest impression of the new South Africa is just how easy, in many circles, it has become to be considered an “ultra- leftist”.
Should I have expected more? My own contacts with the South African struggle go back a long way, to the mid-Sixties when I taught in Dar es Salaam and had my first direct links with the region’s liberation movements, including the African National Congress. And I’m still at it 35 years later, writing about the region and serving as part of the editorial team for the Toronto-based publication, Southern Africa Report, the main activity now pursued by our Toronto Committee for the Liberation of Southern Africa which we founded in 1972. Many’s the damp basement or draughty church hall where I’ve heard ANC representatives, including this country’s current president, speak in “the old days”.
Anybody close to the movement for liberation over all those years knew there were tensions within it about what might happen after the overthrow of apartheid: the theories of “colonialism of a special type” and “the two-stage revolution” seemed to signal as much. Moreover, as Thabo Mbeki himself wrote forcefully (as early as 1984, in the Canadian Journal of African Studies no less), “the ANC is not a socialist party. It has never pretended to be one, it has never said it was, and it is not trying to be. It will not become one by decree or for the purpose of pleasing its ‘left’ critics.”
True, Mbeki saw fit to add that the ANC represented the “notion of both an all- class common front and the determined mobilisation of the black proletariat and peasantry”, with this working class to be viewed as “a conscious vanguard class, capable of advancing and defending its own democratic interests”.
But for supporters, questions were posed regarding such formulations. Were we merely dealing with “petty-bourgeois nationalism”, of the kind Frantz Fanon had seen as so prone to facilitating a “false decolonisation” elsewhere in Africa? Or was this a movement with a far more transformative potential?
In fact, even those who were somewhat sceptical about the revolutionary vocation of the ANC leadership per se thought (with Mbeki?) that enough energy had begun to be released from below in South Africa (not least from a burgeoning trade union movement) that radical, even socialist, outcomes were quite likely.
And perhaps it has – at least for the moment. Hence my own conclusion in recently striking an interim balance sheet on the “South African revolution” for publication back home: “A tragedy is being enacted in South Africa, as much a metaphor for our times as Rwanda and Yugoslavia, and, even if not so immediately searing of the spirit, it is perhaps a more revealing one. For in the teeth of high expectations arising from the successful struggle against a malignant apartheid state, a very large percentage of the population – among them many of the most desperately poor in the world – are being sacrificed on the altar of the neo-liberal logic of global capitalism … There is absolutely no reason to assume that the vast majority of people in South Africa will find their lives improved by the policies that are being adopted in their name by the present ANC government. Indeed, something quite the reverse is the far more likely outcome.”
But what am I really bemoaning in this passage? Is it the fact that the world has changed, that capitalism is everywhere hegemonic and socialism, as a world- historical alternative, has been more or less obliterated, which explains this outcome? Are we merely forced back, in such a context, to the grim epigram of the Polish-American theorist, Adam Przeworski: “Capitalism is irrational; socialism is unfeasible; in the real world people starve – the conclusions we have reached are not encouraging.”
Capitalism is irrational? How else to explain a situation in South Africa (but it is also true on a global scale) where the vast majority of people are desperate in their poverty for a wide range of the simplest goods and services on the one hand and a very large percentage of people (most often the same people) are equally desperate for jobs, on the other. Why can’t those two central pieces to the South African puzzle simply be put together, you ask? Why must they be joined so indirectly and inefficiently through the circuits of global capital and the process of generating surplus value (profits) for the few with the power to dictate terms and guarantee their massive cut of the action?
No one needs to be reminded of these facts perhaps, not in a world where the share of the world’s income of the richest 20% of the world’s population has risen to 85%, while the share of the poorest 20% has declined to 1,4%. But, of course, in South Africa itself the already vast gap between rich and poor has continued to widen since 1994. True, a few more blacks have joined the whites at the top of the table. But is there really much consolation to be found in that?
No question, whatever Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel and the business press may say, such outcomes are – there’s no other word for it, I fear – irrational. And yes, in the “real world” of South Africa people do starve. This is not a surprising outcome. Not so long ago Colin Leys and I produced a survey of the capitalist prospect in Africa in which we concluded that the result for Africa is “relegation to the margins of the global economy, with no visible prospect for continental development along capitalist lines … Africa’s development, and the dynamics of global capitalism are no longer convergent, if ever they were.” The point stands, I think.
What of South Africa itself in this respect? In his own analysis of Africa, sociologist Manuel Castells (soon to visit South Africa) sees somewhat more room for South Africa to manoeuvre within global capitalism than is the case elsewhere on the continent.
He argues this because of the country’s size and relatively sophisticated economic structure compared with other African countries. And yet even Castells must conclude his analysis of South Africa by evoking the possibility of South Africa falling, like “its ravaged neighbours”, into “the abyss of social exclusion”.
He writes: “The real problem for South Africa is how to avoid being pushed aside itself from the harsh competition in the new global economy once its economy is open.” Since it is unlikely to do so, this is, I fear, Castells’s most convincing formulation.
But wait: are these merely examples of the dreaded “Afro-pessimism” that we have all been hearing so much about? I don’t think so, although that charge has certainly been levelled at me during my stay in South Africa when I’ve made such points. No, I’d say the real “Afro- pessimists” are those who state that Africa (including South Africa) has little choice but to tag along behind a global capitalism that actually offers very little by way of development prospects for the continent.
Africans – South Africans not least – can do better than that. Current Wits vice- chancellor Colin Bundy acknowledged some years ago that to continue to hold out the prospect of a socialist transformation in South Africa may seem to require something of a “leap of faith”. But, he continued forcefully: “To imagine that a milder- mannered capitalist order can secure a decent future for the majority of South Africans – or that deracialising bourgeois rule will meet the aspirations of exploited and oppressed people – or that South Africa can somehow be absolved of its economic history and enter a future like that of Sweden or Taiwan: now that really requires a leap of faith.”
Surely there are stronger grounds upon which to build an “Afro-optimism” than through a feckless flight to the right.
What about socialism, then? In principle it makes a lot more sense, surely: “From each according to their means, to each according to their needs.” But “unfeasible”? I’m not so sure. After all, not so very long ago there were alternatives to neo-liberalism proposed in South Africa, and not merely in Nelson Mandela’s celebrated call for nationalisations (soon retracted in the name of accelerated “privatisation”, as we know) on the very day of his release from prison in 1990.
Recall, for example, “growth through redistribution”, a modestly radical proposal once used in ANC circles to suggest a possible first step towards challenging capital and prioritising the needs of the vast mass of the population within the productive process.
As now Governor of the Reserve Bank Tito Mboweni then (1992) phrased it: “The ANC believes that a strategy of ‘growth through redistribution’ will be the appropriate new path for the South African economy. In our growth path, accumulation depends on the prior redistribution of resources. Major changes will have to take place in existing power relations as a necessary condition for this new growth path.”
Or take the 1994 argument of Mandela (it seems a long time ago now): “We are convinced that left to their own devices the South African business community will not rise to the challenges facing us … While the democratic state will maintain and develop the market, we envisage occasions when it will be necessary for it to intervene where growth and development require such intervention.” I agree with Mandela here, although I would develop the point much further. For unless centres of democratic power can begin to wrest exclusive control over decisions about production out of the hands of capital and begin increasingly to discipline the latter to a larger social purpose than mere profit-making there is not much hope of progress.
And yet, how very different are the public debates of the moment. Isn’t it now: ask not what capital can do for you, but what you can do for capital?
All foreign investment and “trickle down effects”, stock markets and lotteries. And, of course, “black empowerment” – with this goal often cast (as Mbeki put it in a speech to a meeting of black managers late last year) in terms of the need to “strive to create and strengthen a “black capitalist class,” a “black borugeoisie”. In fact, Mbeki continued, since “ours is a capitalist society”, the “objective of the deracialisation of the ownership of productive property” is key to “the struggle against racism in our country”.
There’s one problem, however: “Because we come from the black oppressed, many of us feel embarrassed to state this goal as nakedly as we should.”
Indeed, “our lives are not made easier by those who, seeking to deny [sic] 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 the disparities between black and white. Simply put, the argument is that the rich are rich whether they are black or white. The poor are poor, whether they are black or white.”
All of which, Mbeki continued, “frightens and embarrasses those who are black and might be part of the new rich”. Get it? The new black capitalist class are victims – of class analysis.
Of course, I’m not suggesting for a moment that structures of racial inequality aren’t a continuing problem in South Africa. But can the issue of class formation, and its long-term social and political implications, really be finessed away so easily in the new South Africa? Like them or not, the statistics suggest otherwise: as it happens, “the rich are rich whether they are black or white”. One fears that if, in the end, the celebrated “African renaissance” comes to be primarily about the “embourgeoisement” of the favoured few it could turn out to be a very tawdry thing indeed.
True, a report in the Mail & Guardian suggests that some within the ANC (but what about Mbeki himself?) wish to draw away from that position (“ANC backtracks on black bourgeoisie”, M&G, June 2).
Nonetheless, the current presidential fashion of posing South Africa’s challenge in terms of the problem of “poverty” is not much more promising a formulation.
Paradoxically, the language of poverty alleviation is not an uncomfortable one for those at the top, looking down, to employ. Who can deny the existence of poverty in South Africa and who isn’t, charitably, against it?
But what if the problem were named differently: as a deepening polarisation of social classes across the colour line and one reinforced by the very logic of a capitalist development strategy? Quite another matter, obviously.
Don’t get me wrong. I haven’t a blueprint for the revolutionary alternative. That can only be worked out, centimetre by centimetre, by South Africans engaged in concrete struggles for change. What I can tell, however, is when a blue-print isn’t working – and that’s the case with present- day South Africa’s neo-Thatcherite turn (“Just call me a Thatcherite,” as Mbeki famously said at the launching of the growth, employment and redistribution strategy).
Nor am I merely arguing this from afar. My hunch is that, through our shared vulnerability, people all over the world are linked in the struggle against global capitalism as we haven’t ever quite been before (viz, “the spirit of Seattle”). The fact is that global capitalism has, in the name of market realism and the presumed imperatives of capital, forced on every country one version or another of a costly “race to the bottom”. Thus my own country, Canada, is currently having its vaunted welfare system picked clean, a “death of society by a thousand cuts”, as Leys has described the Canadian case.
But then nobody ever thought we had much of a chance for a revolution in Canada: too rich, too comfortable, too smug. Here in South Africa, as even Mbeki once envisaged it, the chance for something new and more promising has seemed greater. In this regard, some will perhaps find it difficult not to be sympathetic to the current leaders of the ANC, given the pressures they’ve been under. Nonetheless, it’s equally difficult to escape the feeling – historians will decide – that in some important way these leaders have merely blown it.
Please understand. I’ve no illusions about the importance of my own personal intervention here. The current leaders of South Africa don’t have any reason to care what wizened old veterans of the anti- apartheid movement think about the course that the liberation struggle has taken. After all, their primary points of international reference, as the president’s recent grand intercontinental tour clearly indicated, are now the Clintons, the Blairs and the Schroeders, the doyens of the international financial institutions, the World Trade Organisation and the global business community. In such a context, the anti-apartheid movement, with its hopes of ongoing progressive transformation in post- apartheid South Africa, is definitely yesterday’s news.
Nonetheless, some of us can’t help thinking that history isn’t over, that the second stage of South Africa’s two- stage revolution may yet be at hand.
Indeed, I seem to detect in many spheres – including within the ANC itself – signs that the left is beginning to reclaim space and to regain its self-confidence. Is it too “Afro-optimistic” to think, for example, that the several million workers who stayed away from work on May 10 represent as much a wave of the future as they do a voice of conscience from the past?
And what of that growing number of younger South Africans (like some of the students I’ve met at Wits) who are heartily sick of crime and unemployment, of social degradation and inequality, and of the smug embrace of neo- liberalism. Might they not increasingly become tomorrow’s news? I certainly hope so.