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THE NEXT LIBERATION STRUGGLE Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy in Southern Africa by John S. Saul PREFACE TO SECTION III—SOUTH AFRICA: DEBATING THE TRANSITION |
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August 2005 |
Southern Africa in Transition The whimper that the “South African revolution” has become constitutes a particularly grievous set-back in continental terms—almost certainly the most grievous of all, given the promise that a South Africa more economically developed and more substantially proletarianized than anywhere else on the continent seemed to offer—to the cause of socialism. Although there are those, in the South African trade union movement for example, who continue to think and speak in terms of such a possible, even necessary, alternative, in many circles any such projection is deemed irrelevant indeed: even some of those who are skeptical about the promise of neo-liberalism are prepared to argue that, in any case, there is no real alternative. As I said (gallows humor) in addressing various gatherings in Johannesburg, the most striking thing I discovered upon my return to South Africa in the year 2000 was just how easy it had now become to be considered an ultra-leftist! Still, as my chapter 9 also indicates, there are some clear signs to be found of disillusion with the present leadership of the ANC and its questionable practices. An African population that acted so bravely to overthrow its racist masters may not sit still for long before querying more deeply its now somewhat more multi-hued ruling class. The essays in this book represent, in general terms then, the culmination of my interface with African realities and southern African struggles since the 1960s. In this Section, I focus more directly on South Africa. Once again, I can trace my connections to developments in that country back to my residence in both London and Dar es Salaam in the 1960s where I first made contact with ANC militants and other South African exiles. It was a link that I was to deepen in the 1970s when political work in support of the liberation struggles against Portugal's colonial presence in Africa (through the Toronto Committee for the Liberation of Portugal’s African Colonies/ TCLPAC gave way, with Portugal’s defeat in 1974-5, to the Toronto Committee for the Liberation of Southern Africa/TCLSAC, in which I was also active). Indeed, it was in the context of such political activities that I first went to apartheid South Africa, and was able to witness at first hand some of the horrors of the social, political and economic system of racial capitalism that tormented that country. Tracing such negative impressions in an article in This Magazine (entitled “In the Belly of the Beast: John Saul in South Africa”), I was also alert to the changing atmosphere of post-Soweto South Africa. Indeed, I found inspiration, as I wrote at the time, in a moving visit to the battlefield of Islandwhana. Islandwhana was, on January 22,1879, the scene of the greatest military victory of the [then] Zulu nation against the on-rushing Afrikaner and British hordes, the latter [both] bent on seizing the Africans land and, ultimately yoking them to the countrys industrial machineTrue, the military might of the imperial centre was ultimately to crush all such warriors, in Natal and elsewhere in Southern Africa, who were armed only with lances and spears. Nonetheless, Africans had shown themselves quite capable of taking up the gage of the conquerors and would be prepared to do so again. Indeed, as I then wrote, it was hard not to hear, in the recent anger of the Soweto students and the ANCs military actions at Rustenburg, Zeerust and Thabazimbi the echo from Islandhwana, the spirit of resistance to seizure and oppression still alive in the land of apartheid. In fact, the example of Soweto seemed clear enough at the time to seek to rally Canadians to solidarity with the freshly escalating struggle. No longer able to get a visa for South Africa after that first visit, the following years found me exploring South African realities at a distance, and, working in particular with Stephen Gelb, we were able to write (in our book The Crisis in South Africa) of the acceleration of resistances, from Durban to Soweto and beyond that were clear signs that the tide has at last begun to turn against south Africas apartheid system. Indeed, invoking the work (on Europe), some decades earlier, of the eminent Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci we could, by 1981, already identify the existence of a veritable organic crisis in South Africa and document its terms at book length. In fact, our book, banned in South Africa, was to lead something of an underground existence and for years afterwards I was to hear stories from political actors of the time of frayed photostated copies that they had read in clandestine circumstances during that period. Moreover, the book provided a framework for ongoing writing, including writing that I extended, at first, to frame a second edition of the Crisis book (in 1986) to which I added freshly written materials: in fact, in identifying the continuing very deep crisis of racial capitalism, it was even possible to then see crisis as not only increasingly deepening but even as being resolved, eventually, in favor of the popular classes [and] in socialist terms. But this was still analysis at a distance. As the 1980s wore on—a decade of marked escalation of the popular struggle in South Africa but also of increasing repression by the apartheid state—I began to feel that I needed to witness for myself the unfolding events (largely taking place inside the country as an urban uprising rather than as the guerrilla struggles familiar from elsewhere in the region) whatever the necessary means of my doing so. As I later wrote (in an article of the time entitled “Without Proper Papers: Inside South Africa”): By 1988 I had not been to South Africa for almost a decade, unable to obtain a visa from the apartheid government. In July of that year I decided I should go anyway. It wasnt the first time Ive crossed a frontier without proper papers. But in 1972 when I visited the liberated areas of Mozambique during the war against the Portuguese, I was accompanied by a column of FRELIMO guerillas. This time I was on my own. So, in 1988, I entered the country once more, this time illegally, and spent a month there, a month which was characterized, as I wrote at the time, by a few moments of tension though, as I added, even these moments seemed pretty small potatoes compared to the dangers South African activists must confront daily as they seek new ways to beat back the brutal repression of South Africas current officially-declared Emergency. And although there did, in fact, seem to be some momentary lag in the popular struggle in the wake of the regime’s emergency restrictions, I saw enough, nonetheless, to understand that I had stolen a month from Pretoria and I had passed close enough to the cutting edge of revolution in that country to the people, the organizations (COSATU, the ANC, in particular), and the powerful yet undefinable ambience of resistance to have sufficient reason to accentuate the positive. I had come away with the knowledge that, whatever the odds, the struggle to realize transformation is in good hands. Nonetheless, the end of the struggle against the apartheid state itself was actually much nearer than I had imagined; in fact, it is now clear in retrospect that the white regime was already seeking ways to alter significantly its tactics of survival and that the mass of the (black) population was quite simply too much on the move towards freedom to be easily shunted aside. Indeed, the process of transition to a new South Africa (with both the positive and not so positive connotations of that phrase) becomes the subject of the present section of this book. For, as noted, the end of the struggle against the apartheid state was actually closer to hand than it had seemed. As a result, throughout the 1990s, I was to return to South Africa on numerous occasions (now quite legally) to conduct research and to witness dramatic developments there. First I was to track the transition through the difficult years of negotiations between 1990 and the election that brought the ANC and Nelson Mandela to power in 1994. In chapter 8, I present an analysis of this period that captures the complexities and contradictions of the process. For there was certainly a story to tell. Thus, during these first years it seemed increasingly clear that the ANC would emerge as the most successful voice for democratic change in South Africa as indeed proved to be the case. But as the picture of the kind of ANC that would come to assume power also became clearer, it was increasingly apparent that the result of its ascendancy would not prove to be so great a triumph for ordinary South Africans as had originally been hoped. This reality too I sought to illuminate and fortunately I was granted the opportunity not merely to pay numerous short visits to South Africa but also, at the turn of the century, to spend a longer period there, teaching in Johannesburg. Chapter 9 represents the kind of balance sheet I was then able to strike. For I was at once disheartened by the performance of the ANC but also buoyed up by resistances to the exaggerated recycling of far too much the of previous reality of inequality and poverty that quickly came to characterize so much of post-apartheid policy making. It bears noting that my written interventions, although crafted in part through close discussions with critical comrades in South Africa during my teaching sojourn there and well received by a number of them, nonetheless faced a very critical reception from other South Africans, also with strong records of struggle and with high repute there (notably Jeremy Cronin and Raymond Suttner). Fortunately their critical reflections did provide me with the opportunity, also in the pages of Monthly Review, to reflect but also further clarify, in my responses to them, the points I had originally made. These responses I have published here as chapter 10 and its appendix. As the reader will see, I found in their criticisms no strong reasons to alter the rather negative picture I had come to when considering the outcomes, in socio-economic terms, that the ANCs success had overseen in South Africa and the great cost, in terms of widespread popular passivity and cynicism on the one-hand and growing skepticism and some renewed resistance on the other that the ANCs new hegemony (as reconfirmed in the 2004 elections, for example) in South Africa has produced. True, the ANC swept the poll in 2004 but the general passivity with which the bulk of the population absorbed the electoral event was much remarked upon; thus, veteran Robben Island prisoner (but ANC critic) Neville Alexander was moved to note the extent to which South Africa has become a normal bourgeois democratic country in which the wealthy rule and the poor are marginalized. In other words, for many this had become already!—just another ordinary election, marking a further pacification and marginalization of the electorate rather than a deepening of its liberation. What a contrast with 1994. For there now existed merely a disillusioned democracy or so Dale McKinley thought to characterize South Africa in the wake of its third national elections (April 14, 2004), noting, as others have done, that only 56 percent (15,806,380) of all eligible voters (27,438,897) cast their ballots—with roughly seven million people eligible to vote who did not even bother to register. As he continued, the national voting turnout has gradually decreased since South Africas first, one-person one-vote elections. In 1994, 19.5 million people voted; in 1999 just over 16 million voted; and in 2004, under 16 million (remembering that the countrys population has grown substantially over the last decade). Thus, argued McKinley, South Africa has already entered into the terrain of low intensity and commodified democracy characterized by the increasingly devastating effects, on already poor South Africans, of massive job losses, privatized service delivery, market-led land policies, and the pursuit of [ruthless] cost-recovery mechanisms. Not surprisingly, I therefore felt confident, finally, to echo in a third cross-section in 2004 (chapter 11) the largely negative reading I had been forming of much of the ANCs post-independence project over the movements first decade in power (at first under the leadership of Nelson Mandela and, subsequently, that of Thabo Mbeki). I here view post-apartheid South Africa in comparative perspective and, skeptically, in the context of the experience of the Third World as a whole; but I also continue to take some comfort in noting that there were new oppositional voices beginning to be heard in South Africa itself, pointing, in the long run, towards a continuing and ever deepening liberation struggle in that country, as on the rest of the continent of Africa. Still, as Trevor Ngwane (one of South Africas most impressive militants outside the ANC orbit, from which he was, however, several years ago expelled) notes, one must be careful not to take false hope from the figures of abstentions which we have cited or engage in wishful thinking: for, in light of the ANCs 2004 electoral landslide (from the electorate who did bother to vote, that is), it was still far too early for such a process of disillusion to be said to have found full fruition. True, Ngwane emphasizes convincingly, the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer in South Africa, all the major social and economic indicators [showing] that the majority of South Africans have not benefited economically or socially from the democratic order. It is indeed clear that the ANC is pushing a neo-liberal capitalist agenda [GEAR, NEPAD] in South Africa and, unfortunately, in Africa, managing only, in Alexanders words (as quoted by Ngwane): to exacerbate the problems of the poor while co-opting individual black wannabes into the charmed circle of the ruling elites. Similarly, South African high court judge Dennis Davis notes that while, after ten years of democracy, ANC economic policy has enabled some black South Africans to profit immeasurably, [it[ has not shown any prospect of changing the economic structure which disempowers the majority of the population, a result wholly unsurprising to Davis in light of the fact that the ANCs dominant faction was a black middle class whose political aspirations stretched only so far as the attainment of the first stage of revolution the national democratic revolution, and not socialism. Yet Ngwane also admits that, however important the low poll may have been, at the polls themselves no party really challenged the ANC, especially from the left or from amongst the black population, despite the manifest failure of the ANC to fight poverty or reduce unemployment during its 10 year rule. There is no doubt, he sadly suggests, that there are millions of workers who still believe in the ANC as both their liberator and guarantor of a better life now and in the future. Either that, or they are so exhausted by the battle against apartheid so recently won, that a new struggle, against elites of their own does not yet seem timely for many. It is also true, as Ngwane states, that the ANC has cynically used to the fullest its access to state power, while dominating the media, to ensure victory. But, on behalf of the opposition, he is self-critical as well. For we, the new social movements, although apparently often quite significant on the ground, were remiss, he says, in calling for (at best) merely a no vote while failing, in this and other ways, to develop a coherent and unified position. In consequence, we merely left an empty space exactly when [we were] supposed to deal with the issue of political power. Above all, we came to celebrate the local struggle in an autonomist manner and, in consequence, failed to develop either a larger vision of socialism or a strategic coherence in terms both of our program of action and the requisite form of organization adequate to the task of implementing such a program. Strong words, a reminder to South Africans that they will have to work even harder in future if they are to develop a truly hegemonic alternative to the situation which history has meted out to them. Nonetheless, the fact is that Africans cannot afford, either in South Africa or elsewhere on the continent, to let time stand still. Indeed, this is a point that I make explicitly, for the continent as a whole, in a final chapter which follows this section of the book and which thus provides an appropriate conclusion to the present volume. All material copyright © 2009 by Monthly Review Press |
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