South Africa has produced a stunted democracy

South Africa has reached a critical moment, a moment of profound crisis. The national democratic revolution, the primary immediate aim of the liberation movement, the ANC, and its allies in the South African Communist Party (SACP) and trade union federation Cosatu, has all but ground to a halt.

In its 1984 constitution, the SACP, taking its cue from the ANC, described the national democratic revolution as: “… the national liberation of the African people in particular, and the black people in general, the destruction of the economic and political power of the racist ruling class, and the establishment of one united state of people’s power in which the working class will be the dominant force and which will move uninterruptedly towards social emancipation and the total abolition of the exploitation of man by man (sic).”

But 27 years after the democratic breakthrough, the legacies of slavery, colonialism, apartheid, the brutal form of racial capitalism South Africa experienced and the turn to a kleptocracy have reproduced the volatile cocktail of poverty, inequality, unemployment and social alienation that threatens the very democracy so hard fought for and won with the blood, sweat and tears of so many. 

The attainment of electoral democracy came after a long journey from colonial conquest to the eventual defeat of the apartheid regime that took about 375 years of suffering and struggle. In the last phase of this struggle, the national democratic revolution aimed to chart a path from racism, impoverishment, unemployment, inequality, landlessness, gender oppression and the super-exploitation of workers and other forms of oppression to a future of democracy, peace, non-racialism, non-sexism, social justice, equality and even prosperity. 

The Freedom Charter, adopted in 1955 after a democratic process based on consultation with people at an extraordinary scale, specifically promised 

equality, land, work, housing, opportunity and, above all else, freedom for all. 

In the eyes of most South Africans, the ANC was elected, first under president Nelson Mandela, then presidents Thabo Mbeki, Kgalema Motlanthe, Jacob Zuma and now Cyril Ramaphosa, to implement this programme.

A neo-colonial society

Yet, as we reflect on almost 27 years of democracy, it is striking that despite advances made in terms of establishing a functioning democracy and meeting people’s basic needs, such as access to water, electricity and to some extent housing, there are still shocking and unjustifiably high rates of poverty, inequality, unemployment, violence, disease and alienation. Inequality and impoverishment are worsening, and millions still live in informal, shack settlements, without proper access to water, sanitation and other basic services.

Race, class, gender, ability, age and various other identity markers, still overdetermine individual socioeconomic realities. Spatial segregation and whether or not everyday life is subject to traditional authority add to this misery, black women remain, on average, the poorest people in society. There are staggering levels of youth unemployment, perhaps the highest in the world. Hunger is endemic. The differently abled, the elderly and children suffer inhumane conditions.

The idea of shared national citizenship remains a fairly superficial thing as racial and sub-national identities, age and gender, as well as religious identities, are still powerful determinants of access to resources and power. Migrants, women and gay people are most at risk from pervasive violence. 

These bleak realities, rooted in the relationship of access to land, work, wealth, education and social and political power to identity, means that the essential logic of the political economy of the colonial and apartheid eras, initially rooted in slavery in parts of the country and later in terms defined by apartheid, are still grotesquely manifest. 

It is widely agreed that this has potentially grave consequences for democracy but while the donor-funded white liberal media sees only a growing threat to liberal democracy, progressives are alarmed by a threat to the wider goals of the national democratic revolution.

If there is no common sense of what South African citizenship should mean, even at a basic level and no access to even the most basic forms of social justice for the majority, there is no guarantee that mass-based commitment to the idea of the national democratic revolution will survive the breakdown in the 1994 political compact. With a slew of reactionary and deeply xenophobic parties emerging to take the space opened up by the declining electoral fortunes of the ANC, these are very worrying times. 

Although the deep structures of oppression were formed by colonialism and apartheid, it has to be accepted that the neo-colonial nature of South African society has been exacerbated by widespread corruption, state capture, nepotism, maladministration, wastage and callousness often displayed by the leadership of the ANC led tripartite alliance and those who work for it. We are in a moral, political, financial and policy crisis.

Widespread popular protest

The conditions of South African society are not accepted by the poor, the working class or even the emerging black middle class. There are frequent protests in shack settlements, townships, workplaces and universities including street protests and strikes. 

Studies report anything from one to two protests nationally a day on average. The “people”, the masses, resist the reproduction of the political economy of apartheid in mostly spontaneous, but widespread, persistent, dramatic and often, violent ways. The poor and working-class majority are acutely aware of the crisis in their own communities as well as the vast gap between their lives and those of the middle class and the rich.

 The numerically increasing black middle class are better off than the majority, but most are drowning in debt, subjected to familial financial obligations, and are justifiably resentful at the wealth of white elites. Their aspirations exceed precarious access to formerly white suburbs and schools. 

The privileged, wealthy black elite, no more than a few thousand or so black business people who have accumulated substantial wealth, are cognisant of the fact that despite their achievement in being granted economic access by the capitalist oligarchs — a handful of white families — they are still regarded as second-class members of this club. 

These emerging black elites are, for the most part, a shield against the wrath of the majority, for their wealth is used to justify the capitalist nature of a brutally exclusionary society by presenting it as progressively deracialising. 

Decisions about our country and especially its economy and online media are not made by a non-racial executive committee of the bourgeoisie. At that level, historical accumulation calls the shots, with Western interests, including the likes of George Soros and the United States’ National Endowment for Democracy playing a key role in supporting the largely white-controlled liberal media. 

The local chapters of these institutions, the Brenthurst Foundation and its quislings are equally responsible for perpetuating the myth that post-apartheid South Africa is what it is because black people can’t govern. Who could govern and transform this neo-colonial mess without upsetting the interests of the very funders of such outfits?

We are forced to ask ourselves some difficult questions. Among these are: 

Why have we not achieved greater progress in terms of sustaining the momentum of the national democratic revolution and meeting its objectives?

• Is it because the theorisation of our politics, including the idea of the national democratic revolution, is flawed?

• Is the primary problem the subjective weaknesses of the liberation movement? 

• Is the fundamental problem the objective conditions imposed by the inherited mess of colonialism and apartheid? 

• Have the compromises of the negotiated transition fatally hobbled the advance of the national democratic revolution?

• Are the political prospects for movement towards a just society fatally constrained by the alliance between domestic and international capital?

• Or is it, more likely, that the fundamental problem is a combination of some, or even all of these factors and most importantly, the failure of the “left” to confront this reality and chart a path out of this neo-colonial dystopia? 

Whatever our assumptions and conclusions, there is no escape from the reality that the patterns of ownership of wealth and of the management and control of the economy fashioned under slavery, colonialism and apartheid are hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and annually reproduced in all their deformed resilience.  

These social conditions, with few exceptions and with some minor variation, are still the lived reality of the majority of South Africans. Moreover what Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser referred to as the hegemonic “ideologico-state apparatus” remains firmly driven by international capital, local capital and the white-dominated liberal media. 

The progressive forces have failed to win the battle of ideas or to build the sorts of institutions that could enable the democratisation of the public sphere. Its institutions and its ethos remain essentially as they were under apartheid.

The stunted democracy, that produces and legitimates our terrible, contradiction-laden reality and the skewed property relations it defends, in part by design and in part by default, sustains the power relations that we live with and under. Democracy will have to be deepened through the emergence of powerful mass-based progressive forces. Our Constitution is an important asset for the battles to come.

It is our task as revolutionaries to contest the battle of ideas and to develop both a critique of dominant ideologies and an understanding of the resilience of the system of oppression. We must do this in order to theorise it accurately, conceptualise its alternative realistically and organise and mobilise for that reality. To do so requires of us to be brutally honest in our critique of this post-apartheid reality, but also and as importantly, in a critique of ourselves. 

Just as in the former Soviet Union, where “really existing socialism”, produced faulty cars, faulty jeans and faulty cadres, our post-apartheid racialised, capitalist society produces goods and services, and reproduces human beings and social relations that are designed and conditioned to accept, support, facilitate, reproduce and legitimise this aberration of a democracy and an economy that does not work for the majority. 

It is arguably the failure of the leadership of the national liberation movement to theorise this problem correctly and to fail to adhere to an existing programme or to develop and implement a new programme to transform this reality that consigns the majority of the people of our country to an existence that is only marginally better than that of their forebears.

This reality also forces us to ask ourselves the most difficult and painful question: Did the forces of neo-colonial capitalism transform the national liberation movement, rather than the movement transforming the reality that is neo-colonial capitalism?

In approaching such an important question, methodology is key. We need to use the historical materialist method, which analyses and describes the economic, political and legal relationships that govern the ownership, production, trade, exchange and distribution of property, goods and services, with a focus on who controls and manages these and who benefits from the financial or monetary surplus generated by this system. In short, it is about who has the power in our post-apartheid, capitalist society. 

This is complicated by the fact that Marxism and the historical materialist school of thought have had a tortured relationship and interaction with the issue of identity, be it as an individual or a collective phenomenon. Most often considered as being about an assumed tension between Marxism and nationalism, the theoretical problematic of identity is a larger issue spanning gender, sexuality, nationality, race and more. But Marxism, especially in its richer forms, remains a powerful tool to understand the critical issue of class and how this is entangled with other identities, as well as the deep structure of an oppressive society. 

There are some grounds for hope. New social forces are emerging and the recent 54th ANC Conference was, at the level of principle, an important step forward in terms of dealing with both the country’s challenges and the organisational crises faced in the ANC-led alliance between the party, parts of the trade union movement and the SACP. 

Nonetheless there is a huge task ahead of progressives in that alliance to regain lost ground and set the national democratic revolution back on track. There is, as Nelson Mandela famously said, no easy walk to freedom. 

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Mail & Guardian.