Ebrahim Harvey LEFT FIELD In the apartheid days the tiny black middle class, many of whom were drawn into the maelstrom of the anti-apartheid struggle because all black people were oppressed and denied equal opportunities, played a progressive role. Today, employed in the corporate and state sectors, or operating businesses, their numbers having swelled substantially, they have become flashy, arrogant, snooty and greedy and no longer play a progressive role in our society. Their Americanised and anglicised accents are part of a mediocre upper-middle class whose sole or most important interest is self-aggrandisement, even in the face of the deepening poverty of the majority of black people.
It’s as if the long apartheid nightmare of deprivation has induced a vengeful pursuit of money and status as quickly as possible. Ensconced in formerly white suburbs they are a far cry from the men and women who supported student and worker demonstrations and strikes. Today, having ridden on the backs of the poor black masses to victory over apartheid, many condemn strikes and demonstrations by black workers and students that draw attention to basic needs. Some express sentiments and language similar to what whites, during the apartheid era, used when denouncing such action: unruly, wild and even uncivilised.
Those who still battle with the legacy of white racism do so to the extent that it, in some way or another, poses obstacles to their ambitious drive to move fast up the corporate or social hierarchical ladder. They clamour for black empowerment and affirmative action in their own narrow class interests when the broad black masses have not benefitted from it. Many in managerial positions ill-treat black workers and display bossy attitudes similar to white managers in the past. Many have appropriated the “African renaissance” for their own narrow class interests and have rapidly imbibed the middle-class prejudices similar to that held by the white middle class. They have little or no patience with the “masses” in the townships. I have heard stories of how some no longer visit their remaining fami-lies in the townships who instead have to travel by public transport to visit them in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg and elsewhere. Politics, previously a consummate and lively affair, is now avoided or a part-time diversion, done with typical middle-class facetiousness, cynicism and scepticism.
As much as their numbers and status have grown they are still a tiny fraction of the black population, but in socio-economic terms there is a massive gulf that separates them from the masses of poor black people. The bigger and smarter the cars they drive and the more expensive the clothing they wear the more affected and smug is their attitude. They act like they are the best things the struggle and transformation has produced.
Quite clearly for the African National Congress-led government, just like with the previous regime, developing a sizeable black middle class is a strategic necessity for ensuring stability, a stake in the deracialised capitalist system and to act as a shock absorber between the black masses and the regime. But this is an inherently tenuous strategy that is unlikely to succeed due to the growing divide between this class and the sprawling poverty of the huge majority of black people which is already serving to spur them to action in many forms. How does the ruling party promote a black middle class and a bourgeoisie in the midst of the obscene and growing poverty of most black people whose basic needs they are unable to satisfy? It is this central and fundamental socio-economic contradiction that is going to present the biggest problem for its strategy. It is not so much the rushing change in material conditions that is a problem, since nobody can be justly accused of betraying the struggle or selling out merely by having the means to live better and more comfortable lives. Instead it is the snobbish attitude towards poor people; smug complacency; political indifference and cynicism; and looking down on workers and youth who believe the struggle for fundamental social transformation, which the present “transition” falls far short off, still continues. I have heard some say that those people are still in the “struggle mode”, which is supposed to be unnecessary and outdated. This is the curse of the black middle class who pays domestic workers a fraction of what they can afford to, as did white people in the apartheid era.
It is this that is defining increasingly the colour-free class dimensions of the present period of “transition”. It is this that is going to lead to the development, already taking shape, of a clearer class consciousness among the black working class, especially those that are poorest. And while the pretentious black middle class enriches itself in the subterranean depths of the black working class, a renewed militancy is brewing which now and then erupts to the surface. As poverty worsens and the basic expectations and needs of black workers remain unfulfilled, so will these eruptions increase until we reach a stage of open mass-struggle against the ANC-led government Unfortunately, there is no visible and united left socialist party towards which these masses can gravitate.
Worse still, in the absence of such a party they could be susceptible to manipulation by the new white-led liberal and centrist Democratic Alliance, which will be nothing but a dead-end for them.