On taming a revolution: the South African case

[El_Johns]

Any sober strategy for realizing progressive, let alone socialist, goals from the promising drama of the new struggles emerging in South Africa must necessarily begin with an interrogation of South Africa’s disappointing path to the present. Such an interrogation must, of course, be done with care. For one does not want to trivialize in any way that which, with the overthrow of apartheid, has been accomplished: the defeat of a bankrupt and evil system of institutionalized racism, a system entirely worthy of its consignment to the global scrapheap of history. Yet in what now looks like a classic case study of how to demobilize a potential revolution, the African National Congress (ANC), working with its new allies, both domestic and foreign, has succeeded in integrating South Africa firmly into the broader world of global capitalism.

As South Africa entered its key transition years (from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s) it would have been hard to imagine that a bald swap of apartheid for the country’s recolonization within the newly ascendant Empire of Capital could ever be seen as being a very impressive accomplishment. Yet it is just such an outcome that has occurred in South Africa, one that has produced – alongside some minimal narrowing of the economic gap between black and white (as a result, primarily, of a small minority of blacks moving up the income ladder) – both a marked widening of the gap between rich and poor (the latter mainly black) and a failure to realize any substantial progress towards tangible ‘development’ and meaningful popular empowerment. It is precisely this recolonization of South Africa, occurring on the ANC’s watch, that forms the context within which the left in that country now seeks to regroup and to struggle.

In this essay, then, we are left to pose some sobering questions about the country’s very transition away from apartheid: what kind of liberation has really occurred in South Africa anyway? How has what happened been allowed to happen? And how has the ANC managed, thus far, to get away with it?

The key to understanding this denouement was, in fact, provided in a deftly
illuminating commentary by none other than Steve Biko. Asked, in 1972,
to reflect on the economy of the country, and identify ‘what trends or
factors in it … you feel are working towards the fulfillment of the long term
ends of blacks’, he suggested that the regime’s deep commitment to a racial
hierarchy had actually acted as ‘a great leveller’ of class formation amongst
the black population and dictated ‘a sort of similarity in the community’ –
such that the ‘constant jarring effect of the (apartheid) system’ produced a
‘common identification’ on the part of the people. Whereas, in the more
liberal system envisaged by the Progressive Party of the time, ‘you would
get stratification creeping in, with your masses remaining where they are or
getting poorer, and the cream of your leadership, which is invariably derived
from the so-called educated people, beginning to enter bourgeois ranks,
admitted into town, able to vote, developing new attitudes and new friends
… a completely different tone’.

Indeed, South Africa is
one country where it would be possible to create a capitalist black society,
if the whites were intelligent. If the Nationalists were intelligent. And that
capitalist black society, black middle-class, would be very effective at an
important stage. Primarily because a hell of a lot of blacks have got a bit
of education – I’m talking comparatively speaking to the so-called rest of
Africa – and a hell of a lot of them could compete favorably with whites
in the fields of industry, commerce and professions. And South Africa
could succeed to put across to the world a pretty convincing integrated
picture with still 70 per cent of the population being underdogs.
Indeed, it was precisely because the whites were so ‘terribly afraid of this’
that South Africa represented, to Biko, ‘the best economic system for
revolution’. For ‘the evils of it are so pointed and so clear, and therefore
make teaching of alternative methods, more meaningful methods, more
indigenous methods even, much easier under the present sort of setup’.3

Flash forward to the late 1980s, however. The reform (‘intelligent’) wing of the National
Party (NP) – together with those of the capitalist class, both of English and
Afrikaner origin, who increasingly claimed the allegiance of NP reformers
– had become just what Biko imagined the Progressive Party already to be
in his own time.

For the NP was then proving to be (at least at the top)For the NP was then proving to be (at least at the top) a party capable –
albeit with great caution and much obvious reluctance – of contemplating
the shedding of apartheid for a system designed, more straightforwardly, both
to empower a liberal capitalist regime and to move to facilitate black (even
black majority) participation within it. For ‘intelligent racists’ and capitalists
alike could begin to see capital’s link to the politics of racial domination
as having been a contingent one... Not, needless to say, that the resultant
transition to a (tendentially) colour-blind capitalism would be simple
or entirely straightforward; there were genuinely dangerous alternative
possibilities that had to be overcome. Nonetheless, the ‘false decolonization’
evoked by Biko was to be, precisely, the ultimate outcome to which socialist
strategy for South Africa in the twenty-first century would have to address
itself.

http://socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/view/18818

[stevenleser]

1. Of course, the ANC should have destroyed all existing economic infrastructure and thrown out

or killed those who had owned it. That would have made a better South Africa.

[El_Johns]

2. Why would you have such a reaction to this article? I don't see the need for the snark. Or the point

of it. The article examines why a revolution led mostly by socialists turned into a victory for capital.

For over a decade, the jobless rate has been among the highest in the world, fueling crime, inequality and social unrest in the continent’s richest nation. The global economic downturn has made the problem much worse, wiping out more than a million jobs. Over a third of South Africa’s workforce is now idle. And 16 years after Nelson Mandela led the country to black majority rule, more than half of blacks ages 15 to 34 are without work — triple the level for whites.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/world/africa/27safrica.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0


"Average incomes of South African men and women fell by about 40 percent between 1995 and 2000, and that there has been little improvement since then."

South Africans are worse off than they were before the end of apartheid, at least as measured by real incomes. In Incomes in South Africa Since the Fall of Apartheid (NBER Working Paper No. 11384), co-authors Murray Leibbrandt, James Levinsohn, and Justin McCrary document that decline and attempt to explain what has happened. They show that average incomes of South African men and women fell by about 40 percent between 1995 and 2000, and note that there has been little improvement since then. These researchers explore income patterns in the South African economy overall and in specific groups, such as men and women, older and younger workers, and whites and blacks. Their focus is on economic well being as measured by income, rather than on other ways of evaluating social welfare, including measurement of political freedom.

http://www.nber.org/digest/jan06/w11384.html

[stevenleser]

3. Oh it's only half snark. And it totally deserves that half.

The ANC and Mandela focused on getting equality for everyone and uniting the country.

To on top of that nationalize industries and wrest companies and land from people and attempt to redistribute it all at the same time would have been disruptive at best and most likely would have turned South Africa into Haiti.

[El_Johns]

4. First:

South Africans are worse off than they were before the end of apartheid, at least as measured by real incomes. In Incomes in South Africa Since the Fall of Apartheid (NBER Working Paper No. 11384), co-authors Murray Leibbrandt, James Levinsohn, and Justin McCrary document that decline and attempt to explain what has happened. They show that average incomes of South African men and women fell by about 40 percent between 1995 and 2000, and note that there has been little improvement since then....

The change in income is most pronounced in the lower half of the income distribution and has disproportionately affected younger workers, women, and blacks. For men in the bottom 5 percent of the income distribution, total real income in 2000 was about half the level of 1995. In the tenth through the seventy-fifth percentile, incomes were about one third lower than in 1995. For those in the top 10 percent, incomes declined by about one-seventh. For women, the results are very similar, although above the ninetieth percentile, women fare slightly better than men, with roughly constant real incomes. In 1995, white South African men were paid 98 percent more than black men. By 2000, this discrepancy had grown to 118 percent -- a difference of 20 percentage points. Black and white women saw the analogous gap grow by 40 percentage points.

http://www.nber.org/digest/jan06/w11384.html


Those are rather amazing figures.

Second, the author (John Saul) specifically noted that ending apartheid was an epochal victory, despite the shortcomings of the post-apartheid era.

The piece doesn't deserve any snark at all, & it seems strange to get such a disproportionate reaction.

"To on top of that nationalize industries and wrest companies and land from people and attempt to redistribute it all at the same time would have been disruptive"

Incomes HAVE been redistributed: UPWARD, such that most black people are worse off than before the revolution. It's only "disruptive" when the rich lose, not when the masses do, I guess.

That is a strange fact that demands examination, which is why I posted the article.

And now, of course, what are the "sensible people" in power blaming these things on? Oh, yes, the "corruption" of the majority-black leadership. Win-win.

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21564846-south-africa-sliding-downhill-while-much-rest-continent-clawing-its-way-up