Our 2004 elections have provoked a flurry of overviews and predictions. What emerges is a profound disjuncture between the dominant consensus among many analysts, on the one hand, and the campaigning experience of thousands of African National Congress activists, on the other.
Talk to ANC leaders and rank-and-file members and there is a feeling of invigoration. Obviously, this elation is partly about the election results, but it is more fundamentally related to the experience of sustained door-to-door work, of direct contact with millions of ordinary South Africans. President Thabo Mbeki captured this when he said the ANC had reaffirmed itself as ”a movement of the poor”.
Contrast this sense of popular participation and of a rejuvenating engagement, with how the majority of commentators covered the elections. The campaign was pronounced ”boring” and ”dull”, and its outcome ”worrying”. FW de Klerk (who has actually been one of the more thoughtful post-election analysts) writes in The Star that we are left with ”a diminished democracy”.
It is not difficult to imagine why he might think so. But it would be wrong to reduce his evaluation to a simple party-political disappointment. It is rooted in a particular paradigm of politics.
”Competition is the basic engine of all natural, social and economic evolution and is a precondition for the development of all institutions, whether they are in the private or public sector,” writes De Klerk.
From this he concludes: ”One of the central requirements for multiparty democracy is that the electorate should have the ability to choose between parties that have a reasonable expectation of winning an election.” (Presumably, if the ANC really believes in democracy, it should give others a better chance of winning?)
The paradigm is social Darwinism and its related pseudo-science, ”free” market fundamentalism. De Klerk is not alone. In the past weeks numerous media commentators have been taking up the same theme, democracy as competitive marketing.
But if democracy is not reducible to marketing, what is it? Without denying the importance of regular multiparty elections, I believe we must shift the emphasis towards fostering the political, social and economic conditions in which millions of South Africans have an effective capacity to participate, and not episodically, in shaping the trajectory of their country and communities.
Interestingly, De Klerk has an inkling of this very different paradigm of politics, of democracy as ongoing participation, as solidarity as much as competition. ”To its credit,” De Klerk remarks, ”the ANC has consistently proved its willingness to accommodate other parties in the processes of government. Its approach in this regard does not arise from any formal constitutional requirement to share power, but from the long-established African tradition of inclusive and consultative government.”
Despite his paradigm confusions and the obvious opportunism of this particular dawning realisation, De Klerk is on to something.
There are indeed dynamic democratic resources within our country. They are to be found in government izimbizo, and in the shape and character of the broad church ANC. They are present at the micro and localised level, in a range of solidaristic and cooperative traditions — stokvels, burial societies, manyano groups, shop stewards locals, faith-based volunteer associations. Many of these resources clearly owe much to pre-capitalist societies and traditions. But they are critically important contemporary resources for confronting the challenges of the 21st century.
There are many loci of class power and influence — the Union Buildings, Parliament, the boardroom, the country club golf course. But it is only in townships, squatter camps and rural villages that the moral and solidaristic hegemony of working people and the poor substantially prevails. It is overwhelmingly here that the ANC chose to forge its ”people’s contract”. Can the resulting cadre and organisational rejuvenation be sustained? That is the challenge.
Jeremy Cronin is the SACP deputy general secretary and an ANC national executive committee member