The recent Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) discussion document argues that critics of the government’s macroeconomic strategy tend to be labelled populist, counter-revolutionary or neo-conservative. The article by Ronald Suresh Roberts (”One step leftward, two steps right,” June 23) falls neatly into this pattern and attempts to delegitimise criticism based on faulty reasoning.
In an ironic twist, Marx has been used as a battering ram to silence critics from the left. But while Roberts’s article betrays his smug, condescending snobbery, it adds very little to the discussion on the trajectory of the South African revolution. Roberts purposefully distorts both Cosatu and South African Communist Party (SACP) positions to make a very weak charge that these formations have veered to the right or represent a ”new left conservatism”. Not surprisingly, Roberts personalises Cosatu’s position by singling out its general secretary. This has been a disturbing trend of late.
Roberts’s argument boils down to the following. Cosatu and the SACP play a reactionary role and both fail to grasp the ”complex” challenges facing the presidents of Venezuela (Hugo Chávez) and South Africa (Thabo Mbeki). The SACP is caught in a time warp, articulating a ”Eurocentric Marxism”, in contrast to the anti-imperialism of Vladimir Lenin and Frantz Fanon. There is an implicit charge that the SACP ignores the rural poor. And Cosatu is waging a ”class war against a woman president”.
Before dealing with arguments, it is apparent that either Roberts did not read the actual discussion documents or is purposely distorting and selectively quoting to make his case. In this he is a prisoner of his own binary vision that construes any critique of the state as ”anti-Mbeki”, anti-ANC or reactionary.
The Venezuelan experience offers interesting lessons for South Africa on how to combine mass and state power to challenge the entrenched power of monopoly capital and imperialism. But to compare Cosatu with the anti-Chávez stance of some Venezuelan trade unions is a distortion. Anyone familiar with history knows that Cosatu played an important role in the struggle against apartheid, has mobilised support for ANC election efforts and remains in the tripartite alliance. How can Cosatu now want to unseat the very government it helped put into power?
The notion that the SACP deploys an anachronistic Marxism defies logic. If anything, the SACP pioneered the application of Marxism to the South African experience.
The national democratic revolution cannot completely succeed under capitalism — especially a capitalism based on centuries of colonial dispossession and racial, class and gender oppression. Even though the ANC is not a socialist movement, it is not hostile to socialist forces; it understands that the social conditions of the historically oppressed must be addressed. Anything short of this is tantamount to changing the complexion of oppression while leaving the material basis of that exploitation intact.
Counterposing the peasantry and the working class is a complete misreading of the South African class structure. In this Roberts is guilty of the sin that he charges the SACP with — that is: throwing text to the problem rather than understanding its dynamics within the given reality.
South Africa is not Algeria or one of the post-colonial societies that Fanon analysed more than 40 years ago and in which the peasantry was a majority. South Africa is a relatively advanced industrial society with a large, developed working class and the peasantry almost non-existent. The rural poor combine remnants of a peasantry and the working class. The SACP’s land and agrarian reform campaign aims to change the social and economic reality of the rural poor. Need we say more?
Invoking the interests of the poor or the peasantry to attack the working class is a disturbing tendency. Many African governments have justified their embrace of neo-liberalism on the grounds that it will benefit the poorest of the poor. Such strategies, in reality, favour those with economic and political power. This approach avoids the enemies of social transformation — monopoly capital and imperialism — and portrays the working class and its formations as the problem.
Any suggestion that the SACP and Cosatu are waging a class war against a future woman president is preposterous. All the party and Cosatu have been saying is that the issue of succession should be handled with sensitivity and ultimately it is members of the ANC who will determine who will lead. They may indeed choose a woman, and Cosatu has not, to the best of my knowledge, argued against a woman president per se.
Rather than distortions and half-truths, it is time we had a real debate about what transformational project should be pursued in South Africa. As pointed out by Joel Netshitenzhe we cannot be content with ”draw[ing] pride … at managing macroeconomic realities in a manner that seeks to perpetuate rather than to improve what we inherited”. The debate centres on state power, leadership, the role of the masses and the democratic movement, and the growth path.
Had Roberts not been blinded by his prejudice, he would have appreciated the richness and nuance articulated in both Cosatu and SACP documents. These papers are not reducible to ”the cacophonous power of the anti-ANC shouters”, or to sound bites.
Oupa Bodibe, director of the National Labour and Economic Development Institute, writes in his personal capacity