Will the promise of 1994 be carried forward into our second decade of democracy, or will we be overwhelmed by the crises of poverty and inequality? This is the central question the South African Communist Party will debate at its special national congress in Durban this weekend.
In the recent past the SACP has tried to avoid two temptations. The first is to evade a serious self-review in the light of the global strategic defeat suffered in the last quarter of the 20th century by the left. The second, the flip side of the first, is the temptation to embrace the new global realities as if they were what we had been fighting for. This is the myth of a world bursting with ”post-Cold War dividends”, a world beyond ideology in which sustained growth is always a few notches of belt-tightening away.
In preparation for the congress the SACP has circulated discussion papers that have been debated from the branch up. They have also been the subject of trade union workshops and public forums — we don’t want our discussions to be private property.
The theme is to put class back into the public debate. In our national discourse we have concepts of the kind of racial and gender outcomes on which we all agree (non-racism, non-sexism). But there is no equivalent consensual, short-hand reference to the imperative of overcoming huge class inequalities. Comrade ministers launch black mining houses and tell us it’s the first time ”blacks are participating in the sector”. The working class is erased from memory.
Once defined as the key motive force of liberation, the South African proletariat is no longer fashionable in some quarters. A leading African National Congress comrade justifies his own enrichment, saying ”people did not struggle … to become workers for the rest of their lives”. (It was the same comrade who not long ago dismissed the basic income grant proposal on the grounds that ”we believe in the dignity of work”.)
The discussion documents come to the conclusion that, paradoxically, it is white South African capital that has been the principal beneficiary of the past decade of democracy. To be sure, there have been impressive resource transfers to the poor (grants, housing, electricity, water), but racialised and gendered class inequality remains entrenched. More than a million formal-sector workers have lost their jobs. Others have been casualised as capital dodges worker rights. Profits have soared, worker productivity has increased, but labour’s share of gross domestic product has been in decline.
Why? The global destabilisation of the left has played a part. Private capital has manoeuvred in the strategic vacuum to exert significant influence on our government. Concepts such as black economic empowerment (BEE), which did not exist in the ANC’s political vocabulary before 1994, became the vogue. In reality, the concept of BEE and the practices it has legitimised have become capital’s means for transforming an emerging political elite, rather than the reverse.
This is the nub of the problem. In the past decade we have not used our political mandate to transform the capitalist accumulation path we inherited. It is an accumulation trajectory that remains excessively export-oriented and import-dependent. It is capital-intensive and labour-shedding. It remains highly concentrated, stifl-ing small business and localised entrepreneurship. It is predatory in our region. Above all, it reproduces enclaves of enormous wealth in seas of poverty. Despite good intentions, policies implemented since 1994 have often exacerbated these tendencies.
Meanwhile, the progressive resource transfers to the urban and rural poor have been precisely that — deliveries of a technocratic kind to ”clients”. They have not transformed the ”first economy”, and they have not mobilised workers and the poor as active agents of collective self-emancipation.
It is important to analyse all of this honestly. We are not, however, pessimistic. Policy errors have not been the result of deliberate nastiness. Already significant reorientation is under way. Liberalisation as the panacea for industrial development has been replaced by sectoral summits driven by the government. The headlong rush into privatisation has been reversed, with an increasingly bold affirmation of the need for an interventionist state. In mid-1996 we were told that it was only capitalists who controlled capital; our job was to woo them. In the past months the Public Investment Commission has woken up to the fact that it commands billions of rands of public money, a critical strategic lever for development.
We hope the congress will strengthen these developments. This decade of democracy must become the decade of the workers. If not, our democracy will falter.
Jeremy Cronin is SACP deputy general secretary and an ANC MP